If you're a cable programmer who finds himself suddenly barraged with phone calls, faxes or e-mails from subscribers complaining about their rate increases in Ohio, odds are Robert Gessner, vice president of Massillon Cable TV Inc., is responsible.
Last week, Massillon Cable made page one -- above the fold -- of the local Canton, Ohio, Repository, about how the company created a Web site -- www.sssnet.cox/expensive networks -- so that cable subscribers could take their complaints directly to the programmers.
Massillon, an independent operator, raised its rates to $26.25 per month for its 46-channel basic service, a $3.25 hike.
Gessner is quoted in the paper as saying programmers 'raise rates because they can.'
In a phoner with me last week, Gessner described his action as the kind of 'telephone terrorism' that cable programmers use all the time when they are trying to launch new services and run ads saying, 'Call your cable operator now to have them add' whichever new network they're hawking.
'Programmers do it all the time, so what's the difference?' Gessner asked.
Gessner said that he doesn't know how many 'hits' his Web site has gotten, since it just launched Nov. 18, or how many cable subscribers have sent faxes or made phone calls to programmers listed on his Web site.
On his Web site, where neither his name nor his company's name appears, he writes, 'I would like to enlist your help in trying to control program-cost increases.' He supplies names, addresses, fax numbers and phone numbers for the networks he says have increased their rates the most.
His 10 targets are Arts & Entertainment Network; CNN; Discovery; ESPN; Home & Garden Television; Lifetime; Nickelodeon; The Nashville Network; Fox Sports and VH1.
Those 10 program networks, Gessner further notes on his Web site, 'are very strange about the price of their programming. Their contracts do not allow a cable operator to discuss the actual price. However, I can show you the percentage increase in costs. As you can see from this table, these networks have allowed program costs to run wild.'
He then urges cable subscribers to contact the 10 networks with the largest percentage increases that he has paid at his own system. Massillon, a small, independent operator, does not benefit from group volume-discount rates.
What is very misleading about the percentage increases Massillon lists on his Web site is that the figures look like increases for a one-year period, which, in fact, they are not.
In actuality, after asking him what those staggeringly high numbers reflect, Gessner said that those increases were based on rates going up at his system since 1995.
For example, if Fox Sports gets a phone call, fax or e-mail from a Massillon cable subscriber, the company will likely hear about how its rates have gone up 358 percent, and not the actual yearly figure, which Gessner did not include on his Web site.
The same is true for Home & Garden, which has had a 69 percent increase, according to the Web site chart.
You have to give Gessner -- a guy who answers his own phone -- some credit for trying to stand up to the programming Goliaths of this industry by trying to play their game.
But I really can't imagine that his tactics -- which are a little misleading, especially the percentages cited -- will work any more effectively than when programmers urge subscribers to call their systems to add new programming services.
If anything, Gessner's 'telephone terrorism,' as he refers to it, is a little dangerous because it can only increase the rancor that exists among programmers and operators.
Gessner's ire over ESPN oozed from his Web site. ESPN's 'actions are atrocious, and they need to hear that message from viewers like you,' he wrote. Sounds like the war wages on!
