Dan Lindgren, pictured on March 15, is a general manager with Ketchikan Public Utilities, which will shut down its cable television service to the Alaskan community later this year.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Charlotte Glover is, by her own admission, an enthusiast of the small screen.
But she is now counting down the months until the cable television package that brings the world to her Alaska doorstep – including the CBC content she depends on for its news and figure-skating coverage – disappears.
On Sept. 15, Ketchikan Public Utilities will, in the language of its engineers, “sunset” its cable television service, ending a seven-decade history in which this small outpost in southeastern Alaska once numbered among the first in the United States to deliver video through lines affixed to utility poles.
It’s now preparing to be among the first to abandon it.
An island settlement built on forestry and fishing, Ketchikan, whose surrounding borough counts a population of 13,948, is a distant afterthought in the universe of televised entertainment. But it stands at the forefront of the tumultuous change upending the way small-screen content is delivered.
“I hate it,” Ms. Glover, who owns a bookstore in Ketchikan, said of the coming change. “I was an only child, latchkey kid. I love television. And I love having all the channels.”
It doesn’t help that her husband, Dave Kiffer, is the mayor of the city, which owns the utility, and is himself not particularly adroit with a remote control. She worries about his ability to navigate the MLB App.
“I have two challenges: I have to figure that out for him, and I have to figure out how we can stream CBC and be honorary Canadians.”
What’s happening in Ketchikan is a seemingly unavoidable sign of the times. In 2022, cord cutters – the people who abandoned pay-TV packages for Netflix, Hulu and a dozen other services – for the first time made up more than half of U.S. households, according to market research company Insider Intelligence. Now, some of those who once provided the cable packages are deciding it’s no longer worth delivering the service at all.
In the coming years, “there’s going to be a lot of Ketchikans,” said Craig Moffett, a telecommunications analyst who follows cord cutting for MoffettNathanson Research.
“The pace of decline for the traditional distributors is now getting close to 10 per cent a year.”
The withering in subscriber ranks has been accompanied by other changes. Media companies have begun to preserve some of their best shows for their own streaming services, leaving cable channels “increasingly impoverished with weaker and weaker programming,” Mr. Moffett said. At the same time, they have hiked prices to compensate for fewer cable viewers.
“So you have this perverse cycle where the cost is spiralling higher, and the quality is spiralling lower. The math just doesn’t work for a lot of consumers – and the distributors recognize that.”
In Ketchikan, the public utility came to city council last year warning it would have to double or triple cable fees to keep up, recalled Mr. Kiffer, the mayor. The number of subscribers has already fallen to roughly 3,000, from nearly 5,000 at its peak, he said. The service is barely breaking even. Some channels now charge cable providers more for wholesale access than they do to viewers who subscribe to their streaming product. A required encryption update to set-top boxes would have meant a large investment in new technology that was hard to justify.
“Cable here is not cheap to begin with. We’re looking at a combination of jacking up rates and seeing more people cut the cable,” he said.
Mr. Kiffer is a former journalist whose family traces five generations to Ketchikan; in his 20s, he was called to sign away the mining leases established by his great-grandfather. Family history and professional acumen have nurtured an interest in local history, including the advent of cable television in Ketchikan, which arrived in late 1953 thanks to the efforts of a pair of local entrepreneurs. One was a former Coast Guard captain who built a marine instruments business, the other a navy veteran with radio repair skills.
Before they strung cables to nine local bars, the dawn of the television age had meant little to Ketchikan, which was too distant from other population centres to receive a broadcast signal. The fledgling Ketchikan Alaska Television solved the problem by shipping in reels of 16-millimetre film and piping content through its cables on tape delay – one week late for news, two for other programming.
Live television didn’t arrive until 1967, with the installation of an antenna capable of receiving broadcasts from Prince Rupert, B.C., located 140 kilometres away. That signal was then redistributed through the cable system, and a Ketchikan generation with few other choices became fond of CBC content. “We all grew up on Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant and The Beachcombers,” Mr. Kiffer said.
Ketchikan Public Utilities still carries the CBC, but it will vanish from most screens alongside the other channels in September. People in Ketchikan have other television options – satellite service is available and state provider GCI Communication offers an internet streaming box.
But the utility expects most people to replace its cable service with the myriad of available streaming options, a thicket of choice sufficiently confusing that the utility has held public information sessions to educate viewers. At one, they set up a half-dozen televisions and guided people through what they could find not just on Netflix, but FuboTV, Sling and Frndly TV. AT&T flew in a representative to pitch its DirecTV Stream. People lined up to get in.
Ketchikan Public Utilities itself films local events such as high-school basketball and baseball games. Those, too, are available through internet streaming.
Leaving cable is “definitely a mindset change,” said Dan Lindgren, the utility’s general manager. Cable television comes to the viewer. Streamed content needs to be sought out: accounts created, apps downloaded.
“But I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing,” Mr. Lindgren said. Often a scan through the cable lineup yields little of interest. “Usually you go through the guide and go: ‘I don’t really want to watch any of this stuff anyways,’ ” he said. For the utility, it’s no big loss. “I’d say our service has not been profitable,” he said.
In many ways, the decision to turn off Ketchikan’s cable service is a sign of the times, an expected moment in the progression of technological change. But it will also relegate to history a form of content delivery that, for better or worse, helped connect people to the world around them.
Jeff Lund, a Ketchikan writer and high-school teacher, remembered his own childhood, when the dinnertime news was always on.
“I just accidentally learned so much,” he said.
News delivered by internet stream – or TikTok – is no replacement. “I’m lamenting the loss of that sort of passive involvement in world events.”