Wisconsin Cable Franchise Bill March 2007

Roger Bindl reports on the March 27, 2007 public hearing on Wisconsin’s Cable Bill’s AB-207 and SB-107. These are general highlights from 7.5 hours of taping the authors, city, and public responses. The views are contradictory at times, but hopefully presented with a balanced view overall.

Highlights included comments from Representative Montgomery, Senator Plale, Eric Griswold creator of Brain Box Television, City Channel 12 Madison, Barry Orton UW Madison, Scott VanderSanden AT&T, Grant Langley Milwaukee City Attorney, and narrated overviews. Also highlighted is a spotlight on how an author of this bill knew very little about the exact things they define in the bill.

Link to bill at this point in time: AB-207.

2 responses to “Wisconsin Cable Franchise Bill March 2007”

John Klatt

April 16, 2007

Nice peice on this legislation Roger, thanks for covering it.

Ken Pyle

April 26, 2007

[This post is from a telco friend who wishes to remain anonymous and was sent to me to post. – Ken Pyle]

He suggested that an AT&T representative made a comment to the affect that, “This bill [the WI State Franchise Bill] has over 70% chance of passing and we are committing over 15 full time lobbyists [confirmed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article] and we will smear the rest of you guys tomorrow with statewide ads of being anti-consumer and not competitive if you vote to not support it here today.”

There is a lot of devil in the details [in this bill] and most of it is not good for small operators. It is better for us to have larger providers, like AT&T or Centurytel, come to town and face the same Village Board that we have to face.

It is tough enough to break even with programming rate increases and tech upgrades [which this year is the first for us to break even in almost 6 years of deploying CATV due to rate increases of around 15.00 dollars over last two years – Not good for customers but we had to pay for network upgrades and the cost programming increases].

Also, the biggest problem with this legislation is while we argue and fight over fees, the DBS people are smiling on the side line and gaining price points and market share. There is a 800 lb. elephant in the room and everyone is ignoring it so far.
Thanks for your coverage and helping to inform our people.