Vermont: Burlington Telecom Secretly Trying To Ditch Cable Customers, Judging From Price Hikes

By Ted Cohen BurlingtonDailyNews

If there is a method to the madness of Burlington Telecom’s continually increasing prices of cable TV, it's quickly becoming apparent.

The municipally-run cable provider in Vermont's largest city just issued the latest in a continuing string of citywide notices of the latest price increase.

But the key to the letter that was sent to all of its customers was an accompanying sheet trumpeting why the company feels its customers should transition over to “streaming” providers.

Streamers, of course, do not require the company to maintain the infrastructure that brings the cable signals to every one of its customers.

Streaming relies on one signal - the internet, so it's much cheaper for Burlington Telecom if all it has to provide customers is an internet signal.

See how this works?

“Cut the Cable Cord with Smarter TV,” the company recommends on its own website. “Say goodbye to traditional cable and hello to smarter TV solutions. Enjoy streaming flexibility, better value, and the content you love, on your schedule.”

The Dirty Little Secret when it comes to cable providers is that they actually want to get rid of customers to transition them over to streaming services, which are much less costly for the provider to maintain.

In its latest rate-hike warning, the company says it will be raising the price of basic-TV service by $5 monthly and the Standard Plus TV package by an additional $11.50 per month.

With basic internet service that brings the monthly cost of cable TV in Burlington, Vermont to roughly $225.

“We know this news is not welcomed and share your frustration with the continued rise in network programming fees,” the company says and its rate-hike announcement. “Our customer service team is available to answer any questions and find solutions for your viewing and budgetary needs.”

And here's the kicker:

“We also encourage you to visit our ‘Smarter TV’ page on our website at burlingtonelecom.com/smarter-tv/

“The rising cost of programming is a nationwide issue,” the company reports. “Please visit TVonMYside.com for complete details on our efforts to keep programming costs in check.”

For those paying attention, “TV On My Side" is an absolutely-impossible website to navigate when it comes to trying to figure out how to subscribe to streaming services.

The other downside to streaming is that, as some cable customers transition over to streaming, if they so choose to do so, the result is a decrease in the size of the customer base supporting the cable provider's infrastructure costs.

As the numbers of customers dwindles, the remaining subscribers are then forced to pick up the additional burden of the company's cost of doing business.

The moral of the story seems to be that it's a lot cheaper to get off the couch and go out and take a walk. The level of self-satisfaction from exercise also helps assuage the pain of the rising cost of watching cable TV so yeah, it's a win-win to ditch traditional viewing habits altogether.

If there is an advantage to customers eschewing exercise and staying on the couch, paying the steep prices for cable TV, it's the design of the remote control.

A typical, standard cable remote control has buttons that allow the user to punch in numbers of channels as well as up and down arrows to navigate through the networks.

The downside to using streamer services is that the remote controls for those applications are much less user friendly because they lack the option to jump from one channel to another by merely punching in numbers.

The question is whether that loss of practicality is worth the skyrocketing cost of cable TV.