Friday, March 16, 2001
Here's a fantasy story line for you: Enormous cable-TV company becomes helpless victim, its programming initiatives thwarted by a sinister government cabal.
Aside from Chris Carter, the "X-Files" creator who never met a conspiracy theory he couldn't script, you may not find many folks hot to trot over the idea of cable monolith portrayed as the underdog. But we're not making this up. Early next month, AT&T Broadband says it will add another local channel to its Puget Sound lineup and bump the Fox Movie Channel from expanded basic into its digital package.
Film buffs aren't likely to take this news with the equanimity of, say, James Bond on a Blofeld kind of day. Hurling invective at AT&T won't do much good, though. The cable company says it has no choice. It's simply obeying the law. Fancy that.
The law would be the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992. Among other things, it requires cable operators to carry local stations on their systems to ensure the public's access to local information from a variety of sources. This "must-carry" provision means stations such as KOMO, KING, KIRO, KSTW and KCPQ are automatically guaranteed carriage on the region's cable systems. So, too, are KTBW, KBCB, KWPX, KHCV and KWDK, which have little or no local programming but get onto cable systems because they're locally licensed.
Haven't heard of KTBW? It's a Federal Way station, available over the air on channel 20, which allows Trinity Broadcasting Corp. to present its religious programming in these parts. KHCV? That's the truly fly-by-night Kent-based operation (channel 45 over the air) by which Value Vision and a ton of infomercials enter our homes when KHCV isn't having audio or video problems. KBCB offers the International Channel, KWPX is Pax TV and KWDK also does religious programming. Without the must-carry provision, none of the national entities affiliated with these stations would be able to crack the local cable lineup.
The latest addition to the list is KWOG, licensed to African American Broadcasting Co. of Bellevue Inc. and going out over the air on channel 51. KWOG's general manager, Donald Laidlaw, lives in Hawaii and seems to know less about the station than I do. Laidlaw referred me to Roger Rosen, who identified himself as an attorney representing African American Broadcasting. Rosen is also in Hawaii, which makes KWOG seem about as local as macadamia-nut pie, but Rosen promises that this will change.
He says KWOG is building a studio in SeaTac and intends to concentrate on programming for a predominantly black audience. He's incredibly short on details, considering that the station is supposed to be on the air in less than a month, and admits discussions are still ongoing with prospective programmers. But he insists KWOG will be a legitimate station with specialty programming for a niche market.
AT&T's paperwork, meanwhile, indicates KWOG will carry the Shop at Home Network, a male-oriented "collectibles" channel already available in the wee hours on TNN. Rosen says a deal with Shop at Home is indeed a possibility while KWOG is starting up, but he dismissed any suggestion it would be a permanent shopping channel.
Surprisingly, Fox Movie Channel, which airs films from the 20th Century Fox library, doesn't seem too torqued by the news. (It probably helps that four other channels from Rupert Murdoch's stable -- Fox Sports Net, Fox Family, Fox News and FX -- are still in AT&T's expanded-basic package.) Mark DeVitre, general manager and spinmeister at Fox Movie Channel, said he understands AT&T's problem.
"As a programmer," he said in a statement, "we're always about trying to give our viewers as much access to our films as possible. AT&T has opted to place Fox Movie Channel within its digital movie tier to try to capitalize on its popularity and generate more subscribers. We appreciate the vote of confidence but also empathize with fans who've grown accustomed to our being there as part of their basic package."
In fact, Fox Movie Channel isn't the most popular of the film channels and AT&T hopes protests will be muted by the fact that the channel isn't going away entirely. True, it will cost subscribers about $15 each month (depending on the package) to subscribe to the digital package, but it's better than losing a station altogether, as happened in 1995 when AT&T's predecessor, TCI Cable, added NorthWest Cable News to its lineup. To make room, TCI jettisoned CBUT, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. station in Vancouver, B.C. Despite howls of protest, CBUT wasn't returned to AT&T's lineup until a fiber-optic rebuild increased channel capacity four years later.
Fans of CBC needn't worry this time, although the addition of KWOG will necessitate some channel shuffling that will affect CBUT's location in the lineup. AT&T says it will notify subscribers, but experienced cable customers know the announcements often come after the fact, and sometimes not at all.
But as long as the must-carry rule allows out-of-towners to create stations that are only marginally local, AT&T says there's a big problem looming.
"If this continues," AT&T spokesman Steve Kipp said, "the decisions are going to be a lot more difficult and we're going to have to take off something that has a real strong audience -- something our customers are not going to be happy with. We have no choice but to comply with the law."
Kipp's point is that unhappy viewers should direct their pique not toward AT&T but at the Federal Communications Commission and their congressional delegation.
Rosen, who thinks AT&T is ganging up on small entrepreneurs, finds that argument amusing.
"Come on," he said. "The idea that out of a channel capacity of several hundred they've got to carry 15 or 20 local stations seems inconsequential." 