Today I want to talk about the cost of programming from the perspective of a small cable provider. In the cable world, any company without many millions of cable customers is considered small because they have no effective negotiating power against the programmers.

For decades most small cable systems have purchased a lot of their programming with rates negotiated by the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC). There are currently 850 member of this cooperative. Altogether the NCTC group represents the second biggest pile of cable customers after Comcast. It’s hard to know the exact number of customers they represent because a few of the larger cable companies like Cox and MediaCom have joined and then left the cooperative over the last few years. At one point I heard the number 20 million subscribers bandied around the industry but it’s probably smaller now.

Not all programmers will work with NCTC and some require cable providers of any size to sign a contract directly with them. But NCTC represents a significant portion of the channels used by cable systems. Within that negotiated pile of content members must still sign a contract with each programmer and are free to sign the NCTC contract, negotiate directly with the programmer, or else sign no contract if they don’t want to carry a given programmer.

Back in 2014 there was a big furor among small cable companies when the Viacom group asked for a huge rate increase, reported to be over 60%. Viacom includes channels like MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Spike, BET, and other music channels. At the time about 60 NCTC members, representing about 900,000 subscribers, decided that they could not afford to pay the higher rates and so dropped the Viacom channels from their cable systems.

We are seeing a similar battle brewing today as AMC is asking for a huge increase in rates with NCTC. I’ve not seen the new proposed rates, but have seen news articles describing this as a 379% rate increase over the term of the new contract, which is probably for five years. AMC includes the channels AMC, We tv, IFC, and Sundance TV. Additionally the new contract also covers BBC America and BBC World News, which are 50% owned by AMC.

How can a programmer ask for such a big increase? Programmers are very attuned to the Nielsen ratings which constantly track the number of people that watch each network. The general concept used by programmers is that their network is worth at least as much as other networks that get the same number of eyeballs, very similar to the way that a professional baseball player sets his worth by comparing his statistics to his peers.

AMC’s popularity has exploded in the last few years as it changed from a channel showing old movies to one which now carries very popular original programming like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead. This has raised their Nielsen rating and the network wants to charge more due to being a lot more popular.

The whole programmer industry owes a debt of gratitude to ESPN which was the first network to constantly and significantly increase their fees over the years. Every time that ESPN signed a new deal to carry programming for a sports league they then raised their prices to cover the new fees they were paying to those leagues.

But in doing so ESPN was setting an industry pricing standard against which other networks can be measured. We saw this happen with retransmission agreements with the major broadcast networks that have grown from zero to several dollars each per customer per month over the last decade. And we’ve seen popular channels ask for more as they get more viewers. The funny thing is, though, that when a network loses viewers they never seem to drop their rates.

Caught in the middle of all of this are the service providers that offer cable TV. They keep seeing bigger and bigger increases each year in programming costs and some are reporting overall programming costs growing by at least  15% per year. They are left with little choice but to raise rates, which puts many of them into a poor position compared to the satellite providers. And with each rate increase comes more customer impetus to cut the cord or at least cut back on the programming they purchase.

It’s been my experience that few of my small clients that carry cable have been bold enough to pass on all programming cost increases, and so their margins on cable keep shrinking. On a fully allocated cost basis many of them are underwater with the cable product. And sadly, as is shown by the recent AMC rate demands, there is no end in sight for continued huge increases in programing costs. It’s a lousy time to be a small cable provider, that’s for sure.