By Robert C. Kenny | September 11, 2014
America’s growing dissatisfaction and frustration with the pay-TV industry continues to accelerate as an uncompetitive market structure has enabled an array of well-documented industry-wide practices to ratchet monthly bills upward for America’s cable and satellite TV consumers. Highly publicized incidents of poor customer service over the past couple of months have brought unflattering notoriety to the cable and satellite TV industry.
Let’s face it… Today, consumers bear the financial burden of satisfying the pay-TV industry’s insatiable desire to expand profit margins at nearly any cost. Symptomatic market failures have allowed cable and satellite TV providers to slide into a world where arbitrary pricing, shoddy customer service, outages, and pervasive erroneous billing is prevalent and commonplace.
While TVfreedom.org recognizes that the consumer fact-gathering campaign initiated by U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) will be instrumental in helping curb the pay-TV industry’s deceptive business and billing practices, Congress possesses the ability to reverse this trend of constant consumer abuse as it embarks on reforming the nation’s video marketplace. According to recent news reports, Sen. McCaskill is contemplating holding a Congressional hearing before year’s end focusing on the deceptive business and billing practices of cable and satellite TV providers.
As part of a robust Congressional examination of the pay-TV industry, TVfreedom.org urges lawmakers to create a “National Consumer Protection Plan” (NCPP) for America’s pay-TV subscribers. The NCPP should be guided under the principles that consumer satisfaction is top priority, and that consumers must be empowered with the tools necessary to address recurring billing errors, ‘surprise’ charges and inferior service quality. We believe that the negative economic impact of pay-TV fees and billing practices on the American family budget highlights the need for Congressional action.
Legislation necessary to implement the NCPP should better define the jurisdiction, roles and responsibilities of federal regulators, namely the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that can aid consumers and address existing market failures in the video marketplace. Today, government oversight of the cable and satellite TV industry is under the jurisdictions of states and local franchising authorities, which has resulted in significant variations in state-by-state government oversight.
Imagine the public outcry if that were the case for wireless voice and broadband services in America. It makes one wonder… Why over the past 20 years has the pay-TV industry largely been left unchecked by federal lawmakers and regulators – especially when industry-wide market failures are pervasive?
Consumers would welcome it if cable and satellite TV providers took the initiative to self-correct billing errors and proactively implemented business policies and practices that helped lower customers’ monthly bills, but it just hasn’t happened.
In its development and implementation, TVfreedom.org believes that the “National Consumer Protection Plan” must uphold, support and promote a series of strong consumer protections at the federal level related to marketing, subscriber promotions, contractual agreements, truth-in-billing practices, service reliability, outage reporting, subscriber complaints, customer service, and service cancellation policies.
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Robert C Kenny is the Director of Public Affairs for TVfreedom.org, a coalition of local broadcasters, community advocates, network TV affiliate associations, and other independent organizations; he formerly served as Press Secretary at the FCC.
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Please visit the TVfreedom.org YouTube web page to watch consumer-friendly videos aimed at pushing back on the pay-TV industry’s gamesmanship in the marketplace and the ongoing abusive billing and business practices hurting consumers.
