Mar
10
Frontier Communications has been rather ungracefully trying to offload or otherwise scare away the 100,000 FiOS TV customers it acquired in its deal with Verizon, first with a huge 50% price hike and botched DirecTV offer, and now with a massive $500 installation fee to frighten off new customers. All the while (alongside starting the ball rolling to back out of TV franchise agreements) Frontier has been insisting they aren't leaving the TV business, despite efforts to migrate all of these customers to DirecTV as quickly as possible. Stop The Cap directs our attention to the spin Frontier's employing to writers of the Newberg Graphic, insisting the steep new install fee was about "pricing people in":
"There was no indication at the time we agreed to transfer the franchise that this (Frontier exiting the TV business) would be the case ... We re saddened to hear that they ve elected to do this and we re looking through the contracts trying to decide what our next move might be. "What it looks like to me is that they re trying to price people out." Crosby, on the other hand, said the increases will help price Frontier "in." Each hookup costs the company $800, he said, and Frontier couldn t maintain the service at current pricing levels.
The paper's story is an amusing read, with Frontier getting to have their cake and eat it too, telling the paper that backing away from franchises does not mean they're leaving the TV business, despite the very clear evidence the company is backing away from franchises to exit the TV business. A letter to the town insists Frontier's TV growth as been "disappointing and stagnant":"Customer growth has been disappointing and stagnant and Frontier has not achieved a commercially reasonable level of subscriber penetration, the letter states. "The unreasonably low penetration and growth is particularly troubling because, in an effort to respond to competition and incent additional subscribership, the FiOS video service has thus far been under-priced relative to Frontier s costs."
Given Frontier's only been in the TV business since July, and they're currently scaring off any potential new TV customers with massive rate hikes and new installation fees, there hasn't been much time or room for anything other than disappointing growth. The question remains whether or not it was the plan to offload these customers all along, and whether or not Frontier hid this fact from regulators in order to get the deal done. Frontier seems to essentially be putting on a little stage play for regulators and the media, where they pretend they didn't know all along they couldn't afford steep programming costs -- and that they're only just now pondering exiting the TV business.read comment(s)
Original story here.
