Good Times Roll for Cable Executives

As U.S. cable industry executives arrive in hot, humid New Orleans for their annual convention this week, the heat is likely only from the temperature and not from regulators, analysts said.

Cable operators have scored key victories since they last gathered, including persuading a federal court to strike down a key ownership restriction as well as insulating their high-speed Internet services from having to share their systems.

And just last week, the top 10 cable operators, including AT&T; Broadband and AOL Time Warner Inc., moved out of the frying pan by accepting a challenge from the Federal Communications Commission to speed the move to digital television.

“Cable, like everyone else in the telecom/media sector, faces a variety of challenges in a difficult economic climate,” Legg Mason analysts Blair Levin and Michael Balhoff said in a research note. “In our opinion, however, the challenges do not include a negative regulatory climate.”

As a result, the cable industry has been plowing ahead rolling out high-speed Internet service to more than 7 million customers and deploying local telephone service, challenging the dominant local telephone carriers. But the sky is not completely clear, with some members of Congress complaining about rising cable prices and independent Internet service providers seeking open access to the cable pipeline.