The Big Picture

The Other Side of 2000

An alternative view of the past year

The NCTA’s "Cable Television Industry Overview" landed on my desk last month, brimming with upbeat facts about the year in cable. This excellent piece of propaganda is one of the best things the group does.

It’s nice to know that in "in 2000, cable networks remained the clear leaders in offering a wide variety of quality programming for children and families," and cable operators invested $12.43 billion in upgrades and improvements in 2000.

However, I felt the NCTA overview — as comprehensive as it was — missed a few salient facts about what happened in 2000. As a public service to our readers, here are some stories the NCTA failed to recount:

• In January, headlines screamed that USA Networks’ Barry Diller might buy Ovation, thus fulfilling his lifelong dream of owning a major network. Although Diller didn’t get Ovation, he did land the Canadian channels Trio and Newsworld later in the year.

• In February, Pat Mitchell quit as chief of CNN Productions to head PBS, becoming the first major executive to leave Dodge in the wake of the AOL Time Warner merger. Two weeks later, CNN’s No. 2 Steven Korn announced he was leaving in June.

• In March, Discovery said it would shut down Discovery People, which it had bought from CBS. Operators always get calls from subscribers whenever they shut down a channel, even if it were the Dick Cheney Goodtime Network. There is no record of an operator getting a single call when Discovery People went dark.

• A federal court judge ruled in April that utilities could charge operators whatever they want to carry high-speed Internet services over the utilities’ lines. The ruling could cost MSOs hundreds of millions of dollars.

• At the National Show in May, feisty L.A. Times writer Sally Hofmeister grilled the press-shy Joe Collins on why his Time Warner Cable took off the Disney Channel earlier in the month. Speculation was rampant that the NCTA would forget about using aggressive print reporters as moderators and go back to using ignorant, pushover TV stars such as Catherine Crier, Bernard Shaw or Larry King. Privately, the NCTA insisted it was delighted by the combative session.

• In June, yet another analyst came out and said middleware services will spawn services that will net MSOs billions of dollars. Cautious operators continued to dabble in interactive services, but with little commitment to go forward in large numbers, ITV remains largely a promise, not a fact.

• In July, Adelphia hired AT&T Broadband’s Ann Montgomery to a key senior operations post. Since the MSO still lacked a public relations contact, no one in the press could find her.

• Also in July, Wink CEO Maggie Wilderotter was practically speechless when a Myers Forum attendee asked her why her interactive ad service is all but invisible on Time Warner Cable’s system in New York.

• In August, Fox Family Channel put the proposed Boyz and Girlz channels out of their misery, hopefully ending the ridiculous attempt on the part of middle-aged white men to appear hip and urban. What’s next? Haim Sabin in baggy pants and a backward baseball cap?

• In September, a DLJ analyst warned investors to steer clear of AT&T after it closed at $31. This was scant consolation to clients who held the stock when it was at $60 earlier in the year.

• In October, No. 2 ISP Earthlink showed it can play hardball as well as AOL Time Warner when the company complained Time Warner Cable was negotiating in bad faith in talks to open up the MSO’s high-speed cable lines. Weeks later, Earthlink reached a deal with Time Warner.

• In November, Fox News Channel’s election coverage beat the other cable news networks. The postman in Cable World’s New York building developed a hernia from picking up all the resumes flying out of the CNN offices upstairs.

• In December, George W. Bush finally won the Presidency. MSOs, which backed Bush, will find his deregulatory stance a double-edged sword as mega-mergers and partnerships put heavy pressure on cable operators. (e.g., Viacom and AOL’s increasing marketplace clout).

In the interests of fairness, there was plenty for cable to cheer in the New Year: DSL is a disaster; VOD is coming (eventually); people now hate their natural gas and oil company more than their cable operator; digital and modems are doing well; the winter will be cold and snowy, meaning more people will stay in and watch cable TV; and USA is carrying Doctor, Doctor, a greatly appreciated sitcom, thus giving me something to tape on my new TiVo.

So where is SCTV?