Wednesday, June 17, 2015

De Facto Monopoly?



The lucrative cable license for Comcast expires in October, 2016 so the town has revived the Cable Advisory Committee, kind of like locust that spends most of their life time in hibernation before noisily coming back to life.  

The Committee met yesterday for the 1st time in almost ten years.  Town Manager John Musante and legal consultant, Boston attorney Peter Epstein, also attended.  Epstein told the committee he was the attorney who wrote the cable agreement 3 cycles ago in the mid-1980s.

 Kris Pacunas was voted Chair

Since cable franchise is such a special field we are not using our regular town attorney from the firm of Kopelman & Paige.  Mr. Epstein is being paid $200/hour and will probably cost in the neighborhood of $20,000 total.

 Attorney Epstein (2nd from left) meets with Cable Advisory Committee 6/16

This year the contract is worth $6.3 million to Comcast and the town's 5% cut comes to $317,000 so not a lot of money to spend making sure the town doesn't get taken to the cleaners in the next contract.

Amherst provides 7,000 total subscribers, the vast majority of them using cable TV -- but that number also includes Internet and phone subscribers, which does not provide any revenue to the town.

 Virtually all of the money ($317,000)  generated by the 5% cut  -- which attorney Epstein said is "written in stone" -- goes to local cable access entity, Amherst Media.

The money issue that could be a tad more negotiable is the one-time payment for "technology upgrade."  At the start of the previous ten-year contract that came to $450,000.  

The current contract expires in October of 2016 but the renewal could theoretically be signed early.  Right now the job of the Cable Advisory Committee is to perform "ascertainment", in other words what do the subscribers want, aka a wish list?  Unfortunately cost of service and programming is not negotiable. 

Cable Advisory member Adrienne Terrizzi said "raising awareness" is, for now,  job number one.

The Amherst Select Board is the final authority and state/federal law mandates at least one Public Hearing which attorney Epstein suggested should happen after Labor Day.  He would like to send Comcast the initial contract by November 1st and they then have two months to respond.



That triggers an additional four months of "negotiations," which hopefully result in a contract both parties can live with prior to October, 2016.  The RFP is specifically written for Comcast and is not a general RFP that could be bid on by Verizon, Charter or any other provider.

Since Comcast owns all the infrastructure required to serve Amherst it is unlikely any other company would want to come in and try to replicate that.

The Internet is not only killing newspapers but cable TV as well, so the next contract (be it 5 or 10 years) could be less lucrative with each passing year. 

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

How does the contract renewal influence/impact the relocation of Amherst Media to a new location?

Larry Kelley said...

Theoretically it doesn't.

But last I heard they had to be out of the current location by January 1st, and even if they broke ground tomorrow on the new building it would probably not be ready by then.

Anonymous said...

I agree, it's unlikely a new facility can be built in such a short amount of time, by Amh. Media is kind of critical to the town meetings and an infinity of local programming. Is it probable that Comcast will extend that deadline? What are they doing with that building, anyway?

Larry Kelley said...

Building is owned by Eversource (formerly known as WMECO) not Comcast.

And I think they already extended the deadline once.

Not sure why they want it back but there looks to be a lot of electrical infrastructure around the building.

Anonymous said...

De facto monopoly? Duh!

Anonymous said...

Westfield worked long and hard on their renewal recently (had to fight to have a customer service center remain in the city)

Might be worth (the committee) taking a look at:
http://www.mass.gov/ocabr/docs/dtc/catv/license/comcast/westfieldcomcastlicense-3-2015.pdf

Anonymous said...

Westfield also negotiated a 10% discount for their seniors (age 67 and older) Not sure how they came up with age 67! lol

Larry Kelley said...

Yes, the consulting attorney did say they could negotiate a "nominal" senior discount.

Anonymous said...

How about a discount for the rest of us while you they are at it. Seniors in this town already have it pretty good.

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah. We have it great. Thanks. The joys of getting older.