Latest in Cable TV

UPDATED with reports of some customers having service restored. Before Comcast can come back to the bargaining table with a new offer for 21st Century Fox assets, it will likely need to get its broadband service back up and running. As the battle with Disney over Fox continues, the No. 1 U.S. cable provider is dealing…

The rumbling under the ground of traditional television is growing louder according to the results of Deloitte’s latest annual Digital Democracy Survey, which polled 2,131 U.S. consumers in early November. The audit, consulting, tax and advisory firm found that 74% of U.S. households subscribe to pay TV and about…

UPDATE, 7:23PM: ESPN has thrown up a red flag to Verizon’s plan to allow FiOS TV subscribers to choose smaller “skinny” packages of programming bundles tailored a little more closely to individual consumer tastes — including splitting off ESPN and ESPN2 into sports bundles. The Re/code website reported late this…

Cable a la carte pricing, whereby consumers pay for only the channels they want, has finally broken through in Canada. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said in a sweeping ruling today that cable and satellite providers must offer consumers an affordable basic lineup and allow them to…

Forget all the talk about how much people hate their cable and satellite companies, and want to cut the cord. Pay TV is “probably the best bargain in entertainment today” and doesn’t have a big problem appealing to consumers, Disney CFO Jay Rasulo told an investor gathering today. Disney was thinking offensively…

It’s time for the pay TV industry’s annual slap in the face from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which surveys 70,000 people about the products and services they use most. Cable and satellite distributors always fare badly in these polls — but this year’s results are especially disturbing after a slight uptic…

In this week’s podcast, Deadline’s executive editor David Lieberman and host David Bloom preview the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, which David L. will be covering in Las Vegas. Among the big trends the Davids say we can expect from the mammoth show: big, big TVs showing ultra-high-definition “4K” images; new tech…

ANALYSIS FROM COMIC-CON: Last evening, I attended a Comic-Con preview screening for the USA series Psych and saw that rabid fans camped out 12 hours in a line around the block just to glimpse an episode that will soon screen on their TV sets. Today, I see an Emmy nomination count for cable TV series that dwarfs…

Despite the growing talk about pay TV cord cutting, providers can feel OK — not great — about consumer attitudes toward them, according to the latest annual measure from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Subscribers gave cable, satellite, and telco video providers the highest overall satisfaction score ACSI…

If you think cable companies already have too much power, just wait. Over the next five years or so the industry “will consolidate to around 3-4 dominant cable operators, which will have sizeable footprints,” Moody’s Investors Service SVP Neil Begley says in a report today. The big guys will start to snap up smaller…

The FCC voted unanimously to allow cable companies such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision to encrypt basic services, Bloomberg reported. Prior to the ruling issued late Friday, cable companies encrypted premium cable programming but were barred from scrambling basic channels so consumers would not be…

Google has disclosed details of a planned 1 gigabit per second Internet service in the Kansas City area to go with an IPTV service with 161 channels, Multichannel.com reports. Google plans to charge $70 a month for the standalone fiber-optic delivered Internet connection or $120 per month for TV plus 1-Gig service…