FierceCable 5-and-5: Five 2010 trends guaranteed to carry into 2011
A calendar is only an artificial ending point for a week, a month, a day, a year, a decade, a century, a millennium--and on and on. It's not really the ending point for anything because despite the noisemakers and confetti and champagne and kisses everything goes on even as one calendar point ends and another begins.
It's with that foundation that FierceCable presents its first-ever 5-and-5: Five trends from 2010 that didn't end when the clock struck 12 on Dec. 31.
1. Retransmission
The year might not have started with stories about the unseemly wrangling between programmers and service providers, but FierceCable certainly did. One of the stories in the premiere issue covered Walt Disney Co.'s retransmission demands from Cablevision Systems. That debacle, as we all know, ended up with Cablevision subscribers missing 20 minutes of ABC's stellar Academy Awards broadcast. Throughout the year, things got dicier as programmers demanded more and service providers--in particular, Cablevision, which seemed unduly stressed--fought back. The year even included a partial blackout of the World Series thanks to News Corp.'s Fox Networks-Cablevision battle and ended with everyone from Time Warner to Dish Network to DirecTV in some sort of squabble with a programmer--either over-the-air or cable-based.
Since the FCC, either for lack of power or inclination, did nothing to stop this nonsense in 2010, it's likely to continue unabated in 2011. As a harbinger, here's how News Corp. COO Chase Carey saw his network's ugly retransmission dispute with Cablevision: "We could have asked for a lot more."
2. Subscriber erosion/over-the-top services
Cable in 2010 leaked subscribers like an arrow-pierced hot air balloon. 
Many analysts and industry critics from both the financial and technological side, attributed most of these losses to the array of new, over-the-top services available to supplant cable's overpriced and, in many cases, underused programming packages.
Netflix, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and Google TV were among the new players supposedly chowing down on cable's lunch. Critics scoffed when MSO executives maintained that subscribers weren't actually fleeing cable for non-paying services but were being drawn by the paid competition--satellite and telco operators. While this was bad, it was, the industry maintained, only a harbinger more work is needed on pricing and customer service issues, along with stickier glue to tie together packages.
Time Warner Cable skewed its packages to meet perceived demands from recession-struck low-end subscribers to high-rolling subs willing to pay more for more broadband speeds, programming and other non-essential amenities.
"We see a segmented economy," Glenn Britt, TWC's chairman, president and CEO said. "Some people clearly would like to be able to buy smaller video packages. I think it would be a good idea for the broader industry of multichannel providers and programmers to meet that need. Not surprisingly we don't see a lot of people signing up for the smaller packages but I do think there's a consumer need there that would behoove us as a bigger industry--not just cable, but the bigger industry--to do that."
For the most part, though, the rest of the industry eschewed this approach and instead emphasized cable's broadband strengths and its ability to be the pipe that carries everything into the home.
"With our speed superiority and strong content position I believe we have the opportunity to further build on our position as the overall solutions provider for our customers in the evolving IP world," Mike Lovett, president-CEO of Charter Communications said, essentially summing up the industry's position.
In 2010 cable accepted (with teeth grinding) the loss of basic video as peripheral damage in an economic war it was winning by reaping more from broadband-centric subs who bought triple play packages. In 2011, if subscribers continue to run away faster than golfers in a thunderstorm, cable may have to rethink the ways it charges for its content. And that, of course, will be impacted by a retransmission trend that has cable paying more for that content and buying it in bundles.
It's all entangled.
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