SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Charter’s hidden “Broadcast TV” fee now adds $197 a year to cable bills:
Charter Communications is raising the "Broadcast TV" fee it imposes on cable plans from $13.50 to $16.45 a month starting in August, Stop the Cap reported.
Charter says the Broadcast TV fee covers the amount it pays broadcast television stations (e.g. affiliates of CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox) for the right to carry their channels. But for consumers, it is essentially a hidden fee because Charter's advertised TV prices don't include it.
Charter has raised the fee repeatedly—it stood at $9.95 in early 2019 before a series of price increases. At $16.45 a month, the fee will cost customers an additional $197.40 per year. Charter sells TV, broadband, and phone service under its Spectrum brand name and is the second largest cable company in the US after Comcast.
Charter imposes a smaller Broadcast TV fee on its streaming TV plans, but is raising that charge from $6 to $8.95 a month, Stop the Cap wrote. Charter is also raising the base price of its TV service. "Spectrum's most popular TV Select package is expected to increase $1.50/month to $73.99/month," Stop the Cap wrote. "Customers on a promotional pricing plan will not see this rate increase until their promotional pricing expires."
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Friday July 17 2020, @11:31PM
I'm lucky enough to live in an area where we have a smaller cable provider along with a larger one (that everyone stopped using). The small provider kept having to raise rates and would occasionally drop channels to avoid more rate hikes. Every time it happened they'd send out notifications of the rate and channel changes explaining they are being required by the networks who were (in their opinion (and mine)) being very unreasonable about constant price hikes and bundling rules. The cable company included web links to web sites documenting this and to petition websites that subscribers could learn from and voice opinions. There's a group of smaller cable companies trying to fight this because they can't keep up with the dominate players.
Back before I dropped cable I made a comment in an email to one of cable company techs about replacing cable with a roku and a few streaming services. They offered to help. We went from 10Mb to 100Mb, picked up 3 streaming services and cut our total cost (landline, -cable +bandwidth & +streaming services) went from $150~ to $70~. Years later, even after picking up one more service and few price bumps in a couple others, we are still no where near our prior costs.
I do wish the cable company would stream their public access channels, but they are still holding on to that to try to keep cable customers.