What has cable company executives losing sleep at night? It’s certainly not thoughts on how to improve customer service or billing. But it’s also not Netflix, Hulu, BitTorrent or any other obvious customer siphon. No, cable suits confess, it’s actually the fact that a growing number of Americans find themselves too poor to pay to watch TV.

“We have to be sensitive in making sure we have a product that consumers can afford,” said the president of Cox Communications at this week’s Cable Show industry event.

Chimed in Time Warner Cable’s CEO, “There clearly is a growing underclass of people who clearly can’t afford [cable]. It would serve us well to worry about that group.”

Talking about the cable industry’s largely unchecked ability to raise rates when and how it wants, one analyst tells Reuters that cable companies have priced themselves into a corner:

That has been a wonderfully attractive model for a generation, but the danger, of course, is that eventually the video product will be priced into irrelevance for lower income consumers… I don’t know when it will happen, but I suspect we’re already perilously close.

Cable worried about poverty, not Netflix [Reuters via CrooksAndLiars]

Thanks to ScandalMgr for the tip!

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