CABLE CONQUEST CONTINUES

It seemed like a $200 million sure thing for Warner Amex. The Dallas cable franchise, which will eventually produce revenues ranging upward from $2 million a month, was the sole property of Warner Amex.

But Warner Amex is now finding that when that many dollars are involved, nothing is that simple. It will take until 1985 – late 1984 at the earliest – to string the 4,000 miles of cable necessary to “wire” the Dallas viewing market. And with all the publicity that has been generated by cable in the suburbs, many Dallas residents are beginning to want cable now.

Enter Silver Screen and a handful of other independent. cable companies that have found a way to short-circuit Warner Amex’s government-granted monopoly and start raking in the cable profits. The independents have wired a number of large North Dallas apartment complexes, erecting satellite receiving stations within each cluster of apartment buildings so as not to run cables across city property – the exclusive domain of Warner Amex.

The independents don’t offer nearly as many channels as Warner Amex will provide. (Silver Screen, for instance, which has wired The Village complex, offers four channels, as opposed to the 80 that the Warner Amex cable will bring.) But the independents have one advantage: Their service is available now. Although the independents’ numbers are not yet all that impressive – Silver Screen serves around 1,700 subscribers – their plans are enough to scare even a corporate giant like Warner Amex. Cable Dallas, another independent serving 4,000 subscribers, plans to reach 20,000 apartment dwellers by the end of the year. Add to that the 100,000 viewers who currently subscribe to the three STV (subscriber television) services – VEU, Preview and ONTV – and Warner Amex is suddenly looking at competition in a market that was supposedly its exclusive property.

In response to the competition, the city franchise holder has started offering “interim service” to North Dallas apartments. Even though Warner Amex’s original franchise development plan didn’t call for the service, the company is busy wiring apartment complexes to provide 19 TV channels plus four movie channels for a fee of $14.90 per month. By the end of the year, Warner Amex plans to have 20,000 apartment subscribers of its own. That will doubtless go a long way toward wiping out the competition.