Red Bank TV

Money talks.  Especially when talking to politicians and corporations.  So let’s try to speak their language and figure out if there are any costs associated with the issues I’ve brought up. 

First, let’s see if we can identify any costs associated with not getting Verizon to commit to not opposing a municipal WiFi. 

Verizon has a well documented record of sparing no expense when it comes to opposing muni-WiFi’s.  I would venture to guess that if we don’t remove their opposition to a Red Bank muni-WiFi now then we will have to entertain legal measures down the road.  What would a legal battle with Verizon cost?  Five thousand dollars? 25,50,150?  Philadelphia spent millions fighting Verizon.  We are a small town.  Hopefully it would cost us less.  For the sake of this post let’s put a number on it.  You can choose your own but let me pull a number out of thin air and say it would cost us $250,000 in legal fees to fight Verizon for something that could be taken care of now.  We have some 5000 households in our town.  That works out to about $50 per household. 

I don’t know how many households in town subscribe to cable so I’ll have to do some guessing here.  Let’s say 4000 households subscribe to cable.  Let’s be generous and split that right down the middle and say 2000 households will switch to Verizon.  So 250000 / 2000 would be about $125 per Verizon subscriber.  This should be passed along in the franchise agreement.

What about the Tiered Internet issue?  How could that cost Red Bank money?  The big cost that would be associated with this issue would be along the lines of an opportunity cost, which would then be passed along as a realized cost in the form of lower tax revenue. 

People who watch internet growth and development worry that Tiered Internet plans will make it harder for new companies to emerge and compete with the big guys.  There are a lot of small companies in Red Bank and with the proposals before the town for more office space there are sure to be many more small companies in our future.  What if one of those companies has the next big internet idea?  Analysts say that in the world of Tiered Access that our little Red Bank company with the next great idea would have almost insurmountable barriers in place that would keep our company from competing with the more established players.

It is not hard to assign costs to a Red Bank business that looses out to bigger competitors and has to shut down, all because the big telecoms used Tiered Access to create an uneven playing field.  Just pick a sample business from the tax rolls and take away the tax revenue generated by that company and take away the tax revenue that the employees of that company. 

 

How could lack of “A La Carte” cable plans cost Red Bank money?  I’ll admit, lack of affordable cable TV programming is hard to translate into a revenue stream.  But this is a blog so why don’t I give it a shot.

If there truly is value to educational programming on cable TV then one could assign cost to the education effort required to bring children who don’t have cable TV in line with those who do.  It’s a stretch. I know.  But maybe this issue isn’t so much about the money but the cost that could be associated with losing out on that one kid who could have but was not inspired to learn about something different or explore a career they might not have heard of on TV.

So long story short.   There is real money associated with not getting these issues addressed by Verizon.  If our town council can not convince Verizon to address these issues then we should charge them more in anticipation of future costs.

 

If we can not get Verizon to work with us on the issues I’ve identified then we should be proactive and work these additional costs into the franchise agreement.