WUSF wants cable spot back

A bitter battle has erupted over the fate of WUSF, Channel 16, on Bright House Networks in the Tampa Bay area.

The kerfuffle kicked off Friday when the cable provider unplugged WUSF from hundreds of thousands of Bay area viewers who subscribe to lower-tier cable packages.

"I was so mad," said Bobby Ann Loper of South Tampa, who Friday turned on her TV hoping to watch a long list of favorite shows on WUSF. "All this time with this digital TV conversion, Bright House has acted like, 'Oh, yeah, everything's fine.' Then they pull this underhanded thing and didn't tell anyone.

"It's so rude."

What replaced WUSF on the screen was a message telling viewers the station wasn't available and viewers should upgrade to a more expensive cable offer.

As with many deals between large media organizations, much of the issue comes down to money: Cable companies holding a lucrative spot on their channel lineup, and public broadcasters trying to reach viewers who donate membership dues for the station to survive.

All this has triggered a round of finger-pointing.

Bright House officials say they're simply exercising an option stemming from a national agreement in November with public broadcasters that lets cable companies pick one PBS station in a market to keep on both high- and low-tier cable packages.

Bright House chose to keep WEDU, Channel 3, on both tiers, and forced WUSF to pick whether to be on high- or low-tier packages. WUSF picked digital tiers, where it has four multicast channels. That move affects about 40 percent of the roughly 1 million Bright House viewers in the area, said Bright House spokesman Joe Durkin.

As for why Bright House favored one station over another, "WEDU, far and away, has higher ratings," Durkin said.

WUSF officials called that explanation bogus, and said there's another motive: Cable companies have complained about a shortage of bandwidth on their networks and are squeezing them out to carry more lucrative stations.

"We're hearing from a lot of people who are very frustrated and angry about losing our station," said JoAnn Urofsky, general manager of WUSF. Unless the station gets its channel back, she worries it could lose a significant number of members, noting some already called during the weekend to cancel their membership.

Urofsky said one irony was that WUSF lost its spot because it produces so much local content, rather than running national PBS shows - a factor taken into account by the national agreement that lets cable companies favor PBS-heavy stations. She said a recent study showed WUSF and WEDU had less than a 13 percent overlap with duplicate TV programs.

"We have heard that Bright House really does want to serve the public, but it appears they want to do that on their terms," Urofsky said.

Bolstering their point, WUSF officials noted that Channel 16 now shows a message telling viewers the station is "no longer available" unless viewers upgrade their package to a digital tier or rent an extra converter box for $1 per month.

On Monday, WUSF officials lodged formal complaints with Bright House, but the cable network has no plans to reinstate WUSF to the analog lineup. As for what channel will replace WUSF, Bright House has not made that decision yet, Durkin said.