(Las Vegas, NV) FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was the first official speaker at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association annual convention here today. The controversial Republican has come out with a string of policy pronouncements and proceedings that has angered the cable industry — so much so that cable leaders privately speculate that Martin must have had a bad personal experience with his cable service.
But no, Martin said, in a short appearance before a packed room of cable operators. “I actually don’t dislike cable. Quite the contrary, I’m an avid consumer,” he said, ticking down a substantial list of cable services he purchases.
What he does like most of all, however, is competition. That’s why he’s pushed for a la carte sale of cable channels and relaxation of franchising requirements for phone companies, among the many initiatives cable despises. “I have tried to apply such technologically and policy neutral competitive positions across all platforms,” Martin said. “I have and will continue to side with the new entrants into the market in which you are the incumbent,” he explained to the audience.
Martin seemed to believe that all he needed to do was to explain his philiosophical position in order to gain cable’s, well, acceptance. “You should understand that I’m approaching these issues with the same regulatory philosophy that has guided me thus far,” he said.
It’s true that cable operators sometimes want the knife to cut only their way. Martin cited what he contends is the intellectual inconsistency between cable’s opposition to must-carry of all TV signals and cable’s opposition to a la carte sale of TV channels.
Cable has argued that consumers shouldn’t be forced to receive every conceivably signal a broadcaster emits, as the TV station industry has insisted in must-carry wranglings. But cable operators also believe that it’s far more efficient to bundle cable channels and that forced sale of individual channels would incalcuably damage the economics of the multichannel video world.
“If that’s really your belief,” Martin said in reference to cable’s views that channels should not be foisted on consumers, “that should be true whether we’re talking about broadcast channels or satellite channels.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:24 PM | Print | Comments (0)Now that all the Q1 07 earnings reports have been issued, it’s time once again to take a look at the U.S. cable industry’s success rate in capturing telephony subscribers with their still-relatively new digital voice services. According to our tally, at the end of Q1 07, the top U.S. cable companies served 9.82 million telephony customers, representing 9.6% of the 102.5 million homes passed by telephony-capable plant (note that not all of these homes passed were actively marketed by the operators.)
Growth in cable’s telephony customer count is gaining speed too. During Q1 07, the top operators combined added 1.14 million net new customers, a run rate 78% higher than the 644,553 net new telephony customers added during the year-ago quarter and 13% higher than the 1.01 million net new telephony customers added during Q4 06.
Not surprisingly, Comcast posted the highest number of net new customer gains year-over-year, adding 1.6 net new telephony customers year-over-year. The numbers for the top operator, which undertook a big VoIP deployment push in 2006, would have been even higher if Comcast weren’t actively trying to shrink its legacy voice customer count.
Mid-sized operator Charter Communications, however, posted the biggest percentage gain year-over-year. From Q1 06 to Q1 07, Charter’s telephony customer count jumped from 191,100 to 572,600, a 200% increase.
| Cable Telephony Subscriber Counts (in mil., except $) | |||||
| 1Q06 | 2Q06 | 3Q06 | 4Q06 | 1Q07 | |
| Brighthouse Networks* | 0.25 | 0.33 | 0.37 | 0.41 | 0.47 |
| CableOne | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.01 |
| Comcast** | 1.42 | 1.71 | 2.09 | 2.51 | 2.99 |
| Cox* | 1.73 | 1.82 | 1.91 | 2.01 | 2.10 |
| Cablevision*** | 0.87 | 0.99 | 1.11 | 1.21 | 1.32 |
| Charter | 0.19 | 0.26 | 0.34 | 0.45 | 0.57 |
| Insight | 0.10 | 0.11 | 0.11 | 0.12 | 0.15 |
| Mediacom | 0.05 | 0.07 | 0.08 | 0.11 | 0.12 |
| Time Warner***** | 1.25 | 1.46 | 1.65 | 1.86 | 2.09 |
| Total | 5.85 | 6.74 | 7.66 | 8.67 | 9.82 |
| Quarterly Adds. | 0.64 | 0.89 | 0.92 | 1.01 | 1.14 |
| Total Telephony HP by Group | 79.16 | 88.55 | 93.90 | 98.17 | 102.53 |
| Subs. % of Telephony HP | 7.4% | 7.6% | 8.2% | 8.8% | 9.6% |
| *EMDI estimates. Note Cox offers a mixed of circuit-switched and VoIP service. | |||||
| **At end of Q1 07, Comcast passed 34.8 million homes with VoIP service and counted 2.43 million VoIP or digital voice customers. The remaining homes passed and subscribers reflected legacy circuit-switched. | |||||
| ***Includes sequentially decreasing, and increasingly trivial, amounts of legacy circuit-switched customers. | |||||
| *****Does not include trivial number of circuit-switched voice subscribers. EMDI estimates for telephony homes passed. | |||||
| Source: Company reports and Emerging Media Analysis estimates. © 2007. | |||||
(Reprinted from today’s issue of IP Media Monitor.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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