Charter Says Its Sneaky, Unnecessary Fees Are A Consumer Benefit
from the this-is-for-your-own-good dept
We've noted for some time how cable providers over the last few years have added a "broadcast TV" fee to customer bills. Such a fee, which simply takes a part of the cost of programming and buries it below the line, lets cable providers advertise one rate, then hit customers with a higher bill. It's false advertising, but you'd be hard pressed to find a regulator anywhere in North America willing to tackle the problem. When Comcast was criticized for the practice two years ago, the company claimed that burying a sneaky new fee below the line was just the cable company's way of being "transparent" with its customers:"Beginning in 2014, we will itemize a portion of broadcast retransmission costs as a separate line item to be more transparent with our customers about the factors that drive price changes," he said. “In 2014, we will not increase the price of Limited Basic or Digital Preferred video service, and adjustments to other video service prices will be lower than they would have been without the Broadcast TV Fee."While it's true broadcasters impose often unreasonable rate hikes on cable companies, the cost of programming is just one of several costs of doing business, and hiding these costs when listing your prices is the complete opposite of being transparent with your user base. Since the fee began popping up in 2014, some cable companies have as much as tripled the fee, which can now be as much as $6 to $8 per customer, per month.
Fast forward to this month when Charter (and now Charter-owned Time Warner Cable) was sued for the practice. The plaintiff in question wasn't asking for monetary damages; they simply wanted to highlight how an estimated 20% of Charter's revenues are now thanks to a practice that lets the cable company "deceive its customers by advertising and promising a lower price while actually charging a higher price." Charter has finally responded to the suit and, like Comcast, is actually claiming that it's misleading its customers for their own benefit:
"Our customer friendly approach includes simplified pricing and packaging with no data caps, no modem fee, no early termination fee and no separate USF [Universal Service Fund] fee. We provide simple to understand bills and want our customers to understand what they are paying for, including the skyrocketing cost of broadcast channels."Right, but the lack of data caps is because the FCC banned them for seven years as a merger condition. And while Charter is one of the only cable ISPs that rolls the cost of renting a modem into the overall cost of service, breaking out the broadcast TV fee is the exact opposite of that. Hiding a part of your costs outside of the advertised price, then bumping that fee 300% in just a few years, remains false advertising and misleading jackassery by any measure. Leave it the cable industry to try and argue that intentionally misleading you into thinking you're not getting a rate hike this year is some kind of favor.
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Filed Under: fees, hidden fees, sneaky fees, transparency
Companies: charter
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No Fees, No Arbitration
Kinda sneaky but I hope it works. Might be an end-run around these damned arbitration agreements every company tries to put their customers into.
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Re: No Fees, No Arbitration
I hope it works too, because they certainly deserve to get hammered on this, and because I can't help but think that the second TWC's lawyers figure out the 'loophole' he used to avoid the rigged arbitration system they'll be issuing an 'updated customer agreement' post-haste to close it and prevent anyone else from going through a court not completely stacked in their favor.
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Re: Re: No Fees, No Arbitration
This isn't a loophole. The plaintiff is following the explicit instructions from their contract:
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Re: No Fees, No Arbitration
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*A reoccurring $159.99 service fee will be applied to your bill each month.
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As a customer you can see why people cancel or dump channels they dont use to save money on their bill and these Fee's are the way for the Telco's to be sneaky about generating more revenue and a lot of these charges are made to look like these are mandatory charges that the Cable & Telco's has to recoup and most people are oblivious to the fact that this is the Cable & Telco's doing this and not any Federal or state agency mandated charge.
The Cable & Telco's wonder why people are cord cutting, and it is because everyone has a limit of what they believe is reasonable to pay, but people have limits and gouging the customer with made up fees and contract pricing for service that can change at the Cable & Telco's whim are just examples of an industry that is cannibalizing itself with high stupidity and pricing itself out of exsistance
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Even Walmart
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Re: Even Walmart
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind at all if the including-tax price was the one listed. But the store doesn't get that money, whereas all of these addon fees and charges go right to the cable company.
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Re: Re: Even Walmart
Wal-Mart doesn't "get" the money they use to pay employees either. Sales tax is an expense like any other (the main difficulty is that it varies by jurisdiction, but I'm sure it costs more to ship products to certain Wal-Marts too).
Those addon fees don't exactly go "right to the cable company" either. The channels really have been raising their costs, as has been reported here. But Charter could deal with that in various non-fradulent ways.
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Re: Re: Even Walmart
Um, no. The Broadcast TV Fee money winds up going to the broadcast TV stations.
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Re: Re: Even Walmart
You mean like the "handling fee" many sellers charge?
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Re: Even Walmart
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Re: Re: Even Walmart
Not saying I think it's a good reason, of course... but it seems like the kind of excuse that we'd get if anyone asked about it.
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Re: Re: Re: Even Walmart
State to state? It can vary by product or container size, location (county/city/metro area/location within a city), etc. The state I am in almost certainly has hundreds of different sales/excise tax rates (the state sales tax instructions say you can download tax charts for 30 different rates). However, for any given product, location, and means of delivery, the rate could be calculated and the final price posted by the retailer. Petrol stations and cigarettes sell at the posted price.
I gotta admit, it does make VAT sound good. Except that we'd then apply other random taxes on top of that posted price.
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Re: Re: Re: Even Walmart
State to state? It can vary by product, location (county/city/metro area/location within a city), etc. The state I am in almost certainly has hundreds of different sales/excise tax rates. However, for any given product, location, and means of delivery, the rate could be calculated and the final price posted by the retailer. Petrol stations sell at the posted price.
I gotta admit, it does make VAT sound good. Except that we'd then apply other random taxes on top of that posted price.
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Re: Even Walmart
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So their argument is that they want their customers to understand what they're paying for, but only after they sign up for service for the advertised amount and get a bill for that number plus all the unadvertised fees?
Idea: If the "skyrocketing cost of broadcast channels" just can't be included in the price of the service (otherwise known as how much it costs) then I should be able to get a cable bundle that omits the broadcast channels. If they're advertising a service at a particular cost but I can't actually buy that service at that cost, isn't that the very definition of false advertising?
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Re:
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This is a separate related discussion, but restaurants should simply raise their rates by %15 and pay their staff better.
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Many restaurant owners would gladly raise their prices while not giving employees anything extra, hell - some of them do not even pay minimum wage.
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Transparency
Let's see how that will look in cable-company-speak:
"Everything is included except for what is currently listed below the line as additional fees and any other fees that we decide to hide below the line later"
Yeah, I think that covers it.
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Re: Transparency
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Don't Understand
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Re: Don't Understand
It the copyright as property madness, its the broadcasters property and therefore they should get the value that is added to the cable service.
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Re: Don't Understand
If anything, the Cable and Satellite company's are doing them a favor. They're getting more people tuned into their channel without having to use a antenna. More people watching means more money can be made on the ad's. Ad's the pay for that channel.
Take it to the next level. Why do all these cable channels like Discovery, TLC, Syfy, etc require a cable or Satellite subscription to watch them using their App? After all you're still watching their Commercials. In fact unlike cable/Satellite where you can DVR everything and skip the commercials, You can't do that through their app.
The CW channels doesn't require a Cable or Satellite subscription to watch any of their programs with their App!!! That's a Antenna Channel, and yet, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox still all require a Cable or Satellite subscription even though it's FREE to watch using a Antenna. Which I do along with a TIVO and I'm skipping on their commercials. Something I wouldn't be able to do using their App!!! So it really makes no sense to me. CBS goes so far as forcing people to pay $6 a month for their content using their App. No way in HELL am I going to do that. So instead I record them and skip their commercials.
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Nationalize the wires
want to start an ISP rent an connection get some servers and customers, what to deliver cable TV service get the content contracts rent a connection and get some customers
NOT ROCKET SURGERY!
Trump will not burn things down but you can, organize, act, disobey
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Re: Nationalize the wires
lol, he is simply replacing the existing idiots with other, different idiots.
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Time to turn the tables, if they can add non-existant 'costs' why can't we?
Cable bill Initial cost: $150.00
Bill Reading Fee: - 50.00
Jaw dropping pickup fee: - 25.00
Eye Popping push in fee: - 25.00
Sanity check fee: - 25.00
Payment Issuing fee - 24.99
Net Due Cable Company .01
Tape a penny to the itemized bill payment invoice, and submit.
If they can claim that all their fees are just a "cost of doing business" then we can claim all our fees are just a "cost of staying sane"
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Except that Charter-owned Time Warner Cable has ALL of those things. So, another whopper of a lie from Big Cable.
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If this was really about "transparency", cable companies could do the same thing. Put the breakdown ABOVE the line. It's fine to show your consumers how much each channel costs. Just don't charge them extra for doing the thing they're paying you to do.
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Roll it back out, please.
They didn't used to. I haven't been a charter customer for the last 12+ years (and thank goodness - my 15MBit DSL may be slow, but at least I'm not sharing 100MBit with my friends and neighbors, including that guy who torrents every single new movie in 4K HD so he can watch it on his 27" 2009 plasma TV. Not even kidding. Look up "trunk speed" and remember to close your mouth. It's amazing.)
Even so, back when I was a Charter customer, they charged a separate $10/month as modem rent. The catch was, you could go to the local Office Depot (or Best Buy, whatever) and buy a brand new modem you'll OWN for $59. In 6 months it pays for itself, and from that point onward, every single month it saves you $10.
So Charter rolls the cost in? I wish they'd roll it back out. Cable modems are very cheap and not worth paying rent for, ever.
But hey, I'm not a customer any more.
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