Instead of you paying for his cable, a Torrington man wants to charge cable television companies rent for giving a home to their converter boxes. He is caring for it, afterall.
"I've got to keep it warm, I've got to feed it electricity. If anything happens to it, I've got to pay $175, " Stephen Simonin the Waterbury Republican-American. "It's absolutely insane."
And he wants lawmakers to give consumers the power to charge cable companies rent, the Waterbury Republican-American reports.
His anger comes from an ongoing contract dispute between Cablevision and Scripps Networks Interactive. Earlier this month, two popular channels were pulled from the lineup for Cablevision subscribers in Fairfield and Litchfield Counties, along with millions of others in the tri-state area.
Gone are The Food Network and HGTV after Scripps Networks Interactive, which owns the channels, yanked them when its contract with Cablevision expired.
Both companies blame each other for the fight that has left thousands of Connecticut customers without access to popular programs, the Republican American reports.
Consumer advocates say this anger is turning to action as customers are joining together to try and convince federal regulators to give more power to the consumers.
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"There's a lot of people that are very angry with this," Simonin told the Rep-Am.
Simonin believes that state-of-the-art televisions are fully capable of decoding digital signals without a separate converter box, and he is convinced the only reason cable companies require the the boxes is to make money off the monthly rental fees, he told the Republican American.
