Cable Rates

Cable TV subscribers in Baltimore will pay more for their CNN and MTV starting Jan. 1.One month after Congress passed a law that promised rate relief for cable TV subscribers, United Artists Cable of Baltimore announced it is raising rates by 4 percent to 7 percent, effective Jan. 1.The fee for basic service will rise from $17.35 to $18 a month, and the fee for expanded basic will go from $18 to $19.25, Euan F. D. Fannell, president and general manager of...

Comcast Cablevision, Howard County's largest cable company, will raise its monthly rates by as much as 95 cents for some channel packages starting March 1, company officials told County Executive Charles I. Ecker in a Jan. 25 letter."

Was last year's cable television regulation law a boomerang? Its supporters predicted that rates, which had been climbing for years, would be rolled back by about 10 percent. The industry argued the opposite would happen. As the new law starts taking effect this month, it appears cable operators were correct.The law is immensely complicated, and so are the regulations adopted last spring by the Federal Communications Commission. Clearly, the FCC thought it was rolling back the average charges viewers pay to get cable service.

Cable TV rates of regulated systems in the nation's 25 largest cities have dropped by an average of 6.63 percent since last August, the Federal Communications Commission reported yesterday.According to the FCC, its "informal and preliminary assessment" found that the typical subscriber's monthly bill from those systems dropped by $1.67 in the wake of two rounds of commission-ordered rate rollbacks. Among the 15 systems that felt the full impact of regulation under the 1992 Cable Act, the average bill dropped $4.57, or 16.46 percent -- close to the FCC's target of a 17 percent rollback.

Starting tomorrow, about 2,700 western Howard subscribers to Mid-Atlantic Cable will see a 13 percent increase in their bills.The rate boost from $25.15 per month to $28.31 for customers of its 49-channel service is a move Mid-Atlantic's general partner says is necessary to meet rising costs and reduce an $18,000 a month operating deficit. Rates for the 22-channel basic service also will increase 10 percent from $15.70 per month to $17.28.The larger Howard Cable TV charges $27.25 monthly for its 40-channel package and charges slightly more for premium channels.

NEW ORLEANS -- The most vilified man in the world of cable television, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt, came before industry leaders yesterday on a peacekeeping mission, suggesting that financial relief was in sight.Mr. Hundt said the FCC was not looking for further rate cuts and suggested in tone, if not in much detail, that the agency might ease proposed restrictions on future rates to encourage industry investment.The FCC and cable industry have estimated that the government's 17 percent rate rollbacks since September will cost the industry $3 billion of its $22 billion in annual revenue.

Clearview CATV Inc. has increased its basic rate to $15.95. Clearview's basic rate offers viewers 32 channels, including Turner Network Television (TNT), which was added Jan. 4.Clearview also has upgraded The Weather Channel to include Baltimore area radar coverage and more detailed local weather information on a 24-hour basis.

After months of complaining that the cable television operators have been getting away with murder in their pricing policies, the industry's critics in Congress have been handed what they call a "smoking gun."In a memo in August, a top executive of Tele-Communications Inc. told local managers to ignore customers' objections and jack up rates on various cable television services before a new cable TV regulation law went into effect."The best news of all is we can blame it on the government now. Let's take advantage of it!"

The two cable television systems with monopolies on service in Baltimore and Baltimore County have announced rate increases effective in January and February.Subscribers to Baltimore County's Comcast Cablevision will see their rates increase on Jan. 1 by as much as 10 percent, according to a letter sent to cable subscribers this week with their monthly bills.According to the letter, signed by Comcast area vice president Stephen A. Burch, the rate for Preferred Basic Service, which offers about 40 channels, will rise from $20.90 to $22.99 a month.

Consumer activist Richard F. Kirchner hopes to persuade the Howard County Council tonight that the county needs a cable TV ombudsman to deal with new regulations and a "madhouse" bureaucracy.Mr. Kirchner, who plans to speak in favor of a resolution to regulate rates for basic cable service, says the problem for cable subscribers is that such regulation probably would help only 5 percent of them."Most cable subscribers in Howard County have expanded service, which has a much greater variety of cable channels," he said, "But the authority proposed in this resolution does not relate to this form of service."