How dare you use Hulu to watch current episodes of your favorite TV shows?

Time Warner (Entertainment) CEO Jeff Bewkes is on a mission to put a stop to that because he believes it encourages cord-cutting. Time Warner, Inc. (no relation to Time Warner Cable) is in negotiations to acquire part-ownership of the popular streaming service. On the top of Time Warner’s agenda is getting rid of offering on-demand access to full seasons of current television shows, whether they exist on Hulu, Amazon, or Netflix. If Time Warner successfully acquires up to a 25% stake in Hulu, they have the potential to make that dream come true.

Bewkes is convinced the only way to stop consumers from dropping pay television subscriptions is to put current television shows behind an industry-enforced paywall. Only those with authenticated cable or satellite television subscriptions would be allowed to watch streaming video. Everyone else will have to get out the rabbit-ear antennas and watch over-the-air television or simply go without access for at least a year after the shows air.

Some on Wall Street think Time Warner’s argument has merit, noting streaming services’ growing libraries of popular television shows and movies makes consumers more likely to consider dropping bloated cable and satellite packages.

“If everybody in the industry is worried about Netflix driving cord-cutting, shouldn’t they be just as worried about Hulu?” Nomura Securities analyst Anthony DiClemente said to the Wall Street Journal, noting that Hulu offers many shows a day after they air.

Others worry implementing Time Warner’s agenda would cause an exodus of customers dropping their subscriptions, devaluing Hulu along the way. A few also believe dedicated viewers will simply resume pirating coveted shows.

The pay television industry has grown increasingly alarmed by research showing cord-cutters and cord-nevers will continue to grow as long as popular shows are easily available online. That is one reason Time Warner has no intention of putting full, current seasons of shows from its networks, including TNT and TBS, on any independent streaming service. Bewkes told analysts last fall the company is now considering holding back their shows to offer longer windows for its own on-demand platforms before selling to cord cutter hangouts like Netflix and Hulu.

The new restrictions would not affect customers already buying cable or satellite TV packages, who will be allowed access after logging in to their provider’s authentication website.

When Verizon Wireless finally fired up its network in Alaska in September of 2014, the writing was on the wall for at least one of Alaska’s homegrown wireless competitors.

Faced with competing against Verizon’s $115 million, state-of-the-art advanced LTE network that already supports new features like Voice over LTE (far ahead of what many customers in the lower 48 states get) Alaska Communications System Group, Inc., decided it was time to sell.

An ACS and GCI-shared cell tower. (Photo: Rosemarie Alexander)

ACS’ 109,000 wireless customers won’t be going far. The buyer, General Communications, Inc., (GCI) is a co-investor in the Alaska Wireless Network that ACS also relies on to offer wireless service. Besides billing and rate plans, most ACS customers won’t notice much of a change after the $300 million sale is complete during the first quarter of this year. GCI will end up with about 253,000 customers after the transaction is finished, which represents about one-third of the Alaskan wireless marketplace. The sale will mean most Alaskans will have a practical choice of three major wireless carriers — AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and GCI.

ACS, weighed down by debt, wanted out of the wireless business because it has proven expensive to support a network serving a high-cost, low margin state like Alaska, where small communities are often far apart. Serving cities like Fairbanks and Juneau is one thing. Serving hundreds of settlements like Meyers Chuck (pop. 21) or towns like Unalakleet (pop. 688) is another.

Like many traditional rural or independent telephone companies, ACS sees gold in its future focusing on selling lucrative broadband service to residential and business customers, where profit margins often exceed 50 percent. There is plenty of room to grow if ACS invests in network upgrades. ACS currently only has a 20 percent share of Alaska’s broadband market, primarily selling DSL service. GCI, which sells cable broadband, has managed a speed advantage.

Both companies have reassured Wall Street that despite ACS’ renewed focus on broadband, there will be no fierce competition, no price wars, or lower prices for consumers. ACS will devote considerable resources into bolstering its business broadband marketing and has already secured contracts with the state government and a regional health consortium.

Despite the $300 million windfall, ACS plans to turn most of that money towards paying off its debts and possibly reinstating a dividend payout program for shareholders. The company is expected to only spend $35 million to $40 million annually on capital investment projects and executives promise they will only open their wallet for projects that guarantee a high return on that investment. As a result, ACS will likely not spend much on rural broadband expansion.

Comcast has filed a patent application that would let the company expand its Wi-Fi network by turning customers into human Wi-Fi hotspots and convincing them to offer Comcast Wi-Fi from rental cars, bicycles, and buses.

FierceCable found the patent application, called “Mobile WiFi Network” that would let the cable company build a dynamic mesh network of mobile hotspots that could be used by its customers. But instead of placing permanent Wi-Fi antennas on buildings or light posts, Comcast wants a patent to extend its network by using vehicles and people that can be positioned exactly where Comcast needs better wireless coverage.

In one example, Comcast’s proposed roving rental car fleet would use incentives to convince renters to activate the car’s built-in hotspot in return for free or discounted services.

“The offer may indicate that if the rental car is dropped off at one or more designated parking spots, the driver will receive a discounted car rental rate, free parking, a coupon for items sold at the designated parking spot, etc. In this manner, the driver may be incentivized to assist in managing the network of transceivers to improve the coverage area. A driver wishing to accept the offer may press a button on the car’s computing display, or other computing device (e.g., using a smart phone application) to respond to the offer with an acceptance,” Comcast states in the patent application.

If a driver says no, Comcast can up the ante with an even better offer in response. If that does not work, Comcast can expand its Wi-Fi network dynamically in other ways.

“It should be understood that the process could be implemented by placing transceivers in or on any other mobile unit, such as bicycles, Segways, buses, police cars, taxis, boats, persons, dedicated vehicles, etc. or any combination of such mobile units,” Comcast wrote.

Last month, Comcast announced it would activate a public Wi-Fi network over wireless routers supplied to customers on a secondary channel.

Time Warner Cable and Cablevision customers: Is Charter Cable in your future?

The best way the cable industry can grow revenue in the lucrative broadband business is to bring back the same type of collusion and control cable companies maintained over video programming 20 years ago.

Dr. John Malone did not want to sound nefarious in his recent interview with CNBC’s David Faber, but the new part-owner of Charter Communications has built a reputation as cable’s Darth Vader over the last 30 years. His detractors consider his way of doing business akin to a nationwide cable mafia, complete with exclusive, non-competitive territories that assure operators can charge sky-is-the-limit prices.

Malone is now back in the cable business in a big way, and analysts expect he will quickly amass influence in an industry he once led as CEO of the nation’s then-largest cable operator — Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI).

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Why is John Malone back in the cable business and why buy a piece of Charter Cable? Malone tells CNBC’s David Faber Charter is a company with enormous growth potential through mergers and acquisitions. CNBC says Malone could be targeting Time Warner Cable and Cablevision for acquisition by Charter as early as next year. “There is consolidation yet to be done,” Malone hints.  (7 minutes)

Malone notes the cable industry is on the cusp of transformative consolidation through collaborative agreements, mergers, and outright acquisitions both here and abroad. CNBC speculated that could begin with efforts to further reduce the number of cable operators in the United States, perhaps beginning with a deal by Charter Communications to acquire both Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, which could combine under Malone’s stewardship and Charter’s executive leadership to “compete” with Comcast.

Dr. John Malone

CNBC reporters note Malone has high praise for Thomas Rutledge, CEO of Charter Communications. Rutledge’s earlier experience working for both Time Warner Cable and Cablevision could be an asset in combining all three companies into one. Analysts speculate such a deal could be pitched as early as 2014 when Time Warner Cable will undergo a management makeover with the departure of CEO Glenn Britt. CNBC also noted Cablevision’s imminent sale has been rumored for years, and current leader and family patriarch Chuck Dolan is 87 years old. With cheap credit and Malone’s business savvy, both companies could find themselves part of a Malone-engineered takeover that would vastly expand Charter Communications into the second largest cable operator in the country.

Malone sees the days of traditional cable television coming to an end as consumers turn to “over the top” online video for an increasing share of their viewing time. As cable television rates continue to increase, customers are cutting the cord. Malone believes today’s bloated cable packages are ripe for an upheaval from a-la-carte pricing or theme-based programming bouquets that break expensive sports programming or movie channels out of the traditional basic cable lineup. Malone even suspects a challenge to the industry’s current price models could surprisingly come from the programmers themselves.

Sports networks will be among the first to notice their affiliate revenue collected from cable and satellite companies (and passed on to customers in the form of higher rates) will stagnate as customers drop cable television. Declining viewer ratings also mean lower ad revenues. Malone believes at some point sports teams and/or programming networks will decide that the biggest barrier to winning new viewers is the $70-80 asking price for basic cable. If sports programmers find they can reach new audiences selling their programming online, direct-to-consumer, for $5-10 a month, the basic cable all-for-one-price model will quickly collapse.

“As the cable guys and the satellite guys start to lose customers to the over-the-top guys, some of those economics will be reflected back on the sports guys,” Malone said. “They’ll start losing advertising revenue. They’ll lose affiliate revenue. And they have to face reality that maybe you need to segregate your market like everybody else.”

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John Malone predicts the demise of the traditional bundle of cable television programming within five years. The future is streamed video online, declares Malone, so it is important the cable industry move to manage that competitive threat by acquiring streaming competitors or launching their own services to assure video programming revenue can be protected.  (5 minutes)

Malone sees the future sustainability of the cable industry dependent on the high revenue broadband business.

“I think it is at a point in history when the most addictive thing in the communications world is high-speed connectivity,” Malone told CNBC. “Everywhere in the world that we operate, we’ve just seen the public want more and more data rate. Whether it’s wireless or wired. There’s a big appetite for it. Cable technology right now is the most cost-effective way to deliver that growth in speed.”

Malone believes there is also plenty of room for revenue growth and cost-cutting, which he said can best be accomplished by getting other cable operators together to “cooperate” and “coordinate” broad scale broadband projects that counter competitive threats from third parties.

Malone helped pioneer the cable industry business practice of “don’t compete in my backyard and I won’t compete in yours,” an informal agreement among operators to stay within their own specific territories, safe and secure from competition. In the 1980s and 1990s, Malone’s TCI was one among many cable operators buying and swapping cable systems to build large, regional system “clusters” where only a single cable company provides service, winning economy of scale and a formidable presence that discouraged other wired competitors from entering the business. In most cities, only the deep pockets of AT&T (U-verse) and Verizon (FiOS) have managed to shake things up.

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Bring back the cable mafia? CNBC’s David Faber gets John Malone to admit vertical and horizontal integration — controlling the content and the pipeline — are important factors to protect cable revenue and expand American dominance in cable internationally. Malone is also a big supporter of industry consolidation and believes mergers and acquisitions are necessary to shrink the number of cable operators in the United States. (5 minutes)

The cable mafia?

Malone wants broadband to be carefully managed under the industry’s own control and direction.

Faber asked if Malone wanted to bring back the days of the “cable mafia.”

“Yes, I think we do want to bring back the days of @Home, the days of Ted Turner, the days when we all got together, because together we provided national scale,” Malone said. “Now I think we have the opportunity to create global scale,” he said. “The goal is not to be bigger. The goal is to be more cost-effective.”

Malone

Dr. John Malone is a force to be reckoned with and the British are about to get an introduction with this morning’s announcement Liberty Global has acquired Virgin Media in a blockbuster $16.3 billion acquisition deal that will make Malone and Liberty one of the biggest broadband providers in the world. (The deal is valued at $23.3 billion after Liberty agrees to take on Virgin Media’s existing debts.)

Malone will take control of Britain’s largest cable operator and will now also control another 18 million broadband customers in Europe, particularly in Germany and Belgium. His biggest rival will be News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch who controls BSkyB, Britain’s largest multichannel provider.

Malone’s reputation for ruthlessness precedes him. In the early 1990s, then Sen. Al Gore, Jr., called Malone the Darth Vader of the cable industry. Gore also referred to Malone as the head of a mafia-like “cable industry Cosa Nostra” best known for customer abuse, cold-hearted mergers and acquisitions, and endless rate increases. In the 1980s and 1990s, Malone appeared regularly at congressional hearings to discuss cable industry abuses. At the time, Malone was CEO of America’s largest cable operator Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI). Today, most of those cable systems are known by another name — Comcast.

In the late 1980s, TCI got the ball rolling on massive rate increases for basic cable service. Other operators quickly followed. As rates exploded upwards, the phones began ringing in Washington from outraged constituents. Gore recounted several recent rate hikes in his own home state of Tennessee in one hearing:

• In three years, rates increased 71% in Memphis,
• 99% in Crossville,
• 113% in Nashville,
• 115% in Chattanooga,
• and 116% in Knoxville.

Under Malone’s leadership, TCI Cable raised rates 60 percent in 1992 alone, helping drive the enactment of the 1992 Cable Act which began to slow the pace of rate hikes. The bill was vetoed by then President George H.W. Bush but overridden in Congress after tens of thousands of constituent complaints poured into Washington. It was sweet justice for many elected officials who were on the receiving end of Malone’s hardball tactics for nearly 20 years. Malone was well known for retaliating against local officials who opposed his unfettered rate increases by suddenly cutting off service to customers and putting up on-screen messages in the place of favorite channels with the names and phone numbers of elected officials Malone claimed were responsible.

Under Malone’s leadership, city officials and consultants working to bring a competing cable operator into Jefferson City, Mo., got a taste of TCI’s ruthlessness when Paul Alden, TCI’s vice president and national director of franchising personally threatened the mayor and a consultant working on the project.

“We know where you live, where your office is and who you owe money to. We are having your house watched and we are going to use this information to destroy you. You made a big mistake messing with TCI. We are the largest cable company around. We are going to see that you are ruined professionally.” Alden warned.

TCI later also claimed it had a First Amendment right to provide service wherever it wanted, with or without a cable franchise. It also threatened any would-be competitor with ruin. In Jefferson City, that would-be competitor eventually won $35 million in damages in a jury trial over TCI’s tactics.

Malone has made no secret he believes government officials are simply getting in his way. In 1999, The Guardian noted Malone is a big believer in telecom oligopolies:

He is scathing about regulatory attempts to prevent monopolies and mergers. Governments, he says, are “antediluvian” in their approach to the emerging new world economic order. Instead of trying to prevent mergers and collusion between media and communications companies, Malone says governments should actually promote the creation of “super-corporations” (such as his own) with enough capital to exploit the potential of new technology.

Malone has plenty of money to throw around. He engineered the sale of TCI Cable to AT&T and personally earned billions from the transaction. Three years later, AT&T sold those systems to Comcast.

Liberty Global has stayed on the sidelines of the cable business domestically, preferring to invest in cable networks and programming. Malone’s firm owns Starz!, which gave Netflix considerable trouble when the online video service lost the rights to a large number of recent movie titles. Netflix had negotiated a $30 million yearly deal with Liberty in 2008 which expired in early 2012. Renewal talks fell through when Liberty demanded $200 million annually to let Netflix keep streaming its movies.

Consumers in the United Kingdom may experience Dr. Malone’s idea of finesse soon enough, if shareholders and British regulators approve the buyout deal.

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BBC News reports the blockbuster deal will pit Dr. John Malone against his biggest rival, Rupert Murdoch. Virgin has five million customers in the UK and provides the country’s fastest broadband service. (2 minutes)