The report looked at the prices charged for basic cable and expanded basic cable in 485 communities in the US, some where cable has a declaration of effective competition and others with no competition.
I think the results shown in the report are off because the findings show average rate increases that are far below what is reported everywhere else in the industry. The FCC says that the price of basic cable increased by only 2.3% over the last year to reach a price of $23.79. More surprisingly, the average price of expanded basic cable increased by only 2.7% to reach $69.03 which was slightly lower than the increase in inflation. This compares to the 10-year historical average of 4.8% increases per year from this same report.
The increase in basic cable might be accurate because there are years when many companies don’t increase this rate. But the expanded basic rate increase is baffling. I wrote a blog back in the beginning of the year showing much larger increases for all of the big cable companies this year except Charter, due to their impending merger – and they caught up later in the year.
I think that perhaps the FCC is no longer asking the right questions. It’s certainly possible that the published prices for expanded basic cable increased as they have said – but that doesn’t tell us anything about what customers are really paying.
I suspect the FCC is not picking up the plethora of new ‘fees’ that are being used to disguise the price of cable. These might be called network programming fees to cover the cost of buying local programming. Or they might be called sports charges to cover the ever-rising cost of sports programming. Every big company labels these fees a little differently. But these fees are part of the cable bill that people pay each month and the primary purpose of the fees is to allow the cable companies to claim lower cable rates. These fees also confuse customers who often think they are taxes. My guess is that the FCC did not include these fees – and they must be included because they are nothing more than a small piece of the cable bill labeled differently.
Additionally, I’ve seen a number of estimates that say that around 70% of households buy cable as part of a bundle, and for these households the change in the list price of the components of the bundle doesn’t matter – customers only care about the overall increase in the price of the bundle. Customers don’t know or care which piece of the bundle increases since they are rarely shown the cost of bundle components.
And this leads to a discussion of the fact that cable companies have recently began increasing the prices of other products in order to keep cable rates lower. Rather than raise the price of cable they might instead raise the fees mentioned above, raise the price of the cable modem or the settop box, or raise the price of the broadband products. And all the cable companies care about – and all most customers see – is the increase in the total bill.
Finally, we know that there are now many different rates in every market. Cable companies sell specials or negotiate contract renewals with customers. At CCG we often gather customer bills to try to understand a market and we often see customers with an identical package with prices varying by as much as 10 or 15 dollars. None of the variation in actual rates makes it into the FCC report. I think this report only looks at the published list price and those prices are largely irrelevant since they don’t reflect what customers really pay.
So I think the usefulness of this report is over. If I recall this report was mandated by Congress, and so the FCC is probably obligated to keep producing it. But the results it now shows have almost nothing to do with the rates that customers actually pay for cable TV in the real world.