Cablevision CEO Jim Dolan may have to eat his words when he told shareholders he was done giving promotional discounts to customers bouncing back and forth between competing providers. Now Verizon has given Cablevision customers an excuse to say goodbye to the cable company for at least the next two years.

The Verizon FiOS $79.99 Triple Play promotion is back and includes a $300 Visa rebate card and free activation when ordering from Verizon’s website.

The package includes:

The incoming CEO of Time Warner Cable will walk away with more than $50 million just for getting out-of-the-way of a sale or breakup of the company.

Robert Marcus is scheduled to take over the CEO role Jan. 1 after Glenn Britt retires. But there is a good chance Marcus won’t have a cable company to run if executives decide to accept anticipated takeover offers due within weeks that could turn ownership of Time Warner over to Charter Communications or split up subscribers among several potential buyers including Comcast, Cox, and Charter.

Reuters reports Marcus will earn the most if he can hold off buyers for the next four weeks until he becomes CEO. Under his employment contract, Marcus would then qualify for a generous goodbye package:

• A compensation bonus amounting to three times his base salary of $1.5 million;
• A departure award amounting to three times his usual $5 million annual bonus;
• Permission to cash out the large amount of stock he has earned as part of his compensation, now valued at $37 million.

In total, Marcus could earn $56.5 million for just one day of work — long enough to shake the hands of the new buyer(s) and head for the elevators for the last time. If the company sells before Dec. 31, Marcus will still land on his feet, earning a severance package valued at $47.5 million.

In a separate move, Time Warner Cable executive vice president Peter Stern dumped 4,253 shares of his company’s stock at $130 a share, taking $552,890 in compensation.

While top managers are routinely offered generous departure packages more commonly known as “golden parachutes,” thousands of lower-level Time Warner Cable employees will likely face the ax within months of any sale, predicted one analyst. In similarly sized mergers and buyouts, the largest job losses will impact call center workers and middle management. Other employees will likely leave if asked to move to regional operations centers in other cities where the buyer(s) operate. At least one analyst said it was unusual for Time Warner Cable to proceed with a CEO switch while the company is in play.

Marcus understands how the business of mergers and acquisitions work; he started his career as an attorney specializing in the practice.

In Search Of… Savings

The cable industry’s week-long feeding frenzy over consolidating Time Warner Cable out of existence comes with the theory that growing larger guarantees cheaper programming costs from volume discounts and influence. But hang on, says Wall Street analyst firm Sanford C. Bernstein.

This week, senior analyst Todd Juenger released a report, “Will Cable Consolidation Slow Down Affiliate Fee Growth? We Say ‘No,’” that questions the theory the bigger the company, the more leverage available to keep costs down.

Juenger says that few customers are in love with their local cable company, and programmers know it. If another brawl erupts between CBS and a cable operator, the presumption of leverage to quickly resolve the dispute is more hope than reality because customers will readily abandon one provider for another to get what they want.

“Consumers are much more loyal to their favorite TV networks than they are to their distributor,” Juenger says. “Every time a distributor has tried to fight back by dropping the content from one of these [big programming] companies, it has ended badly for the distributor because consumers will switch distributors, not TV networks.”

Programming carriage wars will continue to hurt cable companies as long as there is a satellite or telco-TV competitor ready to sign up disgruntled customers. If a suite of Viacom-owned networks are dropped during a cable fee dispute, the cable operator will save around $2.75 a month per subscriber. But if that subscriber decides to change providers, operators lose as much as $40 in marketing costs paid to attract that subscriber in the first place.

Juenger believes the only way combining cable operators will save on programming fees is when smaller cable operators like Charter get the benefit of big discounts on programming offered to larger, high volume providers like Time Warner Cable.

Juenger adds bringing Comcast in as a buyer gets complicated because if Comcast tries to drop networks, programmers might have leverage by appealing to the federal government with claims Comcast is violating its agreement with the federal government to avoid abuse of market power to strangle competitors.

It’s happy days at Comcast’s marketing and public relations department. How does a cable company pocket an extra $1.50 a month from 21.6 million cable TV customers without facing the wrath of the masses? Blame it on greedy broadcasters and quietly bank up to $32.4 million a month in new revenue.

Comcast wants to break out the cost of some of its programming disputes with local stations from your monthly cable bill and add an extra $1.50 monthly surcharge the company is calling a “Broadcast TV Fee” starting in the new year.

Comcast isn’t promising this $1.50 fee covers the total cost of licensing local stations for cable carriage, and they have no plans for similar surcharges for cable networks that have also been known to ask for a lot at contract renewal time. Customers may not realize that in some cases, the local NBC station just so happens to be owned by Comcast-NBC, offering easy opportunities to boost the asking price without too much trouble from co-workers at Comcast Cable.

Broadband Reports notes that isn’t the only new fee coming soon to a Comcast bill near you, starting Jan. 1. The company is also raising prices for cable television by $1-2 for many tiers, increasing the modem rental fee another dollar to an unprecedented $8 a month, and jacking up rates by $2 a month on almost all levels of broadband service.

The Don’t Care Bears

If the former Soviet Union ran a cable company, it would probably resemble Comcast’s customer care centers, filled with long lines and inflexible, bureaucratic representatives that refuse to think outside the (cable) box. Philebrity.com calls the cable company’s downtown office on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia the Comcast Get Out of TV Jail Center:

If you have ever had to return your cable boxes or pay your shut-off cable bill in cash because there’s a big pay-per-view wrestling event you need to see that night, you know this place. We know you know. And we know you feel hot shame for ever even knowing what this place is, or standing in its soul-sucking lines on the other side of the bulletproof glass, and we know that you don’t want anyone to know you’ve been there. So we’ll talk about it for you. To know the Comcast Get-Out-Of-TV-Jail Center is to know failure up close, to be on intimate speaking terms with failure, and to know that the conversation with failure is always mostly in the bitter parlance of popular t-shirts from the 1980s: Life’s a bitch and then you die. 

The apparatchiks ensconced behind Comcast’s bulletproof glass know you cannot get to them, so some have their worst behavior on full display. Some think they know you before you even reach the counter. That angry-looking customer with the file folder? ‘Not for me,’ Carol says, stalling for time with the customer in front of her just long enough to let Brenda the Temp deal with him as next in line. It’s the closest thing to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where long waiting times never interfere with an on-time lunch break or extended chat with a colleague while you sit the day away.

“When many of us here in Philly think about Comcast, this is what we think of,” writes the online magazine. “Not the gleaming tower, nor the endless fun of Xfinity, but this place. This sad awful place. Because this is the place that says, “This is really what we think of you. We know you are worthless. Look at you, with your cardboard box of outdated remotes and modems, and your folded up twenties, hauling our sad s*** back to us like a doting animal with a dead rodent between its teeth.”