CABL Forum - Average cable TV bill rose 7.5% in second half of

Average cable TV bill rose 7.5% in second half of 2008

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/44841/average-cable-tv-bill-rose-75-in-second-half-of-2008/

Find yourself paying more and more each month for the same cable service? Turns out you're not alone.According to Multichannel News, the average cable TV bill was $71 in the second half of 2008, or $5 higher than at the end of 2007. Meanwhile, satellite TV subscribers saw their bills go up an average of $6 to about $74 during the same period.

And consider this: The same survey found no "significant" increase in cable TV bills between 2006 and 2007, Multichannel News reports.

Now, as the story suggests, one explanation for the rise in cable and satellite bills could be that more and more subscribers are ordering high-end services like HD DVRs and pricier HD channel tiers.

But the Multichannel News story got me thinking about my own cable bill, which seems to have been steadily creeping up in the past several months.

So I went ahead and dug up my Time Warner Cable bill from April 2007: a total of $118.84, including an HD DVR, an extra tier of HD channels, and Road Runner broadband service.

A year later, my TWC bill for the same services came out to $122.46, an increase of about $4, or about 3.4 percent. Not a huge increase, mind you, but still noticeable.

By April 2009, though, my TWC bill was $132.16, a $10 increase (8.2 percent) over April 2008, again for the same services.

Just out of curiosity, I checked out the official inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, and discovered that if Time Warner Cable simply wanted to keep my rates even with inflation, I'd be paying just $121 a month for cable, an increase of about three bucks over the $118/month I was paying back in 2007.

Of course, I'm only singling out Time Warner Cable because it happens to be my service provider; the survey quoted by Multichannel News points out that average cable and satellite rates have gone up more or less across the board.

And I admit, my recent flirtation with dumping Road Runner for Verizon DSL aside, I have no plans to jump to another cable provider (not that I could, given that TWC has a cable monopoly in my neighborhood) or go for satellite and/or over-the-air TV. Indeed, the survey from Multichannel News found that a full 81 percent of cable TV subscribers tagged themselves as "not at all likely" to turn off their cable service. No wonder the big carriers are so willing to raise their rates.

So, tell me—has your cable or satellite bill been rising in the past year, even though you haven't ordered any new services?

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Average cable TV bill rose 7.5% in second half of