Marcus

Even as some of the largest investment banks on Wall Street are assembling a $24 billion loan package to further Charter Communication’s next effort to acquire Time Warner Cable, CEO Robert Marcus has learned not to take his eyes off the day-to-day business of running the country’s second largest cable operator.

Marcus turned up late last week at Le Parker Meridien in New York to speak at the 2nd Annual MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit, largely an affair putting Wall Street investors together with top cable executives to learn about industry trends.

Immediately peppered with questions about the failed merger between Time Warner and Comcast, Marcus sought to turn the page on the deal that would have handed him an $80 million golden parachute.

“The horse is dead,” Marcus said in response to continued questions about the deal.

But Marcus did say he felt the deal was rejected for reasons that were never explained to him or the industry, which could have an impact on future cable mergers and acquisitions. Regulator-inspired uncertainty could make some companies think twice about pursuing the next big deal, but so far that does not seem to apply to Charter Communications — still hot on the trail for a deal with the much larger Time Warner Cable.

Marcus claims he understood Time Warner Cable’s image with customers was a real problem that needed to be addressed immediately after becoming the company’s new CEO in  January 2014.

“The residential business was where the work needed to be done,” said Marcus.

Reliability became the top priority for Marcus’ team.

“It trumped features and functionality,” Marcus said, noting that if its network performed as it should, that would result in fewer calls into its customer care centers and reduced “truck rolls” to customer homes, saving Time Warner Cable time and money and improving its image. Marcus claims those efforts paid off.

“It works, we’re not pixelating, and we don’t have [huge] outages,” Marcus said.

Under Marcus’ leadership, Time Warner has adopted a “non-sexy stuff” approach to the cable business, focusing on making sure its existing products work before jumping into new products. That may explain why Time Warner has traditionally been behind other operators introducing vast broadband speed increases, cloud-based set-top boxes with improved user interfaces, more TV Everywhere contract arrangements allowing Time Warner customers to access online video content from third-party cable network websites, and the largest on-demand video libraries.

Not much is likely to change for the time being. Marcus reiterated his plan for major network upgrades under his Time Warner Cable Maxx program remain on track to reach 75% of Time Warner Cable service areas by the end of 2016.

When Maxx upgrades are complete, customers are transitioned to an all-digital television platform and Standard broadband customers move from 15/1Mbps service to 50/5Mbps at no additional charge. Although the top speed for Time Warner Cable broadband is currently 300/20Mbps in Maxx markets like New York, Los Angeles, Austin and Kansas City, Marcus said he was ready to bring 1Gbps broadband to Time Warner Cable customers sometime in late 2016, after DOCSIS 3.1 equipment becomes available.

“As the market evolves to that place, we’ll make it available,” Marcus said.

Recent movement at the Federal Communications Commission to introduce additional oversight over the cable industry has not made much impact at Time Warner Cable, which plans business as usual.

“I live in a different world than Chairman Wheeler in terms of the competitive dynamic,” Marcus said. “We’re fighting it out everyday in the trenches to gain and keep High Speed Data subscribers. The idea we would pull back and not press any competitive advantages of product enhancements we’re capable of delivering, just feels counter-intuitive and bad business.”

The idea that policy changes in Washington would somehow impact the investment in and introduction of new and better services from Time Warner Cable was ridiculous to Marcus.

“I cannot translate that into holding back the product and I can’t imagine what the policy objective would be that would encourage holding back the product,” Marcus said.

Cox Communications will begin testing overlimit fees this summer starting in its Cleveland, Ohio service area with plans to introduce hard usage allowances and excess usage violation charges nationwide if customers tolerate the market test in Cleveland.

DSL Reports learned that Cox will formally notify customers beginning May 19 it has increased broadband usage allowances and will introduce an overlimit fee of $10 for each 50GB allotment a customer exceeds their limit starting this fall.

Cox’s marketing machine is attempting to justify its usage based pricing scheme with a pre-written script to appease anticipated customer complaints:

A draft customer support script obtained exclusively by DSLReports states that this lead-in period will “give customers the opportunity to familiarize themselves with their typical data usage and take action, such as secure their WiFi network or change service plans, if they exceed their limit.”

The script also notes that customers will be notified via e-mail and a browser popup when they’ve reached 85% and 100% of their monthly data allotments. Cox services like Cox TV Connect, Cox Digital Telephone and Cox Home Security will not count toward the usage cap, a Cox insider claims.

To make the idea of potential bill shock more palatable to their customer base, Cox generously increased usage allowances last week:

• Starter: 150 GB/month
• Essential 250 GB/month
• Preferred 350 GB/month (the most popular plan)
• Premier 700 GB/month
• Ultimate 2 TB/month

Exceed those limits and the company will slap penalty fees on your bill as a matter of “fairness.” Customers will get a preview of any specific overlimit fees they would incur starting in June, but the company will not begin to actually charge them until October.

“Data usage plans promote fairness by asking the high-capacity Internet users to pay a greater share of network costs,” argues Cox. “Some critics of data usage plans push a flat fee pricing model, meaning that users would pay a flat fee whether they simply use the Internet to surf the web and check email or if they are a ‘super user’ and consume copious amounts of bandwidth. Data usage plans are a far more fair approach, giving consumers a choice based on their personal needs rather than forcing all customers to absorb the network costs incurred by the 5% of customers who exceed their allowance.”

Stop the Cap! would point out we’ve heard those same talking points since 2009 and they were not credible then and are even less so today.

First, we’d note Cox is attacking the business plans of some of the most successful broadband providers in the United States. Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Google, and a myriad of other phone and cable operators not only deliver on their commitment to offer unlimited use Internet, they actually market it as a good reason to buy Internet access from them.

Cox’s concerns for fairness might be a bit less hypocritical had Cox not sold customers unlimited use plans for years. Were they being unfair to their customers then, now, or both?

Second, the company’s claimed noble intentions for keeping the cost of broadband down might be more believable if it didn’t charge its base customers a whopping $34.99 a month for “up to 5Mbps” Internet that it now wants to limit. Five years ago it charged customers just $21.99 a month for that service. By 2015, it had raised the price more than 59%.

In comparison, Time Warner Cable charges less than half that for unlimited “$14.99 Everyday Low Price Internet” – a tier that has not increased in price since its introduction. Time Warner has also offered its light users an optional plan to win a discount if they keep their usage down. As a reflection of customer interest in plans that place limits (even optional) on broadband service, out of some 11 million Time Warner Cable customers, only a few thousand have shown any interest in plans that introduce a usage allowance component.

Third, Cox’s excuses are very similar to those given by Time Warner Cable when it tried (and failed spectacularly) to impose usage allowances on its broadband customers in 2009. Time Warner officials promised it would represent greater fairness and would help pay for network improvements, while only a small percentage of customers would face higher charges. In fact, none of those claims were true. Customers seeking to keep unlimited access faced a tripling of the cost of broadband, Time Warner Cable only committed to network improvements in their most-populous service areas (which were excluded from the usage cap market trials and had significant competition), and at the usage caps Time Warner proposed in 2009 – 5, 10, 20, and 40GB, more than half of today’s Time Warner customers would be subject to overlimit fees. At the time, Time Warner claimed their proposed usage allowances were generous and fewer than 5% of customers would exceed them. That is eerily familiar to the “5% of customers” Cox refers to today.

The real money is to be made selling broadband, already amazingly profitable.

Cox’s need for strict usage allowances comes at a time when other Internet Service Providers in competitive markets are either abandoning or not strictly enforcing them. Alienating customers has proven bad for business, and there is still plenty of money to be made selling unlimited access. Both broadband and telephone service is declining in cost for the operator to offer, particularly when examining bandwidth expenses.

Cox Communications is a privately held company and does not disclose specific financial data to the public, but similarly sized Charter Communications is publicly held and revealed in 2014 it had revenue of $9.1 billion and Adjusted EBITDA of $3.2 billion – each rising 8.2% on a pro forma basis, year over year. In plain English, broadband is already a real moneymaker for the cable industry, with revenue boosts recorded across the board. In comparison, cable television expenses have taken a toll on the profitability of offering television service. Charter is making so much money on broadband it dropped its usage caps recently.

Because the cable industry relies almost exclusively on existing hybrid fiber-coax networks to deliver products and services, the capital costs of providing Internet access have continued to drop for years. The industry’s decision to invest in and adopt DOCSIS 3 was considered a “no brainer” because it did not need major upgrades to network infrastructure and could recoup its cost by allowing companies to market higher-profit, higher-speed tiers.

In contrast, new entrants like Google Fiber are making significant investments to build all-fiber network infrastructure, confidently offering broadband services with no usage allowances. Many community-owned providers, including EPB in Chattanooga, GreenLight, and Fibrant in North Carolina, proudly follow this model, ensuring customers enjoy unrestricted usage. Even Comcast has embraced this approach by offering its premium 2Gbps fiber service without usage caps, allowing residential customers to fully utilize their connectivity. To further amplify the positive impact of these innovations, companies can leverage the expertise of The Marketing Heaven to effectively reach and engage wider audiences.

In short, Cox’s usage cap regime is completely unjustifiable under current marketplace conditions and represents little more than an effort to raise prices and block online video competition, which Cox customers may decide will eat too much into their usage allowance.

Time Warner Cable goes out of its way to advertise “No Data Caps.”

There are a number of questions Cox customers should ask:

1. Why did nobody ask us whether we thought usage allowances and overlimit fees were fair?
2. Why not offer optional discounts for low-usage customers and see how many actually enroll in such a program?
3. Why has Cox removed the option of an unlimited use tier for customers that want unlimited service?
4. Why won’t Cox commit to a price freeze on its broadband service if usage caps are really about controlling costs?
5. How is it fair to offer a more generous allowance to a customer sold a higher speed tier that can easily chew through more data than customers on lower speed tiers?
6. Why do low-speed customers get a smaller usage allowance when they cannot effectively use the highest bandwidth web applications?
7. Why can’t customers roll unused portions of their usage allowance over to future months?
8. How many customers, if any, actually asked for this type of pricing?
9. Why can Google, Time Warner and other operators provide unlimited access for the same or less than Cox charges and your company can’t?

A well-placed source in Washington, D.C. with knowledge of the matter tells Stop the Cap! the Federal Communications Commission is prepared to take a hard look at the issue of Internet data caps and usage-based billing if a major cable operator like Comcast imposes usage allowances on its broadband customers nationwide.

Comcast introduced its usage cap market trial in Nashville, Tenn. in 2012 but gradually expanded it to include Huntsville and Mobile, Alabama; Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, Mississippi; Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; and Tucson, Arizona.

“Two and a half-years is exceptionally long for a ‘market trial,’ and we expected Comcast would avoid creating an issue for regulators by drawing attention to the data cap issue during its attempted merger with Time Warner Cable,” said our source. “Now that the merger is off, there is growing expectation Comcast will make a decision about its ‘data usage plans’ soon.”

In most test markets, Comcast is limiting residential customers to 300GB of usage per month, after which an overlimit fee of $10 per 50GB applies. Despite that, Comcast’s forthcoming premium gigabit speed plans are exempt from usage caps, the company announced.

Comcast sustomers in market test cities have not been happy with the usage caps, some confronted with inaccurate usage measurement tools or “bill shock” after claiming to find surprise charges on their cable bill. One federal employee offered his own story of bill shock — $200 in overlimit fees on his April Comcast bill. The customer spent $70 a month on broadcast basic cable television and Comcast Internet service. As an almost cord-cutter, he could instead rely on one of several alternative online video providers like Netflix or Hulu, but watching video that did not come from Comcast’s cable TV package contributed to eating his monthly usage allowance and subjected him to hundreds of dollars in extra fees.

“I’ve reviewed [the] account to see and can confirm the charges are valid,” responded a Comcast representative who defended the company’s usage cap trials. “Please understand that we are not here to take advantage of customers. We are here to provide a great customer service experience.  After researching [the] account, at this time no matter what level of service you obtain, the Internet usage [allowance] will remain the same.”

To date, the Federal Communications Commission has left the issue of data caps and usage-based billing on the back burner, despite a Government Accounting Office report that found little justification for usage limits or compulsory usage allowances on broadband.

In 2012, former FCC chairman Julius Genachowski defended the practice, claiming it would bring lower prices to light users, spur “innovation” and enable consumer choice. But Comcast customers have found little, if any savings from Comcast’s so-called “data usage plans.” The only savings comes from enrollment in Comcast’s Flexible Data Option, which offers a $5 discount if a customer keeps usage under 5GB a month on just one plan — Comcast’s 3Mbps $39.95/mo Economy Plus tier.

“We don’t see much innovation coming from Comcast’s usage limit trials because Internet pricing continues to rise and the plans have the side effect of discouraging customers from using competing video providers, which can consume a lot of a customer’s usage allowance,” our source adds.

You are over our arbitrary usage limit!

As far as enabling consumer choice, Comcast’s own representative put the kibosh on that, unless a customer wants to pay higher Internet bills.

Net Neutrality and issues surrounding Title II have consumed much of the FCC’s attention in the residential broadband business during the first half of the Obama Administration’s second term. Usage billing and data caps are likely to become bigger issues during the second half if there is a decisive move towards compulsory usage limits and consumption billing by large operators.

“An operator the size of Comcast absolutely will draw scrutiny,” said our source. “If Comcast decides to impose its currently tested market trial plans on Comcast customers nationwide, the FCC will take a closer look. Under Title II, the agency is empowered to watch for attempts to circumvent Net Neutrality policies. Usage caps and charging additional fees to customers looking for an alternative to the cable television package will qualify, especially if Comcast continues to try to exempt itself.”

Cable industry officials have also become aware of the buzz surrounding usage caps and growing regulator concern. Some reportedly discussed the possibility of FCC intervention behind closed doors at the recent cable industry conference in Chicago. Multichannel News reported (sub. req.) cable industry executives increasingly fear federal officials will ban usage pricing for wired broadband service on competitive grounds. Online video competitors rely on large cable and phone companies to reach prospective customers, many that may think twice if usage allowances are imposed on consumer broadband accounts.

Verizon Communications this morning announced it will buy AOL, Inc., in a $4.4 billion cash deal that will provide Verizon with powerful mobile video and advertising platforms.

Originally known for its ubiquitous dial-up Internet access, AOL today is better described as a content and advertising aggregator — putting online video in front of viewers bolstered by AOL’s powerful advertising technology that can match a targeted advertising message to a specific viewer in milliseconds.

AOL’s portfolio also includes the well-known Engadget, TechCrunch and Huffington Post websites, which many analysts expect will not be part of the deal, quickly spun off to a new owner(s) to avoid any political headaches over Verizon’s control of the well-known content sites, some including coverage critical of Verizon.

All signs point to the AOL acquisition as more evidence Verizon management is shifting priorities to its mobile business, Verizon Wireless. In 2014, Verizon acquired the assets of Intel Media, which was planning an Internet TV service called OnCue. Verizon’s acquisition will help it develop an alternative television platform and many analysts expect it will primarily reach Verizon Wireless customers.

Complimenting online video with AOL’s ad placement and insertion platform will likely be the best chance Verizon has to monetize that video content.

“Certainly the subscription business and the content businesses are very noteworthy,” confirmed Verizon’s president of operations, John Stratton. “For us, the principal interest was around the ad tech platform.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bloomberg Why Verizon Coveted AOLs Ad Technology and Mobile Video 5-12-15.flv[/flv]

Bloomberg says Verizon’s real interest in AOL is their online advertising platform, which can bolster Verizon Wireless’ mobile video service. (2:39)

Verizon’s $4 billion investment in AOL did not go into expanding its fiber optic platform FiOS.

Verizon Wireless Multicast

“For the price it’s paying for AOL, Verizon could deploy its FiOS broadband service across the rest of its service area, bringing much-needed services and competition to communities like Baltimore, Boston and Buffalo,” said Free Press research director S. Derek Turner. “Instead, the company is spending a fortune to wade into the advertising and content-production markets. In terms of the latter, Verizon has already shown a willingness to block content and skew news coverage.”

As Stop the Cap! reported last week, that isn’t a surprise to some utility companies that believe all signs point to Verizon’s growing disinterest in its wireline division. Florida Power & Light expects Verizon will become a wireless only company within the next 10 years.

While AT&T explores expanding its wireless service internationally and seeks approval for its acquisition of satellite service DirecTV, Verizon Wireless is moving to monetize increased customer usage of its network with the forthcoming introduction of a video service this summer. The product would offer a mix of ad-supported and paid short video content and may offer live multicast programming that can reach a larger audience without disrupting network capacity.

Increased viewing of high bandwidth video will force Verizon customers to continually upgrade data plans, further monetizing Verizon’s wireless business. AOL’s ad insertion technology will allow Verizon to earn advertising income from viewers, creating a dual revenue stream.

Verizon can also sell advertisers information about its massive customer base of wired and wireless customers, including their browsing habits and demographic profile to deliver “data-driven marketing and addressable advertising.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Bloomberg Verizon-AOL Deal 1999 All Over Again 5-12-15.flv[/flv]

Bloomberg News puts together several of Verizon’s puzzling recent acquisitions, which point to a shift of Verizon’s business towards its mobile and content platforms. (5:42)