Scrambled channels irk cable viewers
Comcast Corp. is cracking down on a free lunch many of its Boston cable television customers have been enjoying for years.
The largest cable provider in Greater Boston has started scrambling or terminating broadcasts of channels that thousands of its customers have been watching for free.
City Hall officials said yesterday the move appears to be entirely legal, but is still drawing many complaints from Hub residents who are finding that channels like CNN, ESPN, Comedy Central, and the History Channel, which they once watched regularly, are showing up as an unintelligible blur. In some cases, the move is also obstructing customers' use of TiVo-style digital video recording devices.
"We were told we were grandfathered in, but over the last month these channels have been disappearing one by one," said Leslie Wilcox, a South End artist who has been subscribing to Comcast and predecessors for more than 10 years and has lost access to AMC, Bravo, SciFi, and other channels.
"We called up and they said, 'Oh, you shouldn't have gotten that in the first place,' but it's very annoying. I don't like the excuses that they give," Wilcox said. "I'm really thinking I want to go out and buy a satellite dish."
Arthur Clarke, a Back Bay investment adviser, said the new cable box he was required to get last month to maintain his service has rendered his TiVo useless, and he suspects Comcast is trying to force him to shell out several dollars a month more for a digital box with TiVo capability that Comcast plans to sell later this year.
"It's a behind-the-scenes, stealth, sneaky way of imposing a price increase," Clarke said. "It's really a sleazy operation."
Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer L. Khoury said Comcast is only looking to treat all customers fairly -- making sure no one gets channels for free they should be paying for -- as it upgrades the 20-year-old cable system it inherited from the original Hub cable provider, Cablevision Systems Corp. AT&T Corp.'s AT&T Broadband cable unit later bought Cablevision's Boston and suburban systems, and Comcast took over AT&T Broadband in November 2002.
"This project ensures that our customers are receiving the channels that they have subscribed to," Khoury said. "It's the next step in an ongoing video upgrade that has already allowed us to offer video on demand and high-definition television and will enable us to continue to offer new services over the next several years."
Khoury said the new restricted channel lineups are another step toward Comcast's development of a more reliable and simpler network, instead of the current Boston system, which uses A and B groups of channels. The change to a unified network will also solve the TiVo problem Clarke and others face, Khoury said.
Michael Lynch, director of Boston's cable television licensing office, said the changes Comcast has made probably affect about 30,000 customers. Those include people who subscribe to $8.10-a-month basic cable, which includes Boston over-the-air commercial TV channels and a handful of public access stations. These customers have been able to get several additional channels not covered by the discount plan because they own newer TVs that connect directly to a cable plug rather than requiring a set-top box.
"They're perfectly entitled to do what they are doing, but it's creating a lot of problems, and a lot of people are frustrated," Lynch said, citing dozens of complaints received by his office in recent weeks. Comcast has followed proper procedures in notifying city and state regulators about the changes, which Lynch said "are correcting a historic dysfunction" in the system.
Khoury said Comcast is about 70 percent through a project it started in March to scramble channel broadcasts to limit basic subscribers to only the channels covered by their subscription fee.
When Cablevision began building the Boston system in the 1980s, it offered several low-priced subscription plans covering bare-bones rebroadcasts of commercial over-the-air stations. Some have been phased out for new customers by Comcast, but existing customers had the plans grandfathered in. Among other recent changes, however, Comcast has required a few thousand local subscribers to an old Cablevision plan called Metro to get a new cable box that costs $4.10 more a month, including the fee for a remote control rental.
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com. 