Building Stability In a Transient Town

Cable World, Oct 28, 2002

"When you look at a rotator from 4 p.m. till midnight at 200 bucks for quality programming on a USA, A&E or Lifetime, that's a heck of a value," he said.

Cox inserts on 48 networks. Dalrymple said the strongest overall sellers are ESPN, Lifetime, TBS, TNT, USA, A&E, Discovery, MTV, E! and Nick. Some clients do buy local cable on a more specific show-by-show basis.

Most of the time, cable is "cheaper on a per spot basis, but you have to judge whether that's what you want to do. On a cost per point basis it's usually much higher because it just doesn't have the audience size," Jungblut said.

But sometimes, the client needs very specific shows. "We buy a lot of local spots for events that come into the MGM Grand Garden, so that could be anything from Aerosmith to Neil Diamond. When we did Britney Spears, we specifically bought TRL because it was very important to the promoter that we do that. On the other hand, Cher - it's a much broader range."

That degree of targeting costs. "Obviously, the more narrowly targeted it is the more of a premium they're going to be able to justify, but I feel like we get pretty good deals," Jungblut said.

The deals aren't always good enough. Cox priced the MTV Video Music Awards, one of cable's highest-rated shows, at about $850 a spot. "We didn't buy it," she said.

Jungblut also passed on a package Cox put together covering all of the episodes of this season's edition of The Real World. Cox felt this edition would be a big seller because it was set in Las Vegas.

CableRep also sells spots on Visitor Vision, which reaches 75,000 hotel rooms with eight networks.

With so many subscribers coming and going, customer care is key. "Since we took over the system in 1998, we've almost doubled the employee population, from 450 to almost 1,000 today, and that's been a direct result of the growth that we've been able to achieve in the system," Lipford said.

While Dalrymple sells ads, Will Lundstrom, VP of network operations, is responsible for the equipment that keeps subscribers watching. He also has to keep up with Lipford's aggressive new-product agenda. Cox Las Vegas services five different franchise communities, passing 550,000 homes, through a single head-end.

"We have combinations of equipment, both Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta," said Lundstrom. "Our digital platform is S-A. We're fortunate in that they were the first to come out with a box that had HD integrated into the same converter. It wasn't a sidecar. And they were very helpful with the launch.

"It's pretty standardized now, but it's not the same vendor from point A to point Z," Lundstrom added. "We're using Nexus modulators, using S-A IF upconverters. We picked the best product in each stage of the video technology that we need. We have one MTC here - we call it Master Telecommunications Center - and 16 hub sites. And we just pass our video around using IP video technology, so when you come out of the hub sites you have head-end quality signal for our analog channels. On our digital channels, we pass them around using SONET gear. When we come out of each hub site, we've got digital quality there as well. And then we're using a mix of ATM and 1-gigabit Ethernet to pass around all of our high-speed data for our modem customers as well as our business service customers."