Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : 5 Television, 2 Cable Firms to Negotiate Over Signal Charge

SANTA CLARITA — Unless an agreement is reached between two local cable companies and five Los Angeles television stations before an October deadline, residents will be left with only two local TV stations, and no Simpsons.

Under a new federal law passed earlier this year, hundreds of broadcast stations nationwide have the choice to provide their signals free of charge to local cable stations or require compensation.

Five local TV stations--KCBS Channel 2, KNBC Channel 4, KTLA Channel 5, KABC Channel 7 and KTTV Channel 11--decided last month to charge a fee to King Video Cable and ATC Cablevision, which bring the stations to Santa Clarita cable viewers.

KCOP Channel 13 and KCAL Channel 9 will offer their signals for free.

Most cable viewers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area will still receive local television because they can tune in the channels with their TV antenna. But Santa Clarita Valley residents face a troubling problem: Mountains surrounding the city make it nearly impossible to get clear reception from Los Angeles TV stations.

Cable television in the Santa Clarita Valley started in 1962, and it is still the only way to receive television signals transmitted from Mt. Wilson, where all Los Angeles broadcast TV signals originate.

“It means that we have to negotiate something,” said Shirley Aronson, general manager at King Video Cable, a unit of the Providence Journal Corp. “They may ask for cash, we just don’t know what they want to do.”

She said company officials have meetings scheduled with all the stations to negotiate an agreement before the Oct. 6 deadline. King Video Cable serves about 27,000 homes in the area.

There are now about 35 Los Angeles cable companies affected by the new law, said Scott Binder, general manager for ATC Cablevision, which serves an additional 22,000 Santa Clarita Valley homes in a separate service area.

ATC’s parent company, entertainment industry giant Time Warner Inc., issued a statement in June refusing to pay retransmission costs, Binder said.

Binder objects to the “retransmission consent” concept, contending that a cable station should not have to pay to increase the local TV station’s audience and, therefore, its advertising rates.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates cable rates, prevents cable companies from passing along the new increases to subscribers. With no other way to recover costs, the firm will not pay for local TV stations, Binder said.

On the contrary, cable companies sometimes receive free advertising time to help offset the costs of such national TV news channels such as Cable News Network, Binder said.

“Local broadcasters don’t offer that to us,” he said.

Furthermore, local television stations may undercut their own advertising rates by losing viewers who subscribe to cable companies that drop the stations from their service, he added.

KCBS-TV Planning Director Carl Friedlander said negotiations with local cable companies are expected to begin by late this month.