Tag Archives: Time Warner

Big ISPs and Speeds

I was recently reminded in a conversation with a client how cable company executives used to tell the public that they didn’t need faster broadband speeds, and what the cable companies offered was fine. Looking through my archives, I found the following statements from 2013, where cable companies were responding to the first Google Fiber offerings of symmetrical gigabit broadband.

In 2013, Time Warner Cable CFO Irene Esteves announced that the company didn’t see the need to deliver Google Fiber speeds to consumers. Comcast Executive Vice President David L. Cohen was quoted as saying that gigabit speeds were pointless due to limitations on the data speeds that could be delivered from websites and the lack of capability of home WiFi routers. Michael Powell, the CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, characterized gigabit speeds as an “irrelevant exercise in bragging rights”.

The criticisms had some merit at the time. There was no web traffic that operated at speeds even close to a gigabit. Off-the-shelf WiFi routers couldn’t handle anything close to gigabit speeds. But the public didn’t care because performance on fiber was perceived as being significantly better than what was delivered by cable companies, and customers flocked to Google Fiber in the markets where it was introduced. Interestingly, Time Warner obviously thought the Google Fiber threat was real, because the company quickly built fiber-to-the-premise to compete against Google in North Carolina.

There were some customers who benefited from gigabit speeds. I recall talking to a doctor who subscribed to gigabit speeds when it became available from a municipal ISP. This hospital also had gigabit broadband, and the doctor was able to download large MRI files at home in a reasonable amount of time once he had gigabit fiber. I also talked to a photographer who used a different municipal ISP who told me that gigabit speeds made it possible for the first time to upload photography and video libraries to clients without having to wait for hours for the uploads to complete.

The next time that cable companies told the public they didn’t need faster speeds was during the pandemic, when it became clear that cable company upload speeds of 10 Mbps were not able to handle multiple people working and schooling at home at the same time. Every big cable company defended its networks. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said at the time that Charter’s network was adequate and justified that by pointing out that the majority of customer data usage was downstream. But Charter and other cable companies tweaked their networks during the pandemic to improve upload speeds to 15-20 Mbps. Still today, there are numerous cable networks that have not yet implemented any upgrades to bring significant improvement to upload speeds.

Many ISPs subtly tell their customers they don’t need fast broadband through their pricing. I find small ISPs around the country that still charge extremely high prices for anything faster than their basic broadband product.

This frankly mystifies me. I’ve always guessed that this kind of pricing is for two reasons. First, I think some small ISPs fear that customers who buy faster speeds will somehow cost the ISP a lot more money. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. I recall an Ookla article last year that said that, in some markets, the biggest data users were the customers buying the least expensive broadband package. I’ve had numerous ISPs tell me that their gigabit customers don’t use more broadband than their 100 Mbps customers.

The only other reason for high prices for faster speeds is that they are trying to create the idea that fast speeds are a super-premium product. But I think these ISPs are losing out on a lot of revenue. ISPs who space prices between speed tiers of $15 to $20 see that a lot of customers who are willing to upgrade to faster speeds when it doesn’t cost a lot more per month. Most customers are leery about paying $50 or more per month for a faster speed.

AOL Drops Dial-up

In news that will evoke nostalgia for a lot of people, AOL announced that it will be discontinuing dial-up Internet access on September 30. AOL was the poster child of the dial-up Internet era when dial-up was the primary way to get online before the advent of DSL and cable modems in the late 1990s. Anybody who used dial-up can still remember the pings and pongs while the phone made a connection to a dial-up server. People probably remember when AOL would mass-mail diskettes that contained AOL software to attract new customers.

AOL was phenomenally successful in the 1990s. AOL ruled the dial-up industry and reached 34 million dial-up customers at its peak. The company had a lot of ISP competitors like Sprint, EarthLink, NetZero, Prodigy, and a ton of small dial-up ISPs operating in local markets.

But AOL was much more than just a dial-up portal to reach the early web. AOL created the first major platform that included email, news, games, shopping, and a host of other services in one place. AOL was attractive to new users since it gave them the ability to do things without having to search the web. Before platforms like AOL, a user had to be fairly tech-savvy to use the Internet. A lot of users went onto the AOL platform and never strayed elsewhere on the web. Its closest early platform competitor was CompuServe, which grew to about 3 million subscribers and eventually concentrated on serving business people. MSN and other websites eventually tried to duplicate and  compete with AOL.

People remember speeds on AOL and other dial-up ISPs of 56 kbps (kilobits per second). But 56 kbps was only introduced in 1997, and before that, most ISP modems offered speeds of 28.8 kbps or 33.6 kbps. The first DSL modems that brought 1 Mbps speeds that were 18 times faster than dial-up.

AOL stunned the business world on January 10, 2000, when it announced that it would buy Time Warner for $182 billion in stock and debt, the largest corporate merger ever. The purchase was at the height of the early Internet craze, and it was unbelievable that AOL could acquire the company that owned Time Magazine, CNN, and the Warner Brothers studios. AOL wanted access to the Time Warner content as a way to stave off looming competition from other web companies. It’s hard to know if the envisioned synergies could have thrived because in the spring of 2001, the dot-com crash killed AOL’s stock valuation along with other Internet and telco stocks.

AOL and other dial-up ISPs were a major issue for telephone companies because users would stay on dial-up connections for hours or days. Voice switches were not designed to have lines tied up for that long, and telephone companies complained of reaching switch saturation at busy times. A number of telcos tried to block or limit dial-up ISPs, but the courts and the FCC ruled that dial-up was a legitimate use of telephone lines.

You might wonder who still uses dial-up. According to the U.S Census, there were still 175,000 households on dial-up in 2020. The attraction of dial-up is that it is cheap – between $10 and $20 per month for the remaining companies in the business. It’s an attractive option for folks who only want to read email, or for rural folks with no other affordable alternative. Folks who still want dial-up will still have a few other options left, like EarthLink and NetZero.

I used AOL email for many years as my personal email. AOL says that its email service will remain after dial-up dies, but you have to wonder how long they’ll keep that going. Hearing the announcement brought back memories of hearing the AOL pings and the “You’ve Got Mail” greeting, and of using other long-dead services like Netscape and Ask Jeeves.

Trusting Big Company Promises

When AT&T proposed to merge with Time Warner in 2016, attorneys at the Justice Department argued against the merger and said that the combined company would have too much power since it would be both a content provider and a content purchaser. Justice Department lawyers and various other antitrust lawyers warned that the merger would result in rate hikes and blackouts. AT&T counterargued that they are good corporate citizens and that the merger would be good for consumers.

In retrospect, it looks like the Justice Department lawyers were right. Soon after the merger, AT&T raised the prices for DirecTV and its online service DirecTV Now by $5 per month. The company raised the rates on DirecTV Now again in April of this year by $10 per month. AT&T accompanied the price increases with a decision to no longer negotiate promotional prices with TV customers. In the first two quarters of this year DirecTV lost over 1.3 million customers as older pricing packages expired and the company insisted that customers move to the new prices. AT&T says they are happy to be rid of customers that were not contributing to their bottom line.

In July of this year, CBS went dark for 6.5 million DirecTV and AT&T U-verse cable customers. AT&T said that CBS wanted too much money to renew a carriage deal. The two companies resolved the blackout in August.

Meanwhile, AT&T and Dish networks got into a dispute in late 2018 which resulted in turning off HBO and Cinemax on Dish Network. This blackout has carried into 2019 and the two sides still have not resolved the issue. The dispute cost Dish a lot of customers when the company was unable to carry the Game of Thrones. Dish says that half of its 334,000 customer losses in the fourth quarter of 2018 were due to not having the Game of Thrones.

I just saw headlines that AT&T is headed towards a rate fight with ESPN and warns there could be protracted blackouts.

It’s hard to fully fault any one of the AT&T decisions since they can be justified to some degree as smart business practices. But that’s how monopoly abuses generally work. AT&T wants to pay as little as possible when buying programming from others and wants to charge as much as possible when selling content. In the end, it’s consumers who pay for the AT&T practices – something the company had promised would not happen just months before the blackouts.

Programming fights don’t have to be so messy. Consider Comcast which is also a programmer and the biggest cable TV company. Comcast has gotten into a few disputes over programming, particularly with regional sports programming. In a few of these disputes, Comcast was leveraging its programming power since it also owns NBC and other programming. But these cases mostly got resolved without blackouts.

Regulators are most worried about AT&T’s willingness to allow prolonged blackouts because during blackouts the public suffers. Constantly increasing programming costs have caused a lot of angst for cable TV providers, and yet most disputes over programming don’t result in turning off content. AT&T is clearly willing to flex its corporate muscles since it is operating from a position of power in most cases, as either an owner of valuable content or as one of the largest buyers of content.

From a regulatory perspective this raises the question of how the government can trust the big companies that have grown to have tremendous market power. The Justice Department sued to challenge the AT&T and Time Warner merger even after the merger was approved. That was an extraordinary suit that asked to undo the merger. The Justice Department argued that the merger was clearly against the public interest. The courts quickly ruled against that suit and it’s clear that it’s nearly impossible to undo a merger after it has occurred.

The fact is that companies with monopoly power almost always eventually abuse that power. It’s incredibly hard for a monopoly to decide not to act in its own best interest, even if those actions are considered as monopoly abuses. Corporations are made up of people who want to succeed and it’s human nature for people to take any market advantages their corporation might have. I have to wonder if AT&T’s behavior will make regulators hesitate before the next big merger. Probably not, but AT&T barely let the ink dry on the Time Warner merger before doing things they promised they wouldn’t do.

DOJ Opposes AT&T / Time Warner Merger

The US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T opposing the upcoming merger with Time Warner. The filing was surprising since it came so late in the merger process with the proposed merger on the table for much of 2017.

There are those saying that the DOJ objections are political, but the DOJ objections are all legitimate. Some of the major concerns of the DOJ include:

  • The merger could disadvantage AT&T rivals like Comcast and Charter by forcing them to pay hundreds of millions more for access to Time Warner programming.
  • The merger will slow the industry transition to online video through OTT and MVPD providers.
  • The vertical integration of last-mile network and programming gives AT&T the ability to create an unfair advantage over competitors.

I don’t think AT&T or anybody can dispute these objections with a straight face, and in fact, these findings are exactly what AT&T has in mind. AT&T already has major synergies between its various business lines. For example, the latest expansion of the AT&T FTTP network is largely taking advantage of fiber routes that are already in place to support the cellular network. It’s something that AT&T probably should have taken advantage of long before now. AT&T also is starting to take advantage of the synergies between its large acquired DirecTV customer base and its cellular products. It’s also the existing programming contracts of DirecTV that have enabled the successful launch of the MVPD offering DirecTV Now.

What this DOJ suit does not acknowledge is that AT&T is just trying to keep pace with Comcast. Comcast has already integrated programming with a last-mile network when the DOJ and FCC let the company buy NBC Universal in 2009. And now that Comcast is entering the cellular business I have a hard time seeing any real difference between what Comcast has today and what AT&T is trying to become with this merger.

The question that must be asked is if the DOJ is going to block the AT&T merger, then shouldn’t their next step be to ask for the divestiture of the Comcast business lines? If they are not going to pursue that, then this filing is largely political. But if the concern is monopoly abuse, as the DOJ document indicates, then they should pursue the only fully-integrated monopoly like the one that AT&T is asking to create.  In fact, Comcast has already gone far past where AT&T is headed and also bundles in smart home, security and even solar panels with other telecom services.

There is no question that Comcast, and AT&T, if they are able to complete the merger, will have a competitive advantage over any other last-mile network provider. Any other ISP that wants to offer video will have to pay significant amount of money to these two companies as part of competing with them. It can be argued that Comcast cable also has to buy the various Comcast programming – but the fact is that when calculating earnings all intercompany purchases cancel out, so whatever Comcast pays itself for programing is largely funny money. And this gives these big conglomerates an instant $5 / $10 advantage per month in costs over any rival.

It’s an interesting filing, and if the DOJ sticks to its guns this is likely to end up at the Supreme Court. My gut tells me that the courts are going to have a hard time saying no to AT&T for trying to create the same synergies that their primary rival Comcast already has.

We haven’t even seen the full power of the new Comcast bundle yet. The company has so many possible ways to tie down a customer and make it hard to break the bundle. Once Comcast has millions of cellular customers and millions of smart home customers they are going to be a fierce competitor against any newcomer. Combine this with the fact that they will soon have gigabit broadband available everywhere and they can match broadband speeds in any market (while keeping prices higher in non-competitive markets). That is the real power of the big conglomerate ISPs – the ability to compete unfairly in any one market by charging more elsewhere.

I doubt that the DOJ petition will hold up. We don’t really need another company with the same market power as Comcast – but stopping the second big conglomerate is already too late.

The Future of AT&T and Verizon

The cellphone companies have done such a great job of getting everybody to purchase a smartphone that cellular service in the country is quickly turning into a commodity. And, as is typical with most commodity products, that means less brand loyalty from customers and lower market prices for the products.

We’ve recently seen the cellular market demonstrate the turn toward becoming a commodity. In the first quarter of this year the cellular companies had their worse performance since back when they began. Both AT&T and Verizon posted losses for post-paid customers for the quarter. T-Mobile added fewer customers than expected and Sprint continued to lose money.

This is a huge turnaround for an industry where the big two cellular companies were each making over $1 billion per month in profits. The change in the industry comes from two things. First, people are now shopping for lower prices and are ready to change carriers to get lower monthly bills. The trend for lower prices was started by T-Mobile to gain market share, but low prices are also being pushed by cellular resellers – being fed by the big carriers. The cellular industry is only going to get more competitive when the cable companies soon enter the market. That will provide enough big players to make cellular minutes a true commodity. The cable companies have said they will be offering low prices as part of packages aimed at making customers stickier and will put real price pressure on the other cellular providers.

But the downturn in the first quarter was almost entirely due to the rush by all of the carriers to sell ‘unlimited’ data plans – which, as I’ve noted in some earlier blogs, are really not unlimited. But these plans offer lower prices for data and are freeing consumers to be able to use their smartphones without the fear of big overage fees. Again, this move was started by T-Mobile, but it was also driven heavily by public demand. AT&T and Verizon recognized that if they didn’t offer this product set that they were going to start bleeding customers to T-Mobile.

It will be really interesting to watch what happens to AT&T and Verizon, who are now predominantly cellular companies that also happen to own networks. The vast majority of revenues for these companies comes from the cellular parts of their companies. When I looked at both of their annual reports last year I had a hard time finding evidence that these companies were even in the landline network business. Discussions of those business lines are buried deeply within the annual reports.

These companies obviously need to find new forms of revenues to stay strong. AT&T is tackling this for now by going in a big way after the Mexican market. But one only has to look down the road a few years to see that Mexico and any other cellular market will also trend towards commoditization.

Both companies have their eyes on the same potential growth plays:

  • Both are making the moves necessary to tackle the advertising business. They look at the huge revenues being made by Facebook and Google and realize that as ISPs they are sitting on customer data that could make them major players in the targeted marketing space. Ad revenues are the predominant revenue source at Google and if these companies can grab even a small slice of that business they will make a lot of money.
  • Both are also chasing content. AT&T’s bid for the purchase of Time Warner is still waiting for government approval. Verizon has made big moves with the purchases of AOL and Yahoo and is rumored to be looking at other opportunities.
  • Both companies have been telling stockholders that there are huge amounts of money to be made from the IoT. These companies want their cellular networks to be the default networks for collecting data from IoT devices. They certainly ought to win the business for things like smart cars, but there will be a real battle between cellular and WiFi/landline connections for most other IoT usage.
  • Both companies are making a lot of noise about 5G. They are mostly concentrating on high-speed wireless connections using millimeter wave spectrum that they hope will make them competitive with the cable companies in urban areas. But even that runs a risk because if we see true competition in urban areas then prices for urban broadband might also tumble. And that might start the process of making broadband into a commodity. On the cellular side it’s hard to think that 5G cellular won’t quickly become a commodity as well. Whoever introduces faster cellphone data speeds might get a bump upward for a few years, but the rest of the industry will certainly catch up to any technological innovations.

It’s hard to foresee any business line where AT&T and Verizon are going to get the same monopoly power that they held in the cellular space for the past few decades. Everything they might undertake is also going to be available to competitors, meaning they are unlikely to make the same kind of huge margins they have historically made with cellular. No doubt they are both going to be huge companies for many decades to come since they own the cellular networks and spectrum. But I don’t think we can expect them to be the cash cows they have been in the past.

AT&T and Time Warner

ATTI have been thinking about the AT&T and Time Warner merger since it was first announced. Generally the reasons for megamergers are apparent – there is generally some big efficiency or cross benefit to both companies that makes sense. But I had a very hard time seeing very much benefit to either company with this merger.

The obvious intersection between the two companies is programming. Time Warner produces a lot of content – networks including HBO, TNT, TBS, CNN and a host of smaller networks.  And AT&T has a lot of cable customers through DirecTV and U-verse.

But as I think through the programming advantage it’s not as big as you might think. AT&T is not likely to buy any more cable content from Time Warner after a merger than it does today. It’s likely that all of Time Warner’s content is already delivered to AT&T’s video customers. In fact, once the two companies combine, any transactions between the two of them disappear upon consolidation when creating the financial statements for the combined companies.

The non-accountant will say, “Wait, doesn’t that mean that AT&T gets the content for free”? And the answer is no, because it also means that the revenue that AT&T pays to Time Warner today in real cash also disappears. On the consolidated books both sides of the transaction disappear, as if they never happened.

And it’s hard to see any of the typical merger savings from consolidating management. The two businesses have almost nothing in common and it would make no sense for program executives to run a giant ISP or for AT&T executives to make programming decisions.

The only other obvious benefit is for AT&T to somehow leverage the Time Warner content to grow the wireless business. When the merger announcement was first announced the FCC sent a letter to AT&T and told them they would be investigating their zero-ratings practices. Zero-rating is when an ISP provides content to customers without counting the usage against any data caps. AT&T already does this today with a limited amount of content, but if they owned Time Warner they would have far more content they could send over cellphones that wouldn’t count against data caps. An AT&T customer could watch Game of Thrones, for instance, on their AT&T cellular plan without worrying about their monthly data cap. But if they watch non-AT&T video they would be penalized.

With the new administration it looks like zero-rating (and net neutrality in general) is likely dead. But how much of a benefit is zero-rating to a wireless company? Certainly this could drive more advertising revenue to the combined company, but that doesn’t seem like a big enough motivation for the mega-merger. And unless one cellular companies gets killer content that everybody wants to watch on a cellphone, it’s hard to think that zero-rating is going to be a big game changer in terms of shifting wireless customers between providers. I have a hard time seeing AT&T zero-rating as a Verizon Wireless killer.

The only real benefit I can foresee is a bit of a scary one. With each of these mergers between ISPs and programmers the industry collapses to fewer and fewer major players. This merger would put AT&T on the same footing as Comcast in terms of programming content. And maybe that is the major reason for the merger – just keeping up.

But what is to stop the biggest companies from selling content to each other in bulk? I could foresee AT&T and Comcast agreeing to sell content to each other at a reduced price based upon some volume discount. This would end up giving both companies an edge over every other ISP. These two mega-companies (and probably a few others) would then be able to leverage that advantage to crush their other competitors – leaving the nation with even fewer competitors than today.

I don’t know that this scenario could be sustained. It seems like the public is migrating away from a lot of traditional content towards programming produced independently by companies like Netflix. But if the AT&T / Time Warner merger is allowed to happen, what will stop one of these big companies from buying Netflix and every other independent content provider that pops up?

Metropolitan ISPs

Seattle-SkylineI spend most of my time working with rural ISPs. Even my clients that work in larger cities tend to provide service to residential customers and to small and medium businesses. But there is a very competitive market for larger businesses and for businesses that operate in multiple markets.

My clients often run into this when they realize that they are unable to sell broadband to a local chain restaurant, convenience store, bank or other large nationwide or regional business. I recently poked around to see who the carriers are that are selling to metropolitan or nationwide businesses. Some of those on the list will surprise you with their success and there are carriers on the list that you’ve probably not heard of.

Since most of the ISPs in this category don’t report business revenues separate from other revenues it’s difficult to rank these companies by revenue.  Further, some of the companies on this list are almost entirely retail ISPs while others offer wholesale connections to other carriers. Probably the easiest way to compare these carriers is by looking at the number of buildings they claim to have lit with fiber. Of course, even that is not a very reliable way to compare them since there is no standard definition of what constitutes a lit building. But generally these counts are supposed to represent locations with either one very large customer, like a hospital, or else buildings with multiple business tenants. Some of these companies are also count locations like data centers or large metropolitan cell towers.

Here are the carriers that claim to provide fiber to more than 5,000 business buildings:

  • Time Warner 75,000
  • Level3 30,000
  • Cox 28,000
  • AT&T 20,000
  • Zayo 16,700
  • Charter 13,800
  • Fibertech 10,400
  • Verizon 10,000
  • Lightower   8,500
  • Sunesys   7,200
  • Cablevision   7,000
  • Frontier   6,300

Missing from this list is Comcast. I can’t find any references to the number of lit buildings they are in. They are a major provider of business broadband and reported just over 1 million business customers along with $1.3 billion in revenue for their Business Services division. Also missing from the list is CenturyLink who doesn’t seem to claim lit buildings anywhere that I could find. CenturyLink claims to be selling to more than 100,000 businesses on fiber at the end of 2015.

On the list though are both Charter and Time Warner Cable that just merged, which would put them in 88,800 buildings. Fibertech and Lightower merged in 2015 giving them a total of 18,900 lit buildings.

Level3 and Zayo provide both retail and wholesale fiber products, meaning that they will sell connections into the lit buildings directly to businesses or else to other carriers, and they derive a large portion of their revenues from wholesale sales.

The first thing that surprised me about this list is that the cable companies appear to be in a lot more buildings than AT&T and Verizon. There are two possible explanations for this. One is that each group of companies is counting lit buildings in a different way. For example, the cable companies might be counting buildings like schools while the telcos might only be counting larger multi-tenant buildings. But it’s also possible that the telcos have a strategy of only building fiber to the largest buildings in each market while the cable companies will build routinely to smaller buildings. It does raise the question if this is a reasonable side-by-side comparison.

I would also note that some of these companies are growing rapidly and that most of these counts came from 2014 or 2015. Vertical Systems Group (a research and consulting firm that tracks the metro Ethernet market) says that the percentage of the metropolitan businesses connected to fiber grew from 42% in 2014 to 46% in 2015.

The Anti-Competitive US Marketplace

President_sealThe US Council of Economic Advisers released a report on April 15th that cited examples of anticompetitive market power throughout many sectors of the US economy. The report says that in many sectors of the economy that the fifty largest companies control more of the market today than they did in 1997.

The conclusion of the report is that industry concentration has an overall negative impact on the economy. The largest companies in each industry tend to erect barriers that squelch start-ups, thwarts innovation and discourage real competition.

The president used this report to issue an executive order on April 30 that instructs all executive agencies and departments to submit a plan within 30 days of ways that they can promote competition. I don’t hold out a lot of hope of success for this action due to the fact that we are now deep into the last year of this presidency. But it’s still refreshing to see the government acknowledge that competition is better for our economy than having an economy controlled by large companies with huge market power.

There are few industries that demonstrate the negative aspects of anti-competitive behavior than telecom. The cellular part of the industry is probably the worst since four companies have the vast majority of customers in the country. There are not a lot of other cellular companies that own their own spectrum and many competitive alternatives to the big four, like Cricket, actually ride the networks of the bigger companies and buy wholesale minutes from them.

But right behind the concentration of cellular companies are the ISPs. A handful of largest cable companies and telcos have more than 90% of the broadband customers in the country. And even in markets where these providers overlap, the competition between these large companies can best be characterized as duopoly competition where the companies charge roughly the same prices and don’t compete in any meaningful way.

The only broadband markets in the country that have real competition are those where some outside party has entered the market with a competing network. That might be a municipal provider or else one of the handful of commercial providers that are building competitive networks.

Earlier this week I wrote about how the largest ISPs all attack municipal competition and the reason for this is clear. They don’t want there to be success stories where it can be shown that a city was effectively able to take over a market – because such an idea could spread to a whole lot of other cities.

The report goes on to show that government sometimes has been able to curb some of the worst abuses of anti-competitive behavior. There were a few government actions touted in the report as positive steps the government has taken to promote competition. One big action in the telecom space was blocking of the merge between AT&T and T-Mobile. Another was the FCC’s order of net neutrality and of placing broadband under Title II regulation.

But the feds also sometimes get it wrong. Right now the FCC is using the excuse of lack of competition as the motivation for ordering an opening of the settop box market. But I talk to folks in the industry all of the time and nobody I talk to thinks that settop boxes are much of a concern. If anything, the feeling is that new technology will naturally kill settop boxes and eliminate the need for them.

I was relieved to see the merger between Comcast and Time Warner die, but we are still seeing consolidation in the cable industry and the largest companies are getting more powerful. There is very little positive that can be gained from the Time Warner and Charter merger. And it’s always been disturbing to see large ISPs that also own programming content. That alone gives Comcast a huge advantage over anybody that tries to compete against them.

I don’t know how anybody can undo the consolidation in this industry. The big companies have locked up the market and the cost to build new networks to compete against them is a major barrier to entry. But perhaps having new networks built by municipalities and other commercial providers will chip away at enough of the market over time to make a difference.

 

Programmers Have the Power

huluIt was announced late last month that Time Warner is negotiating to buy a 25% share in Hulu. This would make them equal partners with Comcast, Disney, and Fox in ownership of the OTT service. I think this potential transaction highlights the very complicated dynamics in the industry between programmers and OTT companies.

It’s obvious that the programmers love Netflix, the largest OTT provider, but they also fear them to some extent. On the plus side, from the programmers’ perspective, the four companies (include Time Warner) currently get about $650 million per year just from Netflix to pay for selling rights to various programming, mostly older TV series, to Netflix. This is obviously a significant source of revenue.

But there is also a lot of unease in the industry since OTT providers, and Netflix in particular, are influencing people to demand alternate programming. And while the programmers have lost some money from cord cutters, the real threat to them is skinny bundles. While the revenue the programmers get from Netflix is good money, it is dwarfed by the revenues that come from traditional cable packages. I have never seen that exact number, but by looking at my clients I am going to guess that the average paid by cable companies per customer for programming is probably around $45 per month, not including premium movie channels. That would equate to more than $50 billion per year paid for programming.

The big threat from skinny bundles is that the cable companies will sell small packages of only the most popular programming. The owners of the most popular channels will do okay, but today the real money for a programmer comes from forcing cable companies to carry their entire large suite of channels. If skinny bundles get popular enough they are going to whack the revenue streams from the less popular channels in each programmer’s portfolio. And that means huge potential losses in revenue, far greater than what they will collect from OTT and skinny bundle providers.

There is talk in the industry that the major programmers might start withholding their best content from Netflix. Reed Hamilton from Netflix has voiced this concern many times and this is probably the reason that Netflix is spending so much money to create its own content.

The four programmers could instead funnel all of their own content to Hulu, and in effect pay themselves by hopefully drawing more paying customers to Hulu. The surveys I have seen have shown that a large percentage of viewers are becoming loyal to shows and not to networks, and so giving Hulu exclusive rights to content certainly sounds like a plausible strategy.

The above discussion makes me realize how much power the programmers still have in the industry. While these four programmers couldn’t destroy Netflix, they could probably hobble them. As Bill Gates said, content is king, and that certainly applies in this arm-wrestling match between programmers and service providers. Since there are only a handful of programmers, they collectively have the ability to pick winners and losers in the industry.

Since content is king one has to wonder how long a small group of programmers can keep their current power? Not only is Netflix creating popular content, but there other new content creators like YouTube and Amazon entering the fray and joining companies like HBO and AMC that are becoming mini-powerhouses on their own.

I find it unlikely that the programmers would just cut Netflix or anybody else dead from all of the content, which would seem to be an open invitation to an antitrust investigation. But they can withhold some content, raise the rates on other content and make it harder for companies like Netflix to continue to eat away at their revenue streams.

I have no idea where any of this is going to go. But my guess is that if we could look forward a decade from now that there will be major shifts in the industry. There are going to be some current programmers that wane and other new ones who will enter the market. But as a whole, no matter who the programmers are, they are still going to be in the driver’s seat.

Is Net Neutrality Hurting Telecom Investment?

Network_neutrality_poster_symbolLeading up to the net neutrality decision a lot of the big carriers claimed that putting broadband under Title II regulation would kill their desire to make new investments in broadband. AT&T went so far as to tell the FCC that they would stop all capital investments if net neutrality was ordered. Chairman Tom Wheeler of the FCC quickly called their bluff on this and AT&T backed down.

But net neutrality has been the law now for a while and the large carriers are still crying the same tune. There are regular postings by USTelecom, the trade group for the large carriers, claiming that Title II is hurting investment in the industry.

There is uncertainty in the industry due to the fact that much of the FCC’s ruling is being challenged in the courts. At a recent hearing of the House Communications Subcommittee, Frank Louthan of Raymond James told the committee that the big carriers are making investments in line with what they think will be the final rules after the court fights. I’m sure he’s right because that’s what large companies always do when they face uncertainty – they pick what they think will happen and operate under that assumption. But in this case the uncertainty is ironic since it is being caused directly by the lawsuit brought by the carriers that don’t like the uncertainty.

And it’s hard to see that net neutrality is hurting the biggest carriers. Certainly nobody was affected more by the rule changes than the big cable companies who had essentially no regulation on their broadband before the net neutrality rules. Ars Technical has dug into the most recent financials for these companies and reports that large cable companies have increased capital spending. They report that Comcast’s capital spending this year is up 11% over last year and Time Warner is up 10%. And every large cable company has said they are going to be pouring money into upgrades to DOCSIS 3.1 over the next year, so their capital spending is not going to go down in the foreseeable future.

I always wonder what exactly the carriers don’t like about net neutrality. Net neutrality stopped the carriers from making deals that enriched themselves but that restricted customer choices. But it seems like the public was very much on the FCC’s side on this issue and it’s hard for the carriers to find any sympathy for their cause. Probably more problematic for the carriers is that the FCC, in a surprising part of the net neutrality ruling, put in place rules on the network side of the carriers. They were all getting ready to start charging large content providers like Netflix for bringing content to their networks. The FCC decided that the millions of customers paying for monthly broadband were already paying that cost. What the carriers seem most annoyed about is that customers actually want to use the broadband to which they subscribe. The carriers have plans to put an end to that and everybody is watching Comcast’s new attempt at data caps.

One topic that came up in the House hearings was the fact that much of the net neutrality order was done by forbearance, meaning that the FCC chose which existing rules for telephone service would apply or not apply to regulating data. The carriers fear that a future activist FCC could change their mind at any time on the rules that have been forborne and either change the regulations or else hold change over the carriers’ heads while negotiating other issues. On that topic I agree with the carriers and what the FCC has given they also have the right to take away. The only real fix for this would be a new telecom act from Congress, and with our divided political parties that doesn’t seem very likely.

I remember this same level of teeth gnashing and hair rending by AT&T and Verizon after the Telecommunications Act of 1996. They challenged that ruling and spent the next several years complaining about it loudly. But eventually they were complaining to deaf ears, and in this case one has to think that whatever the courts order is going to stand as the law for a while. But eventually the complaining about the Act died down and both companies have gone on to be far more profitable than they were before the Act. Perhaps they ought to go back and revisit their own recent history and just get on with what they do best—make money.