Cable Act and Cable Choice

November 20, 2002

Washington, D.C.: On October 5, 1992, Congress passed the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, also known as The Cable Act.

The Cable Act was famous for regulating a number of issues including: prohibiting cable operators from re-transmitting the signal of a commercial television or radio station without the station's consent; requiring that a cable operator get permission from a broadcast station before cable programming can be aired on the broadcast spectrum; and requiring that cable operators must set aside up to a maximum of one-third of its channel capacity for local commercial television stations.

Lesser known is that the Cable Act also contained the "tier buy-through" rule, a provision that prohibits a cable operator from conditioning a subscriber's access to per channel or per program video programming on the purchase of any other tier other than the basic tier. In simpler terms, this means that cable operators could no longer force cable subscribers to purchase expanded or digital packages just to get access to premium channels such as HBO or Showtime. The provision applies to all cable systems, including those that are not subject to rate regulation. Cable systems that were technically incapable of letting subscribers buy only the basic tier and still have access to all pay services were given ten years to bring their systems into compliance.

October of 2002 was the ten-year deadline for cable systems to comply with the Cable Act. Now that the rule has taken effect, cable customers now have much more flexibility in choosing which channel or pricing packages they'd like to purchase. However, the rule allows customers to choose only premium stations such as HBO on an a la carte basis, not other satellite stations such as CNN or MTV.

But cable customers are still not getting a square deal. According to David Butler of the D.C.-based Consumers Union, cable operators should be able to offer a la carte for all channels and notes that cable rates have increased 45% since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the industry. Consumer advocates will continue to fight for such a provision.