Disney, Cablevision and Parker Home

Guest Commentary in Multichannel News

By Tom Wolzien, Wolzien LLC -- Multichannel News, 3/15/2010 8:01:00 AM

I thought that I’d been on all sides of the retransmission- consent issue. I can argue the broadcasters’ needs and rights. I can argue the distributors’ efforts to keep down consumer bills. I thought I’d seen it all, until last Sunday.

I was at Francis E. Parker Home, a lovely nursing facility (such as these facilities are) in Piscataway, N.J., near New Brunswick and an hour south of New York. We were visiting my wife’s mom and sitting with other residents and their guests — spouses, sons, daughters, grandkids, etc.

As far as I could tell, nobody ever paid any attention as to where the TV signal in this place came from. The big-screen TVs in the central areas and the sets in residents’ rooms ran like any other utility. They’re there and on, 24 hours a day. Operating without question and with no questions asked. In this case, the company providing that television utility is Cablevision Systems.

To say that TV is taken for granted in a nursing facility is an understatement. But it is also an understatement to say that TV is essential to the mental and emotional health and well-being of the residents. It does much more than pass the time. It keeps people active, so long as their minds can be active — even if their bodies aren’t. It is the foundation of conversations among the wheelchairs. And most of all, it helps people who can no longer be part of the outside world … be part of that world.

This was a very different view for me, and I never would have seen it if it weren’t for the Cablevision-The Walt Disney Co. dispute over ABC that residents, staff and families were attempting to understand. Sometimes you don’t see how important things are to people … until they aren’t there anymore. WABC-TV, New York’s channel 7, wasn’t on those screens any more, replaced by a monotonous female voice extolling the rightness of the Cablevision cause. Big Sister.

People were confused, but they wanted to know. My wife, Valerie, God bless her, told people that I could explain everything it since I worked in the industry, thank you very much. And I tried.

And it was surprising how much the 80- or 90- or 100- something crowd knew.

They knew that the television broadcasting that they’d known their entire adult lives was in trouble.

They knew that cable was costing more and more.

And, most importantly, they knew that somebody was taking away their Oscars … and in some cases, it might be the last one they’d ever get to see.

They wanted to know who to blame. I tried to cast it as a business problem between two companies stuck in an economic bind and trying to sort things out in a very public way.

The 80-plus-year-old retired corporate attorney was having none of that. “But who actually threw the switch?” he demanded.

Ah, Disney. But why shouldn’t Cablevision pay them for ABC when they pay them for other networks?

Ah, because they don’t want to raise their prices.

Then why don’t they just make less money?

Ah … And why are they putting us through this? They have no right to do that.
Ah … We were long gone by Sunday night when Cablevision joined the Oscars, 14 minutes in. By the next day, the dispute was probably forgotten in most homes.

But at Parker Home, and for people who take television as a necessity, the shutdown has added one more continuing uncertainty during a period of life filled with uncertainty. Is this going to happen again and again, they asked?

So when Time Warner Cable and Disney face off this summer — or when any other content provider and distributor think about shutt ing down — perhaps the CEOs should forgo having their final negotiating meeting in one of their offices, and instead sit down in front of the big TV at one of the Parker Homes of this world. They should look at the people as tightly clustered around the big TV as their wheelchairs will allow. And they should imagine themselves, or a family member, sitting in one of those chairs.

And then they should ask themselves, “Why are they putting us through this?”

Indeed.

 

Tom Wolzien, a financial analyst and media-industry veteran, is chairman of Wolzien LLC.