Cable’s War on Public Broadcasting

Cable operators in Canada and the United States continue their purge of secondary PBS stations from analog cable lineups from coast to coast.  Subscribers in many communities where multiple PBS stations can be found on the cable lineup are most likely to be impacted.

Some lineup changes have sparked local viewer campaigns to preserve the stations, others draw protests mostly from the stations themselves.  In many American cities with several nearby PBS stations that have traditionally enjoyed carriage, cable operators and PBS have agreed that cable companies can keep one PBS station on the analog basic cable lineup, and switch others to space-saving digital service tiers.  In Canada, cable operators are moving away from over-the-air reception of public broadcasters just across the American border, preferring to grab stations from Detroit or Seattle, well-distributed across Canada by fiber and satellite.

Rogers Cable Plans to Dump Watertown, NY and Erie, PA PBS Stations For A Detroit PBS Station

Rogers Cable, one of Canada’s largest cable companies, is furiously cost-cutting in order to preserve profits in a troubled economy.  One way to save money, apparently, is to dispense with two over-the-air PBS stations Rogers imported for its Ottawa and London, Ontario cable subscribers.  In their place, a fiber-fed signal from the PBS affiliate in Detroit.

First to Watertown, a small city on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, in northern New York state.  WPBS-TV, the local PBS station, has been a part of the eastern Ontario cable lineup for decades.  The station has carefully cultivated a relationship with its Canadian viewers in and around Ottawa for years, and has more than 1,600 Canadian members contributing money to keep WPBS on the air, representing 23% of the station’s membership.  The station also promotes and sponsors Canadian cultural events, and is extremely sensitive to the tastes of its Canadian audience, hence the station’s strong lineup of British television shows.  Rogers gave WPBS no respect, and elected to notify subscribers it was dropping the station, replacing it with WTVS-TV in Detroit, several hundred miles away.  The station found out when a viewer e-mailed WPBS to complain about the decision.

The news stunned station management.

“We didn’t see this coming. We heard absolutely nothing about it,” said Lynn Brown, the station’s director of programming and development. “It would have been nice after a 30-year-plus relationship for them to call and say, ‘We’re considering this’ and give us an opportunity to respond if they wanted us to improve something.  It took a good half hour just kind of staring at one another and getting over that shock,” she said.

Brown said she spoke to a Rogers official who told her there was no requirement to notify the station in advance because it is American and not governed by Canadian broadcasting regulations.

She was told the switch is part of a “streamlining” effort by Rogers to make the channel lineup more “efficient” for viewers.

Rogers Cable also told the Ottawa Citizen:

“Over the years our customers have asked for the PBS Detroit feed, so we’ve decided to replace PBS Watertown with PBS Detroit because it offers higher quality reception and signal reliability. The PBS Detroit feed is delivered through our fibre network rather than through antenna (over the air), which gives us redundancy through our network and improves reliability in poor weather conditions. Typically, our communication is with PBS in Detroit. We called the Watertown station to apologize for the oversight.”

The decision outraged subscribers, who have been pelting Rogers with complaint calls and e-mail.  Several angry letters were published in Ottawa newspapers, a protest Facebook group was formed, and complaints were filed with the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Canada’s version of the Federal Communications Commission.

The protest worked.  Late Thursday, WPBS received word from Rogers they had changed their mind and would retain WPBS on the lineup.

Meanwhile, in London, southwestern Ontario, Rogers customers accustomed to watching PBS programming from WQLN-TV in Erie were also going to see a nearby PBS station replaced by WTVS in Detroit.  WQLN received more than $200,000 in contributions from London area viewers, and that funding is critical to WQLN in a year that Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell proposed eliminating $800,000 in state funding for the public broadcaster.  Combined with the loss of viewership in London, the station could have gone off the air altogether.

Late Thursday, Rogers notified WQLN it would also retain its signal for London area viewers, if the station agreed to spend between $30,000-50,000 to pay for a direct fiber link to deliver the station signal to Rogers master control center in Toronto.

Southern Ohio to Lose Half of Its Public Stations on Time Warner Cable

In southern Ohio, Time Warner Cable customers are about to lose half of the public broadcast channels they used to receive.  The Cincinnati Enquirer had the bad news:

Covington’s (Kentucky) WCVN-TV (Channel 54) and Dayton’s WPTD-TV (Channel 16) will be dropped from Time Warner’s most affordable service level Aug. 25, says Mike Pedelty, vice president for communications.

Only CET (Channel 48) and Oxford’s WPTO-TV (Channel 14) will remain on basic cable.

At the same time, Time Warner will cancel six public TV channels from its more popular digital level – CET’s Kids channel, plus WPTO-TV in high definition and all digital multicast channels.

Overall, Time Warner will drop eight of 22 public TV channels in a major channel realignment. Time Warner will replace Channel 16 on basic cable with the Home Shopping Network.

“We are making changes to prevent duplicate programming,” Pedelty says.

In addition to Cincinnati and Hamilton County, WPTD-TV will lose viewers in Butler and Warren counties, where some residents work or shop in Dayton.

The stations affected weren’t happy to learn of the news, and are meeting with Time Warner Cable in an effort to retain service.  Cable customers are not happy about the changes either, especially considering at least one of those channels will go to a home shopping channel instead.

West Virginia Battled Comcast To Preserve Statewide PBS Station

In West Virginia back in late May, Comcast customers in the state were notified that if they wanted to continue receiving the statewide PBS/public broadcasting station network, dubbed West Virginia Public Television, they would need to upgrade to digital cable service.  That’s because viewers in northern West Virginia were only going to receive WQED-TV Pittsburgh, and areas in the eastern panhandle of the state would receive PBS from a station in Washington, DC.

Once again, viewer complaints and West Virginia Public TV management managed a compromise with Comcast – retention of the WVPBS service on basic cable, but placed on the system in a digital format.  Comcast customers received free, very basic, digital decoder units for two years to continue to receive the channels.

Expect additional controversy in the months ahead if your cable system carries multiple PBS stations.