Complete Story
10/26/2016
The Fastest-Growing Cost for Cable Companies
Cable TV prices keep going up, but cable companies may not be entirely to blame. A big part of what determines the price consumers pay for TV is how much media companies -- the network owners -- charge distributors for their channels.
And those costs are increasing quickly. Comcast 's(NASDAQ: CMCSA) programming expense, to cite one example, increased 8.4% in the first half of the year and the company said it expects programming expenses to continue to increase."
But one group of media companies are increasing their prices at an outstanding pace. The average cable system paid traditional broadcasters -- CBS (NYSE: CBS) , Twenty-First Century Fox (NASDAQ: FOX) , Disney 's(NYSE: DIS) ABC, and Comcast's NBC -- 63% more in retransmission fees during 2014 as compared to the previous year, according to a recent FCC report . And the spike didn't end there. Analysts expect retransmission fees to increase faster than they had originally projected through the rest of the decade.
