Thursday, March 02, 2006

Pass the Lube

A post leached from here.

The original post is in italics, my comments in regualr type.  I know better than to read this crap because it makes me very cranky, raises my blood pressure and makes me want to lash out and break things.

And yes for the record I am bitter.

TORONTO (CP) - Rogers Communications (TSX:RCI.NV.B) expects more moderate growth in its Internet and digital cable TV subscriber base this year but will be able to push through price increases, a senior executive said Tuesday.
"The good news, I think, on both is that there is actually some pricing power," Rogers vice-president finance John Gossling said in a webcast speech at an investor conference in Palm Beach, Fla.
Because in Canada there is no competition, you can choose Rogers or Ma Bell and both of them will equally screw you.
"Unlike the competitive situation down here (in the U.S.), the prices on Internet and TV have been actually moving up quite nicely (for Rogers) in the last little while.
"We don't seem to have the competitive pressure to take these decent-margin products and move their prices down, so we're seeing good lift there," Gossling said.
It’s ok on one side we have no competition, and the other side we have the fully supported RIAA and Motion Picture Industry suing and battering anyone who dares to try to d/l anything of the internet, because god forbid, we have the option of paying for the content we want to watch, rather than the 80% of channels that are either advertising, foreign language or religious”
Rogers Communications, which owns Canada's largest cable company as well as its largest wireless carrier and one of its biggest media businesses, announced several price increases when it released its fourth-quarter and 2005 financial results on Feb. 9. Gossling said at the Bear, Stearns & Co. conference that, after a slow start with the launch of a Rogers Internet phone services in the Toronto area last summer, Rogers Cable is ready to make a big push in that business in 2006.
Yeah we lost money on trying to branch into another market where we can screw Canadians. So in turn we just turned around and increased cable costs to cover that. That way we get to screw people while we plan and implement more ways to screw people.

Rogers has a goal of having 200,000 to 250,000 additions to its home phone product in 2006, he said.
"We had some initial technical bugs we had to work out and didn't have a big push in the latter half of '05 but now we're ready to go hard on that product," Gossling said.
The cable business is having good revenue growth, driven by new products, but needs to work on its profitability, he said.
"We do expect relatively flat margins in the cable business going forward, but I think there's some potential leverage there in terms of pricing increases and driving the penetration of some of our new products," Gossling said.

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