Daniel Frankel

Charter Communications has been hit with a class action suit in St. Louis (MO) for selling subscribers’ personally identifiable information. A subscriber said that between 2011 and 2013, Charter sold information such as names and addresses to unknown companies without customer consent. The plaintiffs are alleging that Charter violated Missouri’s Merchandising Practices Act. The subscriber claims he was not provided with a copy of Charter’s privacy policy, which is required under that law. The complaint also said Charter failed to obtain written consent to sell the information or provide an opt-out provision.

Notably, when Comcast, Verizon and AT&T each put out statements two weeks ago swearing to not sell private customer data in the wake of the Republican Congress’ decision to dispense of Obama-era privacy protections, the nation’s No. 2 cable operator was quiet.

After touting a steady stream of synergistic benefits from its NBCUniversal division in recent quarterly earnings reports, Comcast could be facing an unanticipated challenge from being tied to the programming conglomerate. Along Donald Trump’s inexplicable march to Jan 20’s inauguration, NBCU has found itself at odds with the president-elect. In short, NBCU has a terrible relationship with an incoming president who seems to hold a grudge.

A decade ago, Trump starred in a hit reality show for NBC, The Apprentice. But last summer, the network’s top entertainment executive, Robert Greenblatt, made a private Facebook post that became public, not calling out Trump by name but presumably referring to the then far-right presidential candidate. “It’s actually corrosive and toxic because his ‘mind’ is so demented; and his effect will unfortunately linger long after he’s been told to get off the stage,” Greenblatt said.

Although AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson conceded that he’s never run a movie studio before, chances are the acquisition of Warner Bros. Pictures, part of the company’s $85.4 billion bid to buy Time Warner, isn’t an afterthought. Certainly, in 2009, when Comcast first proposed buying NBCUniversal, there wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid to the cable company taking over a badly slumping Universal Pictures unit that had fallen to dead last among the major movie studios.

Indeed, seven years ago, Time Warner’s Warner Bros. Pictures unit controlled 19.7 percent of the North American box office. With its powerful Minions still a year away from hitting the global box office and turning the fortunes of the studio around, Universal controlled just 8.3 percent of the North American theatrical market in 2009. Jump forward to 2015, and Universal controlled the lion’s share of the global box office, bringing in more than $2.4 billion in North American theatrical revenue alone and generating intellectual property that sparked EBITDA for Comcast across not just cable video on demand, but in robust businesses like theme parks and consumer products.

Charter Communications says a provision buried deep within the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed set-top regulation would, if adopted, require it to charge a modem fee. “We’re the only major broadband provider that doesn’t charge this fee, because we view modems as part of providing a superior broadband service, and it makes us a stronger competitor by allowing us to offer better deals to our subscribers,” Charter said.

“Deep within” the FCC’s “Unlock the Box” proposal, the company added, “is a provision that has the potential to affect millions of consumers, requiring all internet providers to charge a modem rental fee and include it as a distinct line item in their customers’ bills, even if that company (like Charter) doesn’t currently charge a modem fee.” The blog post followed an ex parte filing rendered earlier by Charter, in which it said the FCC proposal is in direct conflict with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks merger conditions that require it to supply free modems.

Delivering some hard subscriber data to indicate why Google Fiber is reportedly considering a pause, MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said that the service had only 68,715 video subscribers at the end of June. “For those keeping score at home, that’s a little less than seven one hundredths of 1 percent of the US video market,” Moffett said.

The numbers come via a filing with the US Copyright Office – necessary for maintenance of a compulsory license for broadcast signals. With Google Fiber eschewing the release of customer metrics, the tiny market share in pay-TV services hints at the diminutive size of the overall business, and explains why the division has laid off half its staff and has stopped deploying its lines in new markets. Using a conservative estimate that only around 15 percent of Google Fiber subscribers also take video, Moffett estimated that the service would have had 453,000 broadband customers as of the end of June, representing less than one half of 1 percent of total US ISP customers.

Cable One has responded to a customer complaint about its broadband usage caps with a three-page letter explaining why the data limits are crucial to the performance of its network and keeping customers. "Managing Cable One’s network for optimal performance is crucial for providing a reliable service," the company said. "Establishing reasonable data plans is an important part of that process."

Cable companies are required to respond to customers who render gripes at the Federal Communications Commission’s online Consumer Help Center. CableOne’s usage caps range from 300 gigabytes for a 100 Mbps service to 500 gigs for its $200-a-month gigabit-speed package. As the company explained in its letter, it no longer charges customers for overages. But subscribers get a letter (a polite one!) if they go over for one month and are automatically bumped to the next higher tier if they exceed their usage limit for three consecutive months.

Nashville Mayor Megan Barry has called on Comcast, AT&T and Google Fiber to meet and discuss a solution to their local pole-attachment issues. Just as it has in Louisville, Kentucky, Google Fiber is trying to circumvent cumbersome rules for attaching fiber-optic cables to local telephone poles by introducing an ordinance to city government called “One Touch Make Ready.”

AT&T, which is battling Google over the same ordinance in Louisville alongside local cable franchise holder Charter Communications, is siding with Comcast in Nashville. In Nashville, Mayor Barry isn’t taking sides. But she has called on the top executive for the company that owns and operates 80 percent of the local utility poles – Nashville Electric Service President and CEO Decosta Jenkins – along with Metro Department of Law Director Jon Cooper to get the three sides in a room together. Google Fiber said it can’t wait around for months while AT&T and Comcast deploy technicians to make room for Google fiber-optic cables on local poles. AT&T and Comcast reps, meanwhile, make arguments based on safety and liability concerns.

CableLabs' recently developed DOCSIS 3.1 spec is more than capable of delivering average downstream speeds far above 1 Gbps, but its ubiquitous deployment is still several years away. That means cable companies will have to rely on the current DOCSIS 3.0 parameters in what amounts to a marketing arms race with Google and AT&T's fast-proliferating fiber networks. Is this even possible? Do these guys have something else up their sleeve, like maybe offering FTTP to the finite number of subscribers who do order 1 Gbps service?

Culling through all the various due diligence and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, SNL Kagan released what is perhaps the clearest numerical snapshot yet of what a combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable would look like, post-merger.

The newly merged giant would control nearly 29.1 million US residential video subscribers, after Comcast divests 3.9 million pay TV customers in the joint venture with Charter Communications known as SpinCo. The wedded Comcast-TWC would house about 29 percent of the US pay TV market, just under the Federal Communications Commission's unofficial 30 percent limit.

The combined company would also control 27.9 million residential fixed broadband customers, accounting for nearly 36 percent of the market, and 13.4 million residential voice customers. In terms of business customers, the behemoth would have around 900,000 video customers, 1.7 million fixed broadband clients and 1 million voice subscribers.