Frontier Communications is adding a new $1.50 monthly surcharge for broadband customers not currently enrolled in a “price protection agreement.”  Labeled the HSI Surcharge, the new fee started showing up on customer bills this month, with only a vague explanation buried inside the bill:

Courtesy: Manmaniac

Frontier's Fast One.

Customers attempting to get an explanation of what this charge was all about got a myriad of answers from Frontier customer service representatives:

• It’s a broadband tax;
• It’s a surcharge to help pay for network improvements;
• It’s a charge for customers who refuse to take a price protection plan;
• It’s a rate increase.

Stop the Cap! called Frontier this afternoon and was told it was designed to collect additional revenue to fund network expansion and was, effectively a rate increase.  Even customers on 1-3 year price protection agreements will eventually pay the “surcharge” as their agreements expire.  It is not a government-mandated charge or tax.

Effectively, this rate increase allows the company to advertise their Internet service at a deceptively low price, until customers discover Frontier’s modem rental fees and surcharges.  In 2009, during Stop the Cap!‘s flirtation with Frontier DSL, we found the “out the door” price for their 3.1Mbps service was actually higher than that charged by Time Warner Cable’s 10Mbps Road Runner service.

Cogeco Cable customers are about to pay for the company’s tragic financial results from its Portuguese operations in the form of broad-based price increases the company is selling as service “improvements.”

July’s financial results for Cogeco, which owns cable systems in Ontario, Quebec, and Portugal, are not good.  With mass subscriber defections and downgrades from Cogeco’s Portuguese cable system Cabovisao, company officials have decided to write off their European investment, resulting in a $56.7 million loss in the third quarter.

Tempering the damage is the company’s decision to raise broadband prices for Canadian customers by $2 a month for their Standard broadband package, soon to be priced at $48.95.

(Courtesy: 'Gone' from Fort Erie, Ontario)

“To add insult to injury, they are calling these changes ‘improvements,'” writes Stop the Cap! reader Claudette, who is a Cogeco customer in Ontario.  “In fact, the only thing Cogeco is improving is their skill at overcharging us.”

Cogeco's financial mess in Portugal.

Cogeco has sent letters to subscribers notifying them about the “improvements,” mostly in the form of a name change for the company’s ‘Standard’ plan, soon to be renamed ‘Turbo 14.’  They have also launched a new section on their website to break down the changes.

The only benefit Cogeco is introducing for customers with their Standard plan is a slight bump in usage allowances, from 60 to 80GB.  But that change comes with a major catch.  Cogeco charges customers a $1.50/GB overlimit fee with a monthly maximum overcharge of $30.  When ‘Turbo 14’ premieres Oct. 1, the maximum overlimit fee will jump to $50 a month.

“That is a total ripoff, because the next plan up with bigger allowances — just over 100GB a month — costs nearly $77 a month, for a whopping 16Mbps,” she adds.  “They just raised our rates last July and now they want more.”

Cogeco is punishing their premium customers even more by taking the maximum overlimit fee cap completely off their DOCSIS 3-based Ultimate 30Mbps and 50Mbps plans.  Available in some Cogeco service areas at prices of $60 and $100 a month respectively, the plans come with usage limits of 175-250GB.  The sky is the limit for overlimit fees, racked up at $1 per gigabyte.

Cogeco customers are outraged, and have begun shopping for alternatives, just like their counterparts in Portugal who have put their cable service on the chopping block.

The ongoing Portuguese financial crisis has been met with tax increases and benefit reductions by the government, and Portuguese consumers have responded with wholesale cord-cutting, cancelling Cabovisao cable-TV service in droves.

Cogeco's systems in Ontario (click to enlarge)

“You now have customers squarely opting out of [cable TV],” said Louis Audet, Cogeco’s president and chief executive officer. “These are economic circumstances that we have not, nor has anyone here, witnessed in North America. These are very unique to the circumstances in Portugal.”

At least Audet hopes they are.

With fewer competitive choices in the rural and suburban Ontario and Quebec markets Cogeco favors, consumers have a tougher time finding alternative providers, but not an impossible one.  Many are dropping Cogeco’s phone and broadband packages, moving to Voice Over IP or cell phone service for the former, and independent broadband providers like TekSavvy for the latter.  TekSavvy still retains unlimited use plans and has been traditionally more generous with allowances for the usage-based plans the company also sells.

Investors have been placated with a boost in Cogeco’s dividend payout… for now.  But many have adopted a “told you so” attitude about the company’s controversial decision to invest in overseas cable to begin with.

Scotia Capital analyst Jeff Fan said he had a negative view about Cogeco’s Portuguese venture.

“We hope this paves the way for a sale,” he wrote in a note to investors, “as Portugal is still cash-flow negative and dilutes the strong Canadian results.”

In fact, many investor groups dream of an even bigger sale — of Cogeco itself.

Joseph MacKay of Mackie Research said Canada’s fourth-largest cable company is ripe for a takeover by a larger cable operator, presumably Rogers or Shaw Communications.  Rogers already blankets Ontario with cable services, so Cogeco’s operations in eastern provinces would be a ‘natural fit’ for the company.  Shaw’s interest in expanding eastward could also get a boost from the buyout of Cogeco.

But one significant roadblock remains — the controlling interests of the Audet family, which have no intention of selling and control enough voting shares to stymie a hostile takeover.  In fact, despite the poor showing of the company’s Portuguese operations, the Audet family claims to be interested in acquiring other providers and expanding Cogeco’s size.

With the benefit of a two-dollar rate increase and the proceeds of Internet Overcharging, they’ll be in a position to put more dollars toward that goal.

Phillip "Try the Gouda" Dampier

Welcome to the Broadband Usage Whine & Cheese Festival

Midcontinent Communications earlier this month announced a big boost in broadband speeds for more than 250,000 customers in the Dakotas and Minnesota, bringing up to 100/15Mbps service to customers who wanted or needed that speed.

MidcoNet Xstream Wideband, made possible with a DOCSIS 3 upgrade, delivers 1/1Mbps ($30.95), 30/5Mbps ($44.95), 50/10Mbps ($64.95), or 100/15Mbps ($104.95) service.  Those are mighty fast speeds for an upper midwestern cable company, especially in states where 1-3Mbps DSL is much more common.

The cable provider was excited to introduce the speed upgrades earlier this month, telling customers:

At up to 100 Mbps, MidcoNet Xstream^® Wideband is fast. But today’s online experience is about more than speed. It’s about the power and capacity to run every streaming, blogging, downloading, surfing, gaming, chatting, working, playing, connected device in the house. All at the same time. MidcoNet Xstream Wideband delivers…it’s everyone in your entire family online at once, doing the most intense online activities, no problem.

But now there is a problem.  Customers spending upwards of $105 a month for the fastest Internet speeds are actually using them to leverage the Internet’s most bandwidth-intensive services, and evidently Midco isn’t too happy about that.  Todd Spangler, a columnist for cable industry trade magazine Multichannel News, was given a usage chart by Midco, and used it to lecture readers about the need for usage caps: “One thing is clear: Broadband service providers will all need to do something to contain the rapidly rising flood of Internet data.”  The implication left with readers is that limiting broadband usage is the only way to stem the tide.

Midco's not-so-useful chart looks mighty scary, showing usage growth on their 100Gbps backbone network, but leaves an enormous amount of information out of the equation. (Source: Midcontinent Communications via Multichannel News)

Spangler quotes Midco’s vice president of technology Jon Pederson: “Like most network providers we have evaluated this possibility, but have no immediate plans to implement bandwidth-usage caps,” he said.

So Midco is more than happy to pocket up to $105 a month from their customers, so long as they don’t actually use the broadband service they are paying top dollar to receive.  It’s an ironic case of a provider desiring to improve service, but then getting upset when customers actually use it.

We say ironic because, from all outward appearances, Midco is well-aware of the transformational usage of broadband service in the United States these days:

If you have ever once said “my Internet is too slow,” then you need MidcoNet Xstream Wideband. With it, you can do all the cool things you’ve heard people are doing online. Explore all the great stuff your online world has to offer. Play the most intense games. Try things you could never do before, from entertainment to finance, video chat or video streaming. Like we said, MidcoNet Xstream Wideband is all about speed, capacity, choice and control.

What this means for you is that you’ll be able to do things like:

• Download and start enjoying entire HD movies in seconds, not minutes.
• Stream video and music without a hitch while you simultaneously perform other intense online tasks.
• Choose from three different pipelines, from 3.0 to 1.0, for the capacity and price your family needs.
• Monitor your bandwidth use to determine if you need more capacity or can do what you want with less.
• Upload files or signals, such as webcam footage, faster than ever before possible for a better online experience.
• Watch ESPN3.com. Your Favorite Sports. Live. Online.

Just don’t do any of these things too much.  Indeed, when providers start toying with usage caps, it’s clear they want you to use your service the same way you did in 2004 — reading your e-mail and browsing web pages.  Real Audio stream anyone?

Let’s ponder the facts Mr. Spangler didn’t entertain in his piece.

Midco upgraded their network to DOCSIS 3 technology to deliver faster speeds and provide more broadband capacity to customers who are using the Internet much differently than a decade ago, when cable modems first became common.  Some providers and their trade press friends seem to think it’s perfectly reasonable to collect the proceeds of premium-priced broadband service while claiming shock over the reality that someone prepared to spend $100 a month for that product will use it far more than the average user.

Part of the price premium charged for faster service is supposed to cover whatever broadband usage growth comes as a result.  That’s why Comcast’s 250GB usage cap never made any sense.  Why would someone pay the company a premium for 50Mbps service that has precisely the same limit someone paying for standard service has to endure?

Cringely

Midcontinent Communications is a private company so we do not have access to their financial reports, but among larger providers the trend is quite clear: revenues from premium speed accounts are being pocketed without a corresponding increase in investment to upgrade their networks to meet demand.  Inevitably that brings the kind of complaining about usage that leads to calls for usage caps or speed throttles to control the growth.

We’re uncertain if Midco is making the case for usage caps, or simply Mr. Spangler.  We’ll explain that in a moment.  But if we are to fully grasp Midco’s broadband challenges, we need much more than a single usage growth chart.  A “shocking” usage graph is no more impressive than those showing an exponential increase in hard drive capacity over the same period.  The only difference is consumers are paying about the same for hard drives today and getting a lot more capacity, while broadband users are paying much more and now being told to use less.  Here is what we’d like to see to assemble a true picture of Midco’s usage “dilemma:”

1. How much average revenue per customer does Midco collect from broadband customers.  Traditional evidence shows ARPU for broadband is growing at a rapid rate, as consumers upgrade to faster speeds at higher prices.  We’d like to compare numbers over the last five years;
2. How much does Midco spend on capital improvements to their network, and plot that spending over the last 10 years to see whether it has increased, remained level, or decreased.  The latter is most common for cable operators, as the percentage spent in relation to revenue is dropping fast;
3. How many subscribers have adopted broadband service over the period their usage chart illustrates, and at what rate of growth?
4. What does Midco pay for upstream connectivity and has that amount gone up, down, or stayed the same over the past few years.  Traditionally, those costs are plummeting.
5. If the expenses for broadband upgrades and connectivity have decreased, what has Midco done with the savings and why are they not prepared to spend that money now to improve their network?

While Midco expresses concern about the costs of connectivity and ponders usage caps, there was plenty of money available for their recent purchase of U.S. Cable, a state-of-the-art fiber system serving 33,000 customers — a significant addition for a cable company that serves around 250,000 customers.

A journey through Midco’s own website seems to tell a very different story from the one Mr. Spangler is promoting.  The aforementioned Mr. Pederson is all over the website with YouTube videos which cast doubt on all of Spangler’s arguments.  Midco has plentiful bandwidth, Mr. Pederson declares — both to neighborhoods and to the Internet backbone.  Their network upgrades were designed precisely to handle today’s realistic use of the Internet.  They are marketing content add-ons that include bandwidth-heavy multimedia.  Why would a provider sell customers on using their broadband service for high-bandwidth applications and then ponder limiting their use?  Mr. Pederson seems well-aware of the implications of an increasingly connected world, and higher usage comes along with that.

That’s why we’d prefer to attack Mr. Spangler’s “evidence” used to favor usage caps instead of simply vilifying Midco — they have so far rejected usage limits for their customers, and should be applauded for that.

Robert X. Cringely approached Midco’s usage chart from a different angle on his blog, delivering facts our readers already know: Americans are overpaying for their broadband service, and the threat of usage caps simply disguises a big fat rate hike.  He found Midco’s chart the same place we did — on Multichannel News’ website.  He dismisses its relevance in the usage cap debate.  Cringley’s article explores the costs of broadband connectivity, which we have repeatedly documented are dropping, and he has several charts to illustrate that fact.

You’ll notice for example that backbone costs in Tokyo, where broadband connections typically run at 100 megabits-per-second, are about four times higher than they are in New York or London. Yet broadband connections in Tokyo cost halfwhat they do in New York, and that’s for a connection at least four times a fast!

So Softbank BB in Tokyo pays four times as much per megabit for backbone capacity and offers four times the speed for half the price of Verizon in New York. Yet Softbank BB is profitable.

No matter what your ISP says, their backbone costs are inconsequential and to argue otherwise is probably a lie.

Cue up Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt, who said precisely as much Thursday morning when he admitted bandwidth costs are not terribly relevant to broadband pricing.

We knew that, but it’s great to hear him say it.

Cringely’s excellent analysis puts a price tag on what ISP’s want to cap for their own benefit — their maximum cost to deliver the service:

That 250 gigabytes-per-month works out to about one megabit-per-second, which costs $8 in New York. So your American ISP, who has been spending $0.40 per month to buy the bandwidth they’ve been selling to you for $30, wants to cap their maximum backbone cost per-subscriber at $8.

[…] IP Transit costs will continue to drop. That $8 price will most likely continue to fall at the historical annual rate of 22 percent. So what’s presented as an ISP insurance policy is really a guaranteed profit increase of 22 percent that will be compounded over time because consumption will continue to rise and customers will be for the first time charged for that increased consumption.

This isn’t about capping ISP losses, but are about increasing ISP profits. The caps are a built-in revenue bump that will kick-in 2-3 years from now, circumventing any existing regulatory structure for setting rates. The regulators just haven’t realized it yet. By the time they do it may be too late.

Unfortunately, even if they knew, we have legislators in Washington who are well-paid in campaign money to look the other way unless consumers launch a revolution against duopoly broadband pricing.

Cringely believes usage caps will be the form of your provider’s next rate increase for broadband, but he need not wait that long.  As the aforementioned CEO of Time Warner Cable has already admitted, the pricing power of broadband is such that the cable and phone companies are already increasing rates — repeatedly — for a service many still want to cap.  Why?  Because they can.

Consumers who have educated themselves with actual facts instead of succumbing to ISP “re-education” efforts designed to sell usage limits under the guise of “fairness” are well-equipped to answer Mr. Spangler’s question about whether bandwidth caps are necessary.

The answer was no, is no, and will always be no.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Midco D3 Upgrade Promo 7-11.flv[/flv]

Jon Pederson’s comments on Midcontinent’s own website promoting its new faster broadband speeds can’t be missed.  He counts the number of devices in his own home that connect to the Internet, explains how our use of the Internet has been transformed in the past several years, and declares Midco well-prepared to deliver customers the capacity they need.  Perhaps Mr. Spangler used the wrong company to promote his desire for Internet usage caps.  Pederson handily, albeit indirectly, obliterates Spangler’s own talking points, which makes us wonder why this company even pondered Internet Overcharging schemes like usage caps in the first place.  (10 minutes)

Despite the loss of more than 128,000 video subscribers, Time Warner Cable more than made up the difference with rate increases on equipment, programming, and broadband to score a 23 percent increase in earnings in the second quarter of 2011.  For the period of April-June, Time Warner earned a profit of $420 million, nearly $80 million more than the same quarter last year.

Cable Television

Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt continued to blame the loss of video subscribers on the housing crisis and economy, suggesting the cable operator’s prices have gotten too high for some customers to handle, and they’ve disconnected cable television service as a result.  Britt also continues to downplay the impact of online video allowing for consumer cord-cutting, suggesting instead that increased competition from phone companies and satellite providers are creating a problem online video isn’t.

As a result, Time Warner is refocusing its efforts on marketing packages to three segments it particularly wants to attract — the very well-to-do, the Latino community, and the income-challenged.

Time Warner officials noted that many of their customers have continued to pare back their packages to cushion against the company’s rate increases.  For the last few years, consumers have cut premium movie channels and extra tier add-ons.  Now customers are targeting Time Warner’s DVR service as a route to a lower cable bill.  Many are returning their DVR boxes to save money, or are not keeping the service as a promotion expires.  Time Warner often bundles DVR service into new customer promotions for no additional charge.

For these income-challenged consumers, Time Warner is promising to develop new packages of services at reduced prices.  That likely means the expansion of the company’s “budget tier” — a package of selected basic cable networks, excluding expensive sports programming, currently testing in two markets for around $50 a month.

But the company is also reporting success with its wealthier customers, many who are adopting Time Warner’s super premium Signature Home service, from which the company collects an average of $220 per month per customer.  Time Warner is also ramping up promotion of its cable services to Spanish-speaking audiences in the Latino community — customers it may have under-served in the past.

The company also reported declines in video-on-demand revenue, principally adult pornography pay-per-view content consumers are now watching on the Internet for free.

Broadband

Among the brightest stars for Time Warner Cable continues to be broadband service, which is increasingly important… and profitable for the nation’s second largest cable operator.  With “pricing strength,” Time Warner has successfully adopted a series of rate increases for Road Runner service, increasing revenues along the way.  The company also reports success with its DOCSIS 3 rollouts, now reaching 60 percent of its cable subscribers.  CEO Britt says the cable company expects to complete DOCSIS 3 upgrades nationwide by the end of 2012.  A noticeable percentage of customers are upgrading to premium-priced, faster speed tiers as a result.

Despite the investment in DOCSIS 3, Time Warner Cable continues to slash the amount of capital it is investing in its network.  So far this year, capital expenditures are down 7.4 percent to $1.36 billion.  Chief Operating Officer Rob Marcus predicts Time Warner will spend no more than $3 billion on its systems in 2011, despite plans to continue broadband upgrades and convert their cable systems to all-digital operations.  So far this year, Time Warner has earned over $2.2 billion from its broadband division alone, up 9 percent from last year.  The company attributes most of that growth to rate increases and customers upgrading their service.

Other facts:

• Time Warner’s wireless mobile broadband has failed to spark much interest from consumers, perhaps because they realize it comes from Clearwire, a company Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt seemed unimpressed with in today’s conference call.  He made a point of telling investors the cable company is under no obligation to invest anything else in the venture;
• Time Warner Cable is taking a new interest in Wi-Fi, deploying networks in New York and Los Angeles, in the hope the company can boost interest in a “quad-play” of cable, phone, Internet, and wireless broadband/Wi-Fi that consumers have taken a pass on thus far;
• The company’s new super data center in Charlotte, N.C., will provide a national “head-end” for IPTV video, currently supplied from a facility in Denver.  This will principally benefit iPad users using the company’s app to stream online video.  The company hopes to eliminate regional and local distribution efforts as a cost-savings measure, consolidating national distribution through Colorado and North Carolina;
• The company’s next version of TWCable TV — the aforementioned iPad app, is due out in a few weeks and will include text searching for individual shows.  Whether it corrects the ludicrous inability for the app to consistently stream video is another question;
• Competition for new customers has been responsible for a number of disconnects.  One satellite provider is pitching Time Warner customers on a $30 a month video package that includes the NFL Sunday Ticket for free.  Verizon FiOS has increased its marketing of Time Warner customers, offering its own triple-play package for $99 a month.  AT&T U-verse has their own triple play packages as low as $89 a month, with a substantial mail-in rebate offer good for over $100.  But Britt warns the lack of change in the “average revenue per subscriber”-numbers from competitors probably means consumers are paying substantially more thanks to fine print-surcharges and fees;
• Time Warner is still trying to sign agreements for its TV Everywhere project, particularly for HBO Go, but the terms are evidently still not acceptable to the cable company.

Our earlier coverage, seen below, covers Britt’s remarkable comments about usage-based pricing.  He was certainly off the usual industry playbook today, even going as far as telling investors what we knew all along: bandwidth costs bear almost no relationship to the prices charged for broadband service.  That’s one we’ll tuck away and remember.

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt highlights the results from the second quarter, covering cable-TV, broadband, and other products. July 28, 2011. (6 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Murdoch

As Fox’s parent company News Corp. continues to reel in a wide-ranging criminal investigation involving phone hacking murder and terror victims in the United Kingdom, the scandal is now spreading into the United States with new revelations this week that CEO Rupert Murdoch, working with New York’s then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, used politically-motivated threats to force Time Warner Cable to add a newly-launched Fox News Channel to the cable dials of New Yorkers, raising their cable bills in the process.

The Daily Beast reports efforts by Murdoch to pay a substantial bounty to get the news/commentary channel on in Manhattan were not effective, so Murdoch turned to a political alliance with Giuliani, who received significant support from Murdoch’s NY Post in his earlier election bid, to force the issue with threats against the cable operator:

Let’s start in 1996, three years after Murdoch’s New York Post helped make Giuliani mayor with the narrowest win in modern city history. That year, Rupert and Ailes, who’d actually managed Rudy’s unsuccessful mayoral run in 1989, were launching Fox Cable News and they had one rather daunting problem: Time Warner controlled the prime NYC cable franchise, with 1.2 million viewers, including virtually all of Manhattan, where every advertiser who might buy a spot lived or worked. And Time Warner refused to give Fox a channel for its new venture. In those days, Time Warner only had space for 77 channels on the dial, and 30 applicants had lined up before Fox. Richard Aurelio, who ran the NYC cable system for Time Warner, recalls now that he assured Ailes that in a year or so, they would “get more capacity and put you on.” But, says Aurelio, now long retired at age 83, “Murdoch was furious.” A former deputy mayor under John Lindsay, Aurelio says he’d “never seen such a display of raw political power,” branding it “ferocious.”

Records revealed that after Murdoch and Giuliani talked directly about the matter on Oct. 1, their aides had 25 conversations and two meetings in the space of a few weeks. A deputy mayor instantly warned Time Warner about the possibility that their franchise, granted by the city every 15 years, might not be renewed and volunteered to fly anywhere in the country to meet with a Time Warner executive above Aurelio. When Time Warner wouldn’t budge, Giuliani came up with an extraordinary remedy. The city controlled five public-access channels, written into law as alternatives to commercial television, and the mayor decided to give one of them to Fox. In fact, presumably to make it look like this wasn’t something he would just do for Murdoch, he offered another to Mike Bloomberg’s then-fledgling TV network. The Bloomberg News channel actually had its debut one night before a federal judge could stop the deal, but soon the courts blocked this transparently extralegal adventure.

Giuliani

While Murdoch was initially willing to pay cable systems up to $11 per subscriber to launch Fox News on cable systems in the fall of 1996, most cable systems were effectively out of channel capacity at the time.  Fewer than ten million households had access to the new new network when it launched, despite the record launch bonus Murdoch was willing to pay.  Time Warner Cable had promised the network it would likely have channel space within two years as the company completed the rollout of its then-new “digital cable” service, which opened up hundreds of new slots for additional channels, but Murdoch was not willing to wait.

The Giuliani Administration owed a lot to Murdoch’s newspaper operations in the city, trumpeting his political campaigns.  One year before Fox News launched, Giuliani’s then-wife Donna Hanover was hired by WNYW-TV, Fox’s owned and operated local station in New York, despite the fact it was over a decade since her last job in television.  Fox tripled her salary just after Giuliani began threatening Time Warner Cable’s franchise to provide cable service in New York, unless and until the cable system made room for Fox News.

By 1997, Time Warner Cable added the network not only to its Manhattan cable system, but agreed to roll the channel out to most of its cable systems nationwide by 2001.

Murdoch’s early willingness to pay a bounty to get cable carriage has proved a worthwhile investment, considering Fox News has now become one of the most expensive networks in the cable package.  In December, Chase Carey, COO of News Corp., compared Fox News’ value with ESPN — America’s most expensive cable channel.  Carey has sought wide-ranging rate increases for Fox News in 2011, even after the network won earlier increases which made them by far the most expensive channel in the news and commentary category, running about a dollar per month per subscriber.  Those rate increases are passed down to every cable subscriber in the form of a higher monthly bill, whether one watches the channel or not.

In 2007, additional pressure was brought against cable operators to add Fox Business Channel, a perennially-low rated channel that was started to counter “the anti-business bias” of CNBC.  Despite now being available in nearly half of all American households, the spring Nielsen ratings show only about 57,000 people over the age of 2 watch the channel on any given day, even though every cable subscriber with the network on their lineup pays for it.