Complete Story
07/24/2017
Indie Cable Operators: Small but Powerful
Small cable operators for years have been the so-called canary in the coal mine for issues that have later affected the broader telecom market, and this year is no different. Those ops also have seen the competitive advantage of offering faster and faster broadband speeds, of providing consumers with easier access to subscription video-on-demand services and now, enabling access to over-the-top content. As the industry assembles in Indianapolis this week for The Independent Show, MCN senior finance editor editor Mike Farrell spoke with National Cable Television Cooperative president and CEO Rich Fickle about the co-op’s biggest priorities and its plan to dive headfirst into one of the industry’s most pressing issues, retransmission consent. An edited transcript follows.
MCN: What’s at the top of your priority list?
Rich Fickle: From our standpoint, we’ve been blessed with a year where we’re not doing any of the major network renewals this year. We’re always working on trying to work on them and improve them, but we don’t have any major renewals going on right now. So we have shifted our focus to an area that we’ve dabbled, but that has been a high-cost growth issue for our members, and that’s retrans [retransmission consent].
