Nov
23
‘Tis The Season for Another Comcast Rate Hike – Comcast Rings in New Year With Significant Increases
Right on the heels of a suite of new price hikes by Time Warner Cable, Comcast is also ringing in the holiday season with price increases that will impact both the company's broadband and television subscribers. This pricing change sheet being sent to customers in New Jersey notes that users can expect across the board hikes on other services and packages as well.
The notice informs Performance customers who bundle TV service that their monthly rate will increase from $45.95 to $48.95. Performance customers who don't bundle TV service will see their monthly cost raised from $59.95 to $62.95. Comcast's Digital Preferred TV package (which has no premium channels) is seeing a hike from $81.95 to $85.95, their HD Preferred XF Triple Play package is going from $154.99 to $159.99, and monthly DVR rental is going from $15.95 to $16.95.
The exact price hikes will vary depending on the market, and how much local competition Comcast sees. In some markets, like Oregon, this is the second rate hike Comcast users are seeing in less than twelve months. In several Oregon markets Comcast has the luxury of "competing" with Frontier Communications, a company that's literally trying to drive customers away with rate hikes after acquiring FiOS TV customers from Verizon they say they can't afford to properly serve.
Comcast and Time Warner Cable will soon be joined in the bi-annual rate hike festivities by most of the other cable giants, whose executives recently have been paying empty lip service toward low-income subscribers struggling under a flagging economy and dysfunctional housing market. Investors have warned cable executives that they can't keep imposing constant rate hikes on subscribers in the face of Internet video and increased telcoTV competition, but it's fairly clear they're not listening.
Despite now consistently losing a significant number of basic cable customers to satellite, telcoTV competitors and Internet video each quarter, cable executives are intent on their stubborn refusal to seriously compete on price -- in part because they're winning the battle for broadband subscribers courtesy of lagging telco network upgrades. The cable exec plan so far appears to be to milk TV subscribers for all they're worth, offer TV Everywhere product and impose caps on broadband service to prevent serious migration to Internet video, then start imposing steep overages only once they begin to sersiously see TV revenues decline.
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