Ahh. The luxury of big SNR.
bp
On 10/2/2014 7:59 AM, Adam Moffett via Af wrote:
I think they're getting more like 30mbps in a 5mhz channel now, with a
guardband. Here's a little tidbit from Wikipedia:
DOCSIS 3.1
Released October 2013, plans support capacities of at least 10
Gbit/s downstream and 1 Gbit/s upstream using 4096 QAM
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation>.
The new specs will do away with 6 MHz and 8 MHz wide channel
spacing and instead use smaller (20 kHz to 50 kHz wide) orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_multiplexing>
(OFDM) subcarriers; these can be bonded inside a block spectrum
that could end up being about 200 MHz wide.^[5]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#cite_note-5>
^That's a lotta capacity if they can dump enough TV channels to free
up a contiguous 200mhz.
That's what I was thinking as well. The comments about margin
pressure were interesting. Carrying TV impacts that significantly,
plus as you say, each HD TV channel eats about 6 Mbps of cable
capacity. 100 channels = 600 Mbps.
bp
On 10/2/2014 7:38 AM, Adam Moffett via Af wrote:
I might do the same thing if I was a cable company with a couple
hundred subscribers.
Or maybe only carry channels I could get free or cheap.
They ought to be able to carry a few gbps on their coax if they
dropped TV and ran DOCSIS 3 on every channel.
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Jay Fuller - Cyber Broadband Inc
<mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* Cyber Broadband Inc. <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Thursday, October 02, 2014 12:42 AM
*Subject:* more cable companies cut the tv cord
More Cable Companies Take TV Off Menu
4 hrs ago - AP
A growing group of small cable-TV providers are realizing that both
they and their customers can live without expensive TV channels.
Of the 100 million homes in the U.S. that subscribe to pay TV,
about 14% are served by smaller companies that have a million or
fewer customers. In some cases, they serve fewer than 100. Faced
with rising programming costs, some of those companies---such as
Ringgold Telephone Co. in Georgia and BTC Broadband in Bixby,
Okla.---have pulled the plug on TV service altogether, preferring
to simply focus on Internet and phone service.
Others, meanwhile, are dropping major groups of channels to manage
their costs. The latest is Suddenlink Communications, an operator
that serves about one million customers, which says it plans to
dropViacom Inc.'s TV channels, including Nickelodeon and MTV, at
midnight Tuesday. Suddenlink says it has already signed long-term
contracts with other channels to fill the Viacom channels' slots.
The shift poses a potential threat to big media companies. These
cable providers are tiny compared with industry titans like Comcast
Corp., but the fees they pay media companies for rights to carry
programming add up. Cable channel owners---which include major
media companies such as Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner Inc.---this
year will collect a total of $35 billion in license fees, according
to SNL Kagan. But that figure could erode if more small players
give up on offering customers the big TV bundle.
After seven years of selling customers cable-TV services, BTC
Broadband got out of that business late last year and now provides
just broadband and phone services. The Oklahoma company, which had
been serving about 420 TV subscribers, decided it simply couldn't
afford to keep paying rising fees to carry a basic lineup of
channels including ESPN, TNT and MTV.
BTC President Scott Floyd estimated that if the company continued
to pass on rising programming costs to consumers and maintained its
thin profit margins, by 2016 cable-TV bills would rise to $130 from
about $60.
"I think the TV model is broken," said Mr. Floyd.
In five years, operators representing about 5 million pay-TV
subscribers---5% of current pay TV households---will "no longer be
doing business the way they do today with video," estimates Rich
Fickle, chief executive of the National Cable Television
Cooperative, a consortium that negotiates programming deals on
behalf of about 915 small cable-TV providers.
A loss of 5% of households in a few years could shave off about
$2.4 billion in revenue for basic cable networks alone, which by
2018 would be raking in about $47 billion in carriage fees,
according to SNL Kagan estimates.
"The change in the market is going to come from the bottom," said
NCTC's Mr. Fickle. Bigger pay-TV companies like Comcast and DirecTV
aren't likely to make similar moves away from pay-TV service, he
said, because they enjoy better profit margins and are busy
pursuing big mergers.
Some operators say they are gradually being pushed out of the TV
business as subscribers drop their expensive TV subscriptions and
watch shows on cheaper Internet video services.
Those who have exited completely say that while many customers
switched to satellite service, a growing number simply migrate to
online video.
Missouri-based Boycom Cablevision Inc. has sold cable-TV service
since the early 1990s, but now counts only 1,000 TV customers out
of its total 5,000 subscribers. "We have truly morphed into a
broadband-only provider in a lot of our markets," says Patty
Boyers, co-founder of Boycom.
Tom Might, chief executive of Graham Holdings Co.'s CableOne, which
serves nearly 700,000 subscribers in 19 states, says reducing
emphasis on video service in favor of broadband has led to higher
profits, even though some customers were lost in the process. The
"trends are kind of hard to fight," he said. "Better to join them
and make your profit where the business is growing."
Since 2008, small telecom companies representing about 53,000
customers have shut off cable-TV services or gone out of business,
according to the NCTC. Over the last three years, the number of
customers affected by such decisions has accelerated.
At least one midsize operator, Cablevision Systems Corp., which
serves nearly 3 million TV customers in the New York metropolitan
area, has said it can imagine a day when it no longer sells
television and makes broadband its primary offering.
Some media executives shrug off the threat, saying that cable-TV
providers have been complaining for a decade about programming
costs. They say their businesses don't face any real risk from the
small companies that have been disconnecting service thus far.
Media companies could get ahead of any broader decline, cable-TV
executives say, by changing their model of selling full bundles of
channels to operators, and instead selling just their popular
channels in smaller bundles or on an a la carte basis---something
they have so far resisted doing.
Many small operators are cutting back on expensive TV channels they
don't view as vital to include in their packages, as Suddenlink
says it is planning to do. Earlier this year, providers
representing some 900,000 households opted out of an NCTC-brokered
carriage deal with Viacom, choosing instead to drop its channels.
Those operators had braced to lose as much as 10% of their
customers, but overall they have lost less than 2% of their base,
according to the NCTC.
Mr. Fickle says other members are emboldened by the Viacom episode
and may take a similar approach in deals with big programmers that
are coming up for renewal with the NCTC, if the terms don't make
sense for them.
Operators' shift away from TV could accelerate if more customers
fed up with rising bills "cut the cord" themselves. Last year, the
pay TV industry contracted for the first time, losing 167,000
customers as people disconnected service, according to
MoffettNathanson research.
Several small operators believe the pay-TV model will splinter and
reset itself online, with TV channels and big distributors such as
Comcast or Dish Network Corp. selling programming directly to
consumers through apps, much like Netflix does today.
Such a reality has long been considered a threat, but executives
like Steve Weed, CEO of WaveDivision Holdings LLC, a West Coast
cable company, envision a new business opportunity for small cable
operators to supply customers with Web TV boxes and manage a
storefront of streaming-video apps.
Dealing with customer complaints about TV service---which account
for most service calls---would be a thing of the past. "We'll go
from being the bad guy to the good guy," Mr. Weed said.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/more-cable-companies-take-tv-off-menu/ar-BB6Hl0Z
