Hey! Where'd my MSNBC go?
Democrats in Oregon got a rude awakening this week when they discovered that Comcast had yanked MSNBC from their cable systems. And they're not alone; the home of Keith Olbermann has been vanishing off basic cable grids across the land.
"Please, oh please, tell me that this isn't Comcast turning out the lights on the only cable news channel that even bothers to air one progressive voice," wrote this blogger.
Actually, the story is not quite so dire or sinister (I think). But you're still not going to like it.
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I spoke a couple of weeks ago with Comcast spokesman Mark Apple. I was calling to ask him why the Hallmark Channel had suddenly been moved off the basic cable grid in the half of Kansas City's metro area that Comcast serves. And why, when I did a little googling, I found Comcast subscribers in Colorado and Connecticut were suddenly without MSNBC.
"It’s a bandwidth management move," Apple told me. "If we can free up space on the analog tier, we will have more room for digital services like video on demand and HDTV."
OK, let's break that down a little. It's been a few years since I wrote about this but I think I've got my facts straight. In the 1990s most cable companies upgraded their systems so that they were all-fiber optic (except for the last few hundred feet of coaxial cable going into your house). This allowed them to push much more bandwidth to the house -- and much of that bandwidth was now digital, which meant it could be compressed.
Compression is what made the consumer satellite boom possible. DirecTV and Dish were able to squeeze hundreds of channels into the bandwidth that could, at best, handle only a few dozen analog TV channels. (All of this is nicely detailed in Joel Brinkley's book Defining Vision
You can't squeeze analog. You must move it to digital before you can compress it. Once you do, though, you almost get back an entire channel. Especially with a channel like MSNBC that features a lot of talking heads. In digital compression, the compressor knows how to delete bits of data the viewer won't usually notice, greatly reducing the size of the video. With sports, the compression isn't as great because the picture is always changing. Not so news television, which means Comcast may be getting compression ratios as high as 10:1 out of Keith Olbermann. Yes, I'm talking about a newscaster like he's an internal combustion engine, which I guess some people would argue he is.
And what do you do with all that newfound bandwidth? Right now, Comcast is trying to keep up with all the high-definition cable offerings being launched. (HD is a bandwidth hog.) Just in the past quarter it's put HGTV HD, Food HD and TBS HD on the KC system — that's right, Time Warner baseball fans, your friends in eastern Jackson County got the playoffs in hi-def and you didn't. "HD launches will remain a priority throughout 2008," said Apple.
Right up there on the to-do list is adding more video-on-demand channels, because VOD is one thing cable does really well that satellite doesn't do well at all (because you have to be able to interact with a server, which is hard to do when using a relay that's floating 22,000 miles above the Earth).
OK, but why MSNBC? And why, for that matter, Hallmark Channel, one of the 10 most-watched cable networks in all the land? In short, because they can.
"It comes down to our contracts with the various programmers," Comcast's Apple told me. "In some cases they stipulate that we carry their channel on an analog basic tier but with Hallmark Channel there was no such (clause)." That's no surprise; as its CEO Henry Schleiff has been telling reporters ever since he took over late last year, Hallmark Channel is disrespected because it's not owned by a major cable company. As an indie, it has been dropped despite high ratings, paid less money per subscriber than even C-SPAN despite high ratings, and now, banished to a tier many subscribers still don't get ... again, despite high ratings. No wonder Schleiff is trying to sell Hallmark Channel to a major.
Apple said Comcast customers are being offered two digital set-top boxes at no cost for 12 months, which is a pretty standard come-on.
As for the idea that MSNBC was being banished in some Comcast areas for political reasons, Apple said that was nonsense, adding, "I would point out that Fox’s ratings have exceeded MSNBC’s for some time now." (Not a great defense, given that Hallmark was also getting the boot.)
So the question really is -- why did NBC Universal leave MSNBC exposed? NBC executives typically negotiate cable carriage on behalf of affiliates, and they're supposed to make sure the cable company carries all their channels with the most favorable placements possible. MSNBC has been relegated to the level of Sleuth and Chiller, two NBCU digital offerings that mostly act as rerun machines.
Odd, isn't it, that NBC Universal can figure out how to embed a light-bulb contract into its negotiations for TV rights with the NFL, but it can't figure out how to keep its 24-hour news channel from going dark in hundreds of thousands of homes served by one of the free world's largest cable companies?
I'd put this one at GE's doorstep, not Comcast's.
