Digital service required for PPV

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2003 | 9:50 a.m.

The difference between analog and digital cable-TV systems was never more clear.

If you have analog service from Cox Cable of Las Vegas and were planning to watch Saturday's pay-per-view fight at the MGM Grand Garden between Oscar De La Hoya and Shane Mosley, you may be surprised or disappointed to learn the fight will be available only to those who subscribe to the firm's digital service or to those who have separate, satellite systems, or to those who choose to pay to see it locally at a closed-circuit outlet.

Cox is using the fight to promote conversions to its digital service and is offering a $10 discount off the fight's $49.95 fee to sway customers to switch to digital. It is also offering coupons that will lessen the digital fee for the ensuing three months, if subscribers choose to make the switch at this time.

Saturday's fight is the first major event to pop up on the schedule since Cox eliminated its analog pay-per-view option, including movies, this summer.

But promoter Bob Arum, whose Top Rank Boxing is handling Saturday's card along with the pay-per-view arm of the Home Box Office network, is not pleased with the timing or the way in which Cox is handling the situation.

"I think there's a real problem," he said Tuesday. "I wasn't aware of this until 24 hours ago, but I've got lawyers looking into it."

Arum said he is anticipating the fight will be purchased by at least 940,000 and perhaps as many as 1.4 million pay-per-view customers. Those figures are the bracket established by De La Hoya's pay-per-view fight last year with Fernando Vargas and his 1999 pay-per-view fight with Felix Trinidad.

But Arum, too, may be disappointed.

"This is a Cox-only problem," he said. "It's only for their cable subscribers in Las Vegas and San Diego. We had HBO agents look into it and they said it wasn't going to be a problem anywhere else, and Cox told me that 80 percent of their Las Vegas customers and 90 percent of their San Diego customers were already on digital."

Yet Cox Cable services a multitude of national markets beyond Las Vegas and San Diego, including Orange County (Calif.), Phoenix, Tucson, New Orleans, Cleveland, Oklahoma City and larger regions such as New England, West Texas and the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Additionally, Cox Cable vice president Steve Schorr refuted Arum's contention that Cox was the only cable provider blocking analog availability for the fight.

"That's not true," he said when told of Arum's statement, naming at least one other major cable provider that would be showing De La Hoya vs. Mosley in digital form only.

Arum himself is skeptical of Cox's assertion that 80 percent of its Southern Nevada subscribers are already paying for and receiving digital service.

"That does seem awfully high," he said.

Neither Schorr nor a second Cox spokesman would give an exact figure on the number of digital vs. analog subscribers on its present roster in Southern Nevada. But a Cox national website indicates that of its 6.3 million subscribers, only 1.9 million are currently receiving the digital product.

That translates to approximately 30 percent.

"I don't know if we have any legal recourse, because the cable system doesn't have to offer the fight," Arum, a nonpracticing attorney, said. "If there's no recourse, there's no recourse.

"But I heard about this Monday for the first time and I don't agree with the way Cox is doing this. They're forcing the people who want to buy the fight to buy their digital service, too."

Schorr counters by saying the move to digital will eliminate a problem with piracy that has dogged analog boxing telecasts for many years. "Digital cable is fully encrypted," he said, meaning the signal cannot be intercepted by a "black box" that descrambles premium programming.

"It boils down to a theft issue," Schorr said. "Cable theft is more heightened in special events like big fights, as Arum well knows.

"We're going out of our way to correct the problem (and) we're trying to make it easier on people (to receive a digital signal)."