Matthew Daneman;

Staff writer;

Time Warner Cable%27s increases vary by package%2C but the average increase will be 6.4 percent

According to DirecTV%2C its average price increase will be roughly 3.7 percent

Cable companies says the price increases are the result of the rise in programming fees

Forget death or taxes. The one thing you can really count on is the cost of pay TV going up.

Time Warner Cable has started mailing notices to Rochester-region subscribers that cable television and Internet rates would increase starting with the billing cycle that begins March 19. While the increases vary by product or subscription package, the average increase will be 6.4 percent, said Time Warner Cable spokeswoman Joli Plucknette-Farmen.

The company's standard Internet service, currently $55 a month, will go up by $3.

And its popular Preferred television package, currently $9 a month, is going up a dollar — atop the $3-a-month increase for Standard TV service that all Preferred subscribers have. Standard currently costs $83 a month.

Subscribers currently in promotional deals, which represent about 70 percent of Time Warner Cable's customer base, won't see any rate increase until those promotions run out. Subscribers to Time Warner Cable's Starter TV package — what used to be called Basic — also won't see any price increase.

Time Warner Cable has roughly 350,000 Rochester-area subscribers.

The TWC rate hikes follow 2014 increases announced in recent weeks by such competitors as DirecTV and Dish Network.

According to DirecTV, its average price increase will be roughly 3.7 percent, with the price of such offerings as its Xtra package going up $3 to $74 a month. Those higher prices took effect Feb. 6.

Dish Network did not return a message seeking comment Friday, but reportedly has similarly increased its 2014 rates.

According to the cable and satellite TV operators, the monthly bills are being driven in large part by television networks and what they charge for the right to carry multitudes of channels.

According to DirecTV, the programming fees it pays to TV channels are going up about 8 percent.

Plucknette-Farmen said a huge driver of TWC's rising programming costs is what it has to pay local broadcasters. For Time Warner Cable, she said, those broadcast fees were up 40 percent in 2013.

TWC is instituting a $2.25 "broadcast TV fee" — which will be a separate line in monthly bills — in response to those retransmission costs, Plucknette-Farmen said.

That $2.25 fee is above and beyond the rate increases, which are to cover such expenses as new channels, increased cable network costs and Time Warner Cable's capital investments on its network — the company having spent $227 million on that network in 2013, Plucknette-Farmen said.

A number of cable companies, including Comcast and RCN, have similarly instituted such broadcast fees on monthly bills. Last week, Time Warner Cable and Comcast announced plans to merge.

Those retransmission fees paid by cable and satellite operators are growing rapidly. They were an estimated $3.3 billion in 2013, and were expected to more than double, to $7.6 billion, by 2019, thanks to TV station owners negotiating higher subscription fees, according to an analysis by financial information firm SNL Kagan.

That comes even as more people are "cutting the cord" and opting for TV-via-Internet instead of pay services. In that same analysis, SNL Kagan cut back on its projections for pay-TV subscription growth. While those numbers were roughly 100 million at the end of 2011 and expected to hit 103.7 million by 2018, SNL Kagan now estimates they will stay roughly flat.

MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/mdaneman