BULK-SUBSCRIPTION TV, P.2

However, there are precautions you can take. David Goodman, director of business development for Tudor Realty, says one safeguard is to have the board make the monthly fee part of the maintenance – in essence, treating telecommunications delivery as a building-wide amenity the same as a laundry room or a doorperson.

If your co-op or condo decides to go this way, you first need to decide which provider you want to use. The board can do the research itself or have the managing agent do it. "When a board requests it," says Timothy Grogan, president of John J. Grogan & Associates, "we go out and investigate, and bring the board the information."

For convenience's sake, the franchised cable company in your area – either Time Warner or Cablevision – is usually the default: that's what residents will already have, and changing to a fiber-optic provider like RCN or Verizon or a satellite provider like DirecTV involves separate service visits for the cable box to be removed and for the new service's converter to be installed, and it also involves different channel numbering. The actual cable channels themselves, from A&E to Zee TV, are much the same, with the biggest difference for most subscribers being that Time Warner has an exclusive news channel New York 1, while others might carry Regional News Network instead.

Regarding service, the cable companies, under their franchise agreements, must respond to all service calls regarding major outages, service interruptions and poor service within 24 hours, and with malfunctions corrected within 48 hours of notice (unless the appointments are requested after 4 P.M. Friday; then the clock starts ticking on the next business day). RCN, which New York City franchises as an "Open Video System" (OVS), must comply with the same customer-service standards. With other providers, you can insist on those standards contractually during negotiations.

Aside from the familiar cable companies, your choices include satellite-TV providers and digital fiber-optic providers.

Satellite. Whether you choose DirecTV, Dish Network, or Sky Angel, which specializes in Christian faith-based family programming, satellite TV works two ways. If you have a south-facing window and a clear line of sight to the sky, and if the co-op or condo allows it, you can install a dish about the size of a medium pizza on your terrace or an outside wall. Or, the building can install a single "satellite master antenna television" (SMATV) system on the roof, and have it feed into several units. In either case, don't pay attention to those cable-TV commercials that try to convince you that satellite-TV goes out at the first sign of rain.

Fiber optic. Three fiber-optic providers serve New York City: NuVisions, a division of Microwave Satellite Technologies; RCN; and Verizon, with its FiOS system. "Fiber optic," explains RCN's Ontiveros "is a bigger pipe" than the coaxial copper cable that cable-TV companies use. "Depending on how you utilize that pipe, you provide more bandwidth." When requested (and only in those areas that it serves), RCN brings its fiber-optic network to a point close to the house or in the basement, and converts it to coaxial.

As technologies and media continue to converge, most of the companies offering TV programming also offer broadband cable-Internet (or, in Verizon's case, the slower but less expensive, telephone-line-based DSL) and cable/fiber-optic telephone services. If your residents are particularly high-tech types, it might be worth seeing what kind of deal a company might make for a bulk-subscription that bundles, say, TV and the Internet.

It's a brave new wired and wireless world, so you might as well buy in bulk now and, in those time-honored words, pass the savings on.

Adapted from Habitat October 2006. For the complete article and more, join our Archive >>