US Cable

» see uscable.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A 48 percent stake looking for the door is what finished this company. Comcast held it, and said in 2010 that it wanted to exit the partnership, which put US Cable on the block. The sale then happened the way cable companies get sold, by the system rather than by the company, and it took three deals across 2011 to take it apart.

It began in 1976 as M.A.I. Cablevision, in Watson, New York, started by two stockbrokers named Stephen E. Myers and Michael Anderson. Through the late 1970s and the 1980s it built and bought cable systems in whatever markets it could get, and the result was franchises in twelve states that have almost nothing to do with one another: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin.

The company's history is mostly a history of its partners. It ran joint ventures with Tele-Communications Inc through the 1980s. In 1992 Liberty Media, which TCI owned, took half of its cable properties. In 1997 TCI bought its midwestern and New Jersey systems outright. At peak it had more than 240,000 subscribers and sat in the top 35 operators nationally.

Cable television in Turkey was laid by the state and run by Türk Telekom, so the idea that the wires down a particular street are an asset one company sells to another is not part of how I grew up with television. What we had on the balcony was a dish, and later Digiturk. An operator whose whole business was holding the franchise in towns it had no other tie to is a specifically American kind of company. Turkey had one cable network and one owner.

~ the chronicle ~

~ borrowed systems ~

By the 2000s the company was mostly a set of partnerships: half the cable properties already belonged to Liberty Media, and Comcast ended up holding 48 percent of US Cable itself. When Comcast decided in 2010 that it wanted out, no arrangement of that decision left US Cable intact.

Waller Capital Partners ran the sale. A cable operator gets sold in pieces when the pieces are not connected to each other, and US Cable's were not. The upper midwest went one way and the southwest went another, with Missouri sitting on its own in between.

~ the summer of 2011 ~

Midcontinent Communications agreed in June 2011 to take the Minnesota and Wisconsin systems, about 33,000 subscribers passing 86,000 homes. Terms were not disclosed, and people in the financial community put the price near $120m, which works out around $3,600 a subscriber. Midcontinent announced on 4 October 2011 that the deal had closed, started interconnecting the two networks that fall, added staff and opened another call center in West Fargo.

Charter Communications took the Missouri systems, about 16,000 subscribers, for an undisclosed sum. On 16 August 2011 US Cable agreed to sell what was left, the southwestern systems with about 60,000 revenue generating units spread across three states, to Baja Broadband of Fort Mill, South Carolina. Multichannel News noted that this was the third US Cable transaction in two months and reported that the deal was scheduled to close in the fourth quarter.

The exact end date is not settled. Wikipedia says Baja Broadband acquired US Cable on 21 August 2011, which is five days after the agreement was announced and well before the fourth quarter close the trade press described. What is certain is that all three sales were agreed inside six months of 2011 and that nothing was left of the company afterward. Baja Broadband was itself bought later by Telephone and Data Systems for $267.5m. The domain uscable.com now resolves to a HugeDomains sale listing.

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