Cablevision is raising their rates again!!!

Cablevision To Raise Rates


By Harry Berkowitz
Staff Writer

November 22, 2003


Cablevision Systems Corp. announced Friday it will raise monthly rates by an average of 3.2 percent in early 2004 for its nearly 3 million cable TV customers, the smallest percentage increase since 1996 but still higher than the inflation rate.

The increase, which translates to an additional $1.59 per month on average, comes at a time when a debate has been raging in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere over whether cable operators such as Cablevision or cable programmers such as ESPN are most responsible for a 40-percent increase in rates nationwide over the past five years.

Cablevision said its programming costs have jumped 13 percent this year. ESPN, which has been raising the fees it charges cable companies by 20 percent a year, has argued that subscriber rate hikes are largely due to spending by cable companies to upgrade their systems for high-speed Internet access and other new services.

The rate hike by Cablevision, which serves Long Island, parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, also comes at a time when competition from satellite TV companies has made it difficult for cable TV operators to hang on to all their subscribers, let alone add new ones as they did for many years.

'Eventually you run into price resistance,' said Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America, based in Washington, D.C. 'That doesn't mean it's a fair price.'

For the standard level of cable TV service, which Cablevision calls Family Cable and which includes such channels as CNN, TNT, MTV, Nickelodeon and ESPN, the average monthly rate will increase 3.53 percent, from $42.80 to $44.31, Cablevision said.

That's a departure from the company's practice in the past three years of raising average rates for Family Cable by a much greater percentage – more than 7 percent in 2002, more than 12 percent in 2001 and nearly 10 percent in 2003 – than for all levels of service combined, including premium tiers.

Partly by doing so, Cablevision has managed to shift much more of its customer base to higher tiers, including its iO digital packages.

Since the early 1990s, Cablevision's monthly rates for Family Cable, which has added many more channels, have about doubled.

Cablevision said it will not raise prices in 2004 for its Optimum Online high-speed Internet service, which increased rates sharply this year despite price cuts for competing DSL service by Verizon Communications and which has topped 1 million customers.