With snow on the ground in parts of southern Ontario this morning, seeing beautiful beaches and bathing suits on Grand Cayman, Puerto Plata, Holguin and St. Maarten isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Devoting a cable channel to covering one Canadian airline’s ground crews might be.

Rogers Cable this week announced the takeoff of WestJetChannel, a 24/7 network capturing baggage handlers tossing luggage into the airline’s fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft. If that isn’t enough, watch gripping live coverage of airplane wranglers with light sticks pushing a plane away from the terminal.

“This is an amazing opportunity to pull back the curtain and show people what we do and how we do it,” said David Soyka, WestJet’s director of marketing. “We’re looking forward to taking viewers behind the scenes at our airports as well as to some of our most spectacular destinations, without ever having to leave the comfort of their couch. We’re always in the air — and now we’re on the air, too.”

It’s another example of “Slow TV” Rogers has embraced with open arms, adding “real-time” coverage of mundane things to your cable TV lineup.

An early example of American “Slow TV”

If WestJetChannel doesn’t fly, viewers can sink or swim with the Aquarium Channel, showing nothing but tropical fish. If that is all wet, dry off by the fire — Swiss Chalet’s Rotisserie Channel, featuring slowly roasting chickens. Unable to get away on holiday? Rogers customers could instead spend quality time with The Cottage Channel. Now they can watch WestJet take other people to the places they wish to see, but can’t afford to visit after paying the cable bill.

Rogers isn’t responsible for inventing “Slow TV.” WPIX-TV’s “Yule Log” was one of the earliest examples, treating apartment-bound New Yorkers to a roaring fire at Gracie Mansion beginning Christmas Eve, 1966. The original three-hour program was actually a 17-second 16mm film loop accompanied by a simulcast of WPIX-FM, which provided accompanying traditional Christmas music. In 1970, the original worn-out film was replaced with a 7-minute 35mm film loop shot in California and still seen today.

Norsk rikskringkasting, the Norwegian Broadcasting Company has made “Slow TV” their own, much to the delight of Scandinavian viewers.

In 2011, NRK broadcast 134 hours non-stop of a cruise ship going up the Norwegian coast to the Arctic, winning the world record for the longest continuous TV program. Millions of Norwegians tuned in. In February, it aired a 12-hour show on firewood, featuring discussions about stacking and chopping and a debate on whether the bark should face up or down. At least 20% of Norwegians watched the event.

Last Friday, Norway’s biggest broadcaster aired 12 hours of knitting, complete with needle tips and a how-to on knitting a cover for a Harley Davidson motorbike. The event started with  sheep shearing in the studios of NRK2 followed by teams furiously trying to break the world record for the fastest knitted sweater.

“You can argue that the national knitting night is the feminine response to the firewood show,” said NRK spokeswoman Sidsel Mundal.

“We’ll dive deep into the world of knitting, then from midnight, we’ll turn down the pace, if that’s even possible,” said producer Rune Moeklebust. “We’ll watch the arm of a sweater get longer and longer; it will be fascinating, but pretty strange TV.”

Who needs 5-Hour Energy when you can watch that.

The National Knitting Evening turned out to be such a ratings smash, rights for the concept have been sold to U.S.-based LMNO Productions for reconceptualization.

Norwegians celebrate “Slow TV” partly as a backlash to artificial drama generated by the reality-TV craze that has swept across Europe and North America.

Flying until Feb. 2, 2014, WestJetChannel can be found on Ch. 206 on Rogers Cable in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WestJetChannel Promo 11-12-13.mp4[/flv]

A promo for WestJetChannel, now on your Rogers Cable lineup. (0:42)

Set-top box-less Time Warner Cable subscribers in parts of New York City will find more than 90 percent of the basic cable lineup missing from their QAM-equipped televisions as the cable company completes a transition away from analog cable television and begins encrypting almost all its digital channels.

The Federal Communications Commission changed the rules last year allowing large cable operators to begin encrypting basic cable, requiring customers to rent cable boxes or CableCARD units to keep watching.

Time Warner Cable began the all-digital, encrypted channel conversion earlier this year in Mount Vernon, Staten Island and Bergen County, N.J., and is now switching on encryption in the New York City region on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.

The switch renders televisions useless for receiving cable channels without extra equipment supplied by Time Warner Cable. Encryption is deployed as an anti-theft measure, but it also inconveniences customers who have to rent equipment for each of their televisions. Encrypting basic channels also benefits Time Warner Cable by allowing service authorizations and disconnects to be handed from the office, reducing in-home appointments.

Customers will need a traditional set-top box, a Digital Transport Adapter (DTA), or a CableCARD to get the channels back. DTA boxes are being provided at no charge until 2015, after which they will cost $0.99 a month each.

Some customers also complain Time Warner is testing “copy protection” permissions, preventing some channels from being recorded. In Queens, one customer noted copy protection was active on C-SPAN, preventing recordings of the network. Some programmers may insist on copy protection technology being implemented as part of future cable carriage contracts. Most expect pay-per-view and on-demand events will be the first blocked from recording, potentially followed by premium movie channels.

At this time, Time Warner Cable says its encryption initiative is limited to the New York City area.

The next name of Time Warner Cable?

Charter Communications is laying the foundation for a leveraged buyout of Time Warner Cable before the end of the year in a deal that could leave Time Warner Cable’s broadband customers with Charter’s usage caps.

Reuters reported discussions between the two companies grew more serious after last week’s revelation a poor third quarter left TWC with 308,000 fewer subscribers.

Charter is relying on guidance from Goldman Sachs to structure a financing deal likely to leave Charter in considerable debt. Charter Communications emerged from bankruptcy in 2009 and is the country’s tenth largest cable operator, estimated to be worth about $13 billion. Time Warner Cable is the second largest cable operator and is worth more than $34 billion.

The disparity between the two companies has kept Time Warner Cable resistant to a deal with Charter, stating it would not be beneficial to shareholders. Charter executives hope to eventually win shareholder support for a buyout stressing the significant cost savings possible from a combined operation, particularly for cable programming.

The deal would likely end Time Warner Cable as a brand and leave Charter Communications CEO Thomas Rutledge in charge of a much larger cable company. Pricing and packaging decisions are usually made by the buyer, which could bring faster broadband speeds to Time Warner customers, but also usage caps already in place at Charter.

John Malone’s War on Customers

Malone

Cable billionaire John Malone, former CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) — America’s largest cable operator in the 1980s — believes consolidation is critical to the future of a cable business facing competition from phone companies and cord cutting. Malone’s Liberty Media, which now holds a 25% stake in Charter, is currently buying and consolidating cable operators in Europe. Malone’s post-consolidation vision calls for only two or three cable operators in the United States.

Malone’s quest for consolidation is nothing new.

Under his leadership, TCI eventually became the country’s biggest cable operator, but one often accused of poor service and high prices. More than a decade of complaints from customers eventually attracted the attention of the U.S. Congress, which sought to rein in the industry with the 1992 Cable Act — legislation that lightly regulated rental fees for equipment and the price of the company’s most-basic television tier.

Despite the fact consumer advocates didn’t win stronger consumer protection regulations, TCI was still incensed it faced a new regulatory environment that left its hands tied. One executive at a TCI subsidiary advocated retaliation with broad rate increases for unregulated services to make up any losses from mandated rate cuts.

A 1993 internal TCI memo obtained by the Washington Post instructed TCI system managers and division vice presidents to increase prices charged for customer service calls and add new fees for common installation services the company used to offer for free. TCI’s Barry Marshall recommended charging for as many “transaction” services as possible — like hooking up VCR’s, running cable wire, and programming remote controls for confused customers.

“We have to have discipline,” Marshall wrote. “We cannot be dissuaded from the [new] charges simply because customers object. It will take awhile, but they’ll get used to it. The best news of all is we can blame it on re-regulation and the government now. Let’s take advantage of it!”

Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) was the nation’s largest cable operator. Later known as AT&T Cable, the company was eventually sold to Comcast.

The FCC’s interim chairman at the time — James Quello, charged with monitoring the cable industry, was not amused.

“It typifies the attitude of cable companies engaging in creative pricing and rate increases to evade the intent of Congress and the FCC,” Quello said. “There is little doubt that the cable industry has an economic stake in discrediting the congressional act they vehemently and unsuccessfully opposed.”

Marshall defended his internal memo, although admitted it was inartfully written and was not intended for the public. Revelation of a damaging memo like this would normally lead to a quiet resignation by the offending author, but not at John Malone’s TCI, a company with a reputation for being difficult.

Mark Robichaux’s 2005 book, Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business, was even less charitable.

Robichaux describes Malone as a “complicated hero,” at least for investors for whom he was willing to ignore banking rules and creatively interpret tax law. Robichaux wrote Malone’s idea of customer service was to ‘charge as much as you can, but spend as little as you can get away with.’

TCI’s top priority was to keep up the cable business as an “insular cartel.” The predictable result included accusations of “shoddy service” customers were forced to take or leave. In the handful of markets where TCI faced another cable competitor, TCI ruthlessly slashed prices to levels some would describe as “predatory,” only to rescind them the moment the competitor was gone. TCI’s intolerance for competition usually meant mounting pressure on competitors to sell their system to TCI (sometimes at an astronomical price) or face a certain slow death from unsustainable price cuts.

Among Malone’s most-trusted friends: junk bond financier Michael Milken and Leo Hindery, former CEO of Global Crossing.

Congressman Albert Gore, Jr., later vice-president during the Clinton Administration, was probably Malone’s fiercest critic in Washington. Gore’s office was swamped with complaints from his Tennessee constituents upset over TCI’s constant rate increases and anti-competitive behavior.

The cable industry’s biggest competitor in the 1980s-1990s was a TVRO 6-12 foot diameter home satellite system.

Gore was especially unhappy that TCI’s grip extended even to its biggest competitor — satellite television.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, cable operators made life increasingly difficult for home satellite dish owners, many in rural areas unserved by cable television. But things were worse for home dish owners that walked away from TCI and began watching satellite television instead. To protect against cord-cutting, the cable industry demanded encryption of all basic and premium cable channels delivered via satellite. It was not hard to convince programmers to scramble — most cable networks in the 1980s were part-owned by the cable industry itself.

To make matters worse, unlike cable systems that only leased set-top boxes to customers, home dish owners had to buy combination receiver-descrambler equipment outright, starting at $500. Just a few years later, the industry pressured programmers to switch to a slightly different encryption system — one that required home dish owners replace their expensive set-top box with a different decoder module available only for sale.

Gore was further incensed to learn TCI often insisted home dish owners living within a TCI service area buy their satellite-delivered programming direct from the cable company. Customers hoping to leave cable for good found themselves still being billed by TCI.

Sometimes the rhetoric against TCI and Malone got personal.

”He called me Darth Vader and the leader of the cable Cosa Nostra,” Malone said of Gore. “You can’t win a pissing contest with a skunk, so there’s no point in getting involved in that kind of rhetoric.”

“There’s a joke going around Washington,” John Tinker, a New York-based Morgan Stanley & Company investment banker who specializes in cable television said of Malone back in 1990. “If you have a gun with two bullets, and you have Abu Nidal, Saddam Hussein and John Malone in a room, who would you shoot? The answer is John Malone — twice, to make sure he’s dead.”

TCI itself was a four letter word in the many small communities that endured the cable company’s insufferable service, outdated equipment, and constant rate “adjustments.”

The New York Times reported John Malone’s TCI had a reputation for treating customers with “utter disdain,” and provided examples:

• In 1973, rate negotiations stalled with local regulators in Vail, Colo., the local TCI system shut off all programming for a weekend and ran nothing but the names and home phone numbers of the mayor and city manager. The harried local government gave in.
• In 1981, TCI withheld fees and vowed to go completely dark in Jefferson City, Mo., if the city failed to renew its franchise, while a TCI employee — “who turned out to have a psychological problem,” said Malone — threatened harm to the city’s media consultant. Again, a beleaguered local government renewed the franchise — although in a subsequent lawsuit, TCI was fined $10.8 million in actual damages and $25 million in punitive damages.
• In 1983, the small city of Kearney, Neb., also dissatisfied with poor service and rising rates, tried to give Malone some competition in the form of a rival system built by the regional telephone company. TCI slashed fees and added channels until the enemy was driven from the field.

“That’s the dark side, if you will, of TCI,” said Richard J. MacDonald, a media analyst with New York-based MacDonald Grippo Riely.

By mid-1989, Malone’s frenzied effort to consolidate the cable industry resulted in him presiding over 482 merger/buyout deals, on average one every two weeks. Among the legacy cable companies that no longer existed after TCI’s takeover crew arrived: Heritage Communications, United Artists Communications and Storer Communications.

To cover the debt-laden deals, Malone simply raised cable rates and shopped for easy credit. Bidding with others’ money, the per-subscriber price of cable systems shot up from $998 in 1983 to an astronomical $2,328 in 1989.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found deregulating the cable industry cost customers through rate hikes averaging 43 percent. In Denver, TCI raised rates more than 70% between 1986 and 1989.

Malone’s attempt to finance a leveraged, debt-heavy buyout of Time Warner Cable seems to show his business philosophy has not changed much.

FiOS Have’s and Have-Nots

Despite complaints earlier this month from Boston Mayor Thomas Menino that Verizon’s latest ad for FiOS was filmed in Boston — a city that lacks the fiber optic service, not every Massachusetts community is so unlucky.

Stop the Cap! reader John C. wrote to alert us that the town of Raynham will get Verizon FiOS service despite Verizon’s long-standing intention not to further expand the fiber service outside of areas already committed.

It turns out Verizon’s partial buildout of fiber optics in the area was reason enough for Verizon to complete wiring Raynham with fiber and seek a formal franchise agreement from the town’s board of selectman. Phil Santoro, a Verizon spokesman, noted the company did the same thing a year earlier in Medford.

Raynham residents will be able to buy voice, data, and television service from Verizon, in direct competition with Comcast.

Verizon plans to offer residents FiOS TV service, FiOS Internet service and the FiOS Digital Voice unlimited calling plan starting at $89.99 a month, with a two-year contract.

Meanwhile, the city council of Quincy is desperately seeking cable television competition after hearing complaints from senior citizens they can no longer afford Comcast’s prices.

The city council has repeatedly reached out to Verizon in hopes the company will bring FiOS to town, but to no avail.

Comcast is in the seventh year of its 10-year franchise agreement in Quincy and is unlikely to change much when it requests a renewal.

City Solicitor James Timmins believes the reason Verizon isn’t interested is the fact “it costs the company about $1,500 to hook up each home.” Timmins also claimed “Verizon knows that in a few years FiOS (TV) is going to be obsolete.”

Cable ONE customers nationwide lost eight Turner Networks channels yesterday, despite the fact the cable company has a signed contract with Turner to pay for some of the networks that have gone dark.

“In an extraordinary act of retaliation and bullying, Turner Networks removed TBS, TNT and Cartoon Network from all Cable ONE systems without warning, when our prior Turner contract expired on October 1,” said Cable ONE CEO Tom Might. “This happened despite the fact that Cable ONE had signed new contracts and already agreed to pay an enormous nearly 50% rate increase for these three networks.”

Cable ONE was under pressure to carry all eight Turner-owned networks (in turn owned by Time Warner Entertainment) during contract renewal negotiations that included substantial fee increases. The cable company independently decided to boot five “less popular” networks from lineups nationwide: Boomerang, TruTV, TCM, CNN and CNN Headline News. It agreed to keep buying TBS, TNT, and Cartoon.

“We signed contracts for TBS, TNT and the Cartoon Network through the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), which allows for the purchase of individual channels rather than the entire bundle of eight,” said Might. “In a disgraceful punitive reaction, Turner Networks refused to recognize the NCTC contracts and immediately de-authorized all Cable ONE systems in order to ‘teach’ Cable ONE a lesson about the power of cable programmers to tie and bundle channels together and force carriage of unwanted bundles.  They refuse to give cable operators or their customers any choice about what they can or cannot buy.”

Turner Networks claims Cable ONE has no authority to buy a slimmed-down package of channels through the NCTC and must negotiate with Turner directly.

Cable ONE will automatically credit its customers for the missing channels. The cable company is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company and serves 730,000 customers in 19 states.

Cable ONE explains to its customers why eight Turner Network-owned channels are now missing from the channel lineup. (2 minutes)
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