05-08-2013 Council Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

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NSCC Franchise Renewal Talking Points 1. Comcast: Federal law prevents us from paying operational support. Federal law does not allow local franchising authorities to require operational support. Nothing in federal law precludes cable companies from offering operational and other support for public, educational and government (PEG) access, and many recent agreements between cable companies and local franchising authorities do provide operational, as well as capital, support for PEG access facilities. 2. Comcast: NSCC's PEG (public, education and government) access fee is one of the highest in the nation. • It is important to understand that PEG fees historically have been based on assessments of community needs, not by the NSCC or Comcast. Comcast chooses to pass PEG fees through to subscribers. • The NSCC /CTV PEG fee stays here and supports eight channels (That's 50 cents /channel.) of award - winning locally - produced, community based programming, including city parades and festivals, meetings and informational programming from local government, school sports and concerts, youth media education, election coverage and hundreds of hours of programs created by community producers and volunteers. • If the PEG fee were to be decreased or eliminated, Comcast might decrease the rates for basic service temporarily, but would recover the amount in other unregulated tiers. And that money would go to Philadelphia to support the company's bottom line, instead of supporting and benefitting the local community. • In over 20 years, the NSCC /CTV office has received only a few calls about the PEG fee, and the subscribers simply wanted to know what it was. When they were told that it was used to support locally- produced community programming for subscribers in our 10 cities, they were overwhelmingly supportive of the PEG fee and its use. 3. Comcast: NSCC's PEG fee is a competitive disadvantage for the company because the satellite providers do not have to pay it. • In fact, the cable company's numbers of subscribers and penetration rate has stayed remarkably consistent over the past 20+ years, with slightly over 30,000 subscribers for the past 10 years and, even with the number of marketable homes increasing, a penetration rate of close to 50 %. [This is lower than the penetration rates in most other parts of the country. Historically, the Twin Cities, Portland and Denver markets have tended to have lower rates of cable subscribership.l