Search

Twenty years ago, it was easy to classify companies such as Ryder/P-I-E, Consolidated Freightways and Yellow Freight System as less-than-truckload carriers: simply put, that was the type of freight they [...]

The 1992 Cable Act, containing must carry and retransmission consent requirements, provided consumers with minimal rate inflation and increased channel offerings but did not provide broadcasters with additional revenue. Must carry rules require cable operators to carry local channels, but stations can grant retransmission consent instead. However, cable operators' refusal to pay the proposed retransmission fees drove broadcasters, faced with the possibility of being dropped from the cable systems, to grant consent without compensation in return for carrying the broadcasters' new second stations.

Congress passed the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 with three goals: to make programming more varied, to make cable available to everyone and to reduce rates and improve customer service. The Act has succeeded only in regulating rates and improving service. To achieve the first two goals, cross-ownership limitations and must-carry requirements must be eased. The cross-ownership ban prevents local telephone companies from owning cable networks. Eliminating this ban would stimulate the further growth of cable by replacing regulation with competition.

Integrated and nonintegrated program suppliers for the cable television industry should no longer be treated as separate entities in FCC regulations. The FCC chose to treat them differently due to fears of anticompetitive pricing, but both integrated and nonintegrated suppliers use the same pricing schemes that the FCC has identified as anticompetitive. The actual sources of the anticompetitive pricing are the fluctuating degrees of bargaining power among the cable industry and the price-setting processes of program suppliers.

It was a tumutuous year for the cable industry in the regulatory arena. Characterized by a mountain of legislation, unexpected court decisions, increasingly hostile state and local governments, and an [...]

IN HIS OFFICE AT WARNER CABLE Communications Inc., Tom Sharrard, division president and the top executive in charge of the operation in Milwaukee, is on the phone with an irate [...]

Last year, China was one of the few countries that still prohibited its banks from diversifying into other financial areas, such as mutual funds or insurance. That law changed in [...]

'I want my ... I want my ... I want my MTV.' In the early 1980s, 'I want my MTV' was a slogan in an ad for a fledgling cable [...]

Protecting Cable's Gains This was supposed to be the easy part. Several years of sweat, blood and intense negotiation produced the Cable Act of 1984 five years ago, and a [...]

Despite recent gains, subscription television is not making money. Recent deregulation of the industry could be a stimulus to rapid development. The industry firmly disagrees with FCC decision to sell decoders to subscribers. Subscription TV must market aggressively and offer quality programming to successfully compete with cable. Various industry officials voice this and other opinions.