Apartment residents will now enjoy more choice when it comes to TV service providers. They should direct their thank-you to the Federal Communications Commission, who ruled to ban cable operators from signing exclusive contracts with apartment buildings.
Digital Journal — If you live in a U.S. apartment, no longer will you just be stuck with one cable provider (like Comcast) because your building owner struck a deal with the cable provider. Starting today, the FCC will allow phone companies like Verizon and AT&T the opportunity to provide apartment residents with their TV services.
As FCC chairman Kevin Martin told reporters yesterday:
I believe that people who live in apartment buildings deserve to have the same choices as people who live in the suburbs.
Apartment dwellers won’t be locked into just one TV provider. The new rule applies to all new contracts between cable companies and apartment building owners, as well as existing contracts containing exclusivity clauses.
On a business side, benefiting most from the new FCC rule are phone companies trying to power into the TV provider market. As the Boston Globe notes:The FCC’s action may help AT&T and Verizon, the two biggest US telephone companies, win more TV subscribers and challenge cable operators that have lured away customers with phone and Internet service. Verizon had 717,000 TV subscribers at the end of last month, while AT&T had 126,000, the companies said yesterday.
But the ruling doesn’t extend to all companies offering TV service. Not bound by the exclusivity rule are satellite TV companies and smaller private cable operators who use exclusive contracts to lock in customers in apartment buildings.
Although critics are upset the rule doesn’t apply to all TV providers, the FCC is making amends for its lax media consolidation laws of the past. By allowing apartment residents to choose from a variety of providers, the consumer wins. Why be stuck with Comcast’s rates and plans, when AT&T may offer a better programming package?
Let’s hope the FCC takes this one step further. FCC’s chairman has always been a proponent of a la carte cable pricing, which would let people pick the channels they want instead of subscribing to an entire package of channels. Martin has faced resistance to this idea, but it wouldn’t be improbable for this non-exclusivity ruling to help bolster his other plans. It’s a start.
