UPDATE ON Cable Television : Cable TV Companies Pushing Quality as S.D. Market Tightens

With slower subscriber growth ahead for the local cable television industry, the largest of San Diego County’s 14 cable companies say they are placing greater emphasis on improving programming, reception and service so as to minimize cable service “disconnects.”

Toward that end, many of the nearly 700,000 cable TV households in the county are finding themselves on the receiving end of customer preference surveys, special offers and direct mailings that tout new programming and technology, including fiberoptic transmission lines.

With about 70% of San Diego County homes accessible to cable now receiving the service, San Diego is commonly referred to in the industry as the most “wired” cable TV market in the country. The county’s penetration is far above the 56% penetration of households nationwide, said Robert McRann, vice president and general manager of Cox Cable San Diego, which is the county’s largest provider with 305,000 customers.

The housing and population booms that the county has experienced over the last six years have produced tremendous surge in demand for cable TV hook-ups. That demand curve has meant that local cable companies have been able to replace disconnects easily with orders from new residents.

Cox and three other companies--Southwestern Cable TV of San Diego with 130,000 subscribers, Dimension Cable of Vista with 112,000 households and Daniels Cablevision in Carlsbad with 44,000--together control about 85% of the county’s cable TV subscribers.

The fastest growing of the four is Dimension Cable in Vista, which has the cable TV franchise for several fast-growing North County municipalities. Dimension has increased its subscriber rolls from 98,000 households since the end of last year, a 19% annual growth rate. Southwestern Cable will grow by about 11% this year, Daniels by 10% and Cox by between 3.5% and 5.5%, the companies said Wednesday.

(Conventional wisdom seems to have it that San Diego’s high cable TV penetration is because of high demographics and a good local economy. McRann said it is more a result of the generally poor quality of network broadcast transmission. The county’s rugged topography lacks a central vantage point from which signals can be beamed without topographical interruption. “Affluence has nothing to do with it,” he said.)

But industry observers say growth is due to level off because the supply of new housing is being cut by the slow-growth initiatives passed by local municipalities in recent years. The fact that many corners of the county are already fully “wired” means cable companies can’t grow as easily as in the past from simple market penetration.

Hence, cable companies are paying much more attention to keeping their existing customers content and avoiding subscriber “churn.”

Southwestern Cable, the cable company that provides service to city of San Diego residents north of Interstate 8, added two channels over the past year, Turner Network Television (TNT) and Prime Ticket, as a direct result of viewer preference polling, spokeswoman Sandra Cochran said.

TNT offers mainly sports and movie selections from Ted Turner’s 4,000-title MGM film library and Prime Ticket is a Southern California regional sports network.

McRann said TNT, which recently was added to Cox’s menu of channels as well, is the most successful new cable channel “launch” in history, having signed up cable systems with 32 million subscribers nationwide in the year since it was introduced.

Dimension and Cox are also touting their fiberoptics lines that have been installed in certain segments of their transmission lines. The new technology improves reception and increases the lines’ transmission capacity, a Dimension spokeswoman said.