Cable Ops Offer Family Tiers, Says McSlarrow

[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton & John M. Higgins]
National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow Monday outlined preliminary plans for a number of cable operators voluntarily to start selling "family tiers." Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Advance-Newhouse, Brennan, Insight, and Midcontinent are all on board and other operators are considering offering family tiers. The move is an attempt to head off government-mandated tiering or a la carte cable lineups. McSlarrow said the individual operators would define family-friendly differently, saying there would be anti-trust issues involved in coming to group decisions on those. He said he could not say exactly what the tiers would look like, but that it would be a case of the mandatory basic service--broadcasters and public access channels--then a choice of the traditional 70 or 80 channels of expanded basic or a digital family tier, though he did not know what form that would take, or how it would be priced. McSlarrow said he hoped that government-mandated tiers would now be off the table because he said the government would "get it wrong." He also cautioned that the decisions by the individual operators "were not easy decisions, nor is this an easy place," he said, "because marketplace negotiations have produced the greatest single engine for diversity or compelling content in the world. That should not be lightly trod upon." Additionally, former Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti said he had held three meetings with industry in the past two weeks, and that the conclusion was to simplify the TV ratings and give parents more information about them. Mr. Valenti said he had been working on behalf of cable, broadcast and movies "trying to make the American parent understand that they have total control over all the visual programming into their home.
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