Expanded Cable Bills up Average of 2.7 Percent in 2014, Media Bureau Says

its latest annual Report on Cable Industry Prices, posted Wednesday in docket 92-266. The bureau said expanded basic rates were higher due at least in part to cable operators providing more channels; the average price per channel for expanded basic service meanwhile went down 1.8 percent, to 46 cents per channel. Between 2005 and 2015, the price per channel dropped 1.4 percent on an average annual compounded basis, the bureau said. When comparing communities with a finding of effective cable competition vs. those without, the cost of expanded basic service was seen going up on average 2 percent to $70.31 in the former and 3.3 percent to $67.85 in the latter, the bureau said. And during that year span, it said, prices per channel dropped 0.6 percent in communities without effective competition to 49.7 cents per channel, while they dropped 3.3 percent in effective competition communities to 41.2 cents per channel -- the result of cable operators in effective competition communities carrying more channels on expanded basic lineups than operators without effective competition. Basic and expanded basic costs and rates of increase also varied by the type of competition the cable operators faced, according to the survey. The cost for basic ranged from $20.06 a month when the effective competition was from a rival cable operator in a cable overbuild area, to $25.57 when cable operators either have competition from wireless operators offering pay-TV service or themselves serve fewer than 30 percent of households in a service area, according to the survey. The average cost for expanded basic, meanwhile, ranged from $69.46 when the effective competition was from the incumbent operator in a cable overbuild area, to $74.05 when the competition was from a rival in that overbuild area. The bureau said the data came from a random survey of 800 cable operators.