Since when does the CEO of a Fortune 200 company not named Weyerhaeuser, WaMu, Boeing or Microsoft pay a high-profile visit to Tacoma? A cursory search says it happened at least once – 1997.
Nearly 10 years ago, Leo Hindery Jr., then head of TCI, the nation’s leading cable television powerhouse, arrived in Tacoma with a singular mission – crush the competition before the competition existed.
All because Tacoma had mustered the audacity to consider launching a cable television service, as a subsidiary of Tacoma City Light.
Have you heard of Click! Network?
Amazingly, a recent survey suggests, nearly half of us have forgotten or never knew Click! was and is a wholly local venture.
Consequently, as Click! closes in on its 10th anniversary, this week it launches:
• A new name: Click! Cable TV,
• A new color: grape purple – for its logo,
• New purple paint jobs for some of its service trucks,
• A new Web site: clickcabletv.com,
• A new video-on-demand channel devoted to locally produced programming, and
• A new slogan: Your local choice.
“I’ve been telling our people, ‘We need to embrace purple,’” said Mitch Robinson, Click! marketing and business operations manager. “We’re trying to make our personality a little more hip … a little more contemporary.”
The changes come as the underdog rebrands itself, for the first time, in its ongoing battle with Comcast, which took over AT&T Cable, which had taken over TCI’s former cable holdings.
To think, Click! almost never happened.
Until that day in October 1997, if you wanted cable television in Pierce County you had to get it from TCI.
Hindery, a Bellarmine High School graduate who made good in Big Business, lobbied council members in public session and private meetings in the mayor’s office – and lost.
“Some of us were in the mayor’s office until the bitter end, right before the meeting,” recalled former City Councilman Mike Crowley. “As I tell people, I didn’t know really where the votes were until the elevator ride down to the council chambers.”
Crowley philosophically opposed starting a public enterprise to compete with a private-sector industry.
“It was a risk, and the staff people from our utility had no experience in it,” Crowley said. In the end, however, he voted to create Click! primarily to improve Tacoma’s competitiveness as a city for business. No company had wired downtown Tacoma with high-speed Internet service, and Click! would do that.
“Besides,” he said, “TCI wasn’t providing Tacoma with very good service.”
In a parting shot 10 years ago, Hindery called Tacoma’s fledgling venture a disappointment “for the citizens of Tacoma … Time will tell who was right in this matter.”
Sorry, Leo. Score a big one for your old hometown – and Fircrest, University Place, Fife, parts of Lakewood, Browns Point and Fife Heights.
All of you now have the choice of Philadelphia-based Comcast or Tacoma-based Click! for your cable television and high-speed Internet services.
Comcast still dominates the market. By how much? Comcast won’t reveal its local numbers. But last September, in an e-mail obtained by The News Tribune through a public records request, the company told the City of Tacoma it had 38,200 customers in Tacoma. As of last week, Click! had 24,464 customers – roughly 32 percent of the homes it passes inside and outside Tacoma have subscribed.
Starting this summer, another 1,000 homes per month in the Summit-Waller, Parkland, Midland and Allison areas will have Click! as an option.
And the marketing minds at Click! say their research indicates once you know their operation comes to you 100 percent local, more of you will choose it.
“People want what we have, they just don’t know we’re it,” said Click!’s Robinson. “‘Your local choice’ gives us that differentiation. We’re the only local guys that do cable.
“Starting this month, when you call Click!, you’ll hear, ‘Hi, this is Mitch at Click! in Tacoma.’ This is an advantage we have that we haven’t really been telling people about,” Robinson said.
And Click! has started negotiating with area video producers about how it can store more local programming on its video-on-demand space so viewers can watch government meetings and special presentations.
For a recent test, Click! posted movie shorts from the Grand Cinema’s third annual 72-hour film competition, and, for a few days, those shorts drew more video-on-demand viewers than any other cable offerings, Robinson said.
Over at Comcast, meanwhile, spokesman Walter Neary says the company likes to think its Pierce County service is as local as a national corporation can be, because it employs 920 people here, between its Fife and Puyallup offices.
“That’s a lot of jobs, a lot of people raising kids here,” Neary said. “We’re pretty dang local.”
For its marketing strategy, Comcast has pushed its all-in-one service bundle – packaging cable TV, high-speed Internet and telephone service together – as a way to gain and keep customers.
Comcast knows it has competition, Neary acknowledged.
“We’re keeping an eye on the other guy,” he said. “We’ve been forced to compete against a government entity and forced to adjust accordingly.”
For Mayor Bill Baarsma – the only elected official remaining from the nine that unanimously voted to launch Click! – that competition has meant better options and better prices for local consumers.
“We created the most robust and competitive telecommunications market in the United States,” Baarsma said. “We have among the lowest rates for Internet service providers and cable television.
“It was one of the best decisions the city has made in my tenure on the council. I compare it to the day in 1912 when Tacoma City Light threw the first switch on their hydroelectric dam and delivered some of the least expensive public power of any community in the United States. … It was absolutely the right move to make.”
The evidence suggests Click! has delivered on most of its promises. For example, according to figures supplied by Click!:
• In its original financial analysis, Tacoma City Light, now Tacoma Power, predicted an initial $99.4 million price tag to build the system within the Tacoma city limits. It actually cost $86.3 million.
• The utility estimated it needed to capture 25 percent of the homes it passes to recoup its investment. It averages 32 percent.
In addition, some of Pierce County’s heavyweight organizations – Russell Investment Group, Labor Ready, Puyallup Tribe of Indians, MultiC are and Franciscan health systems, Rainier Pacific Bank, Port of Tacoma – all use Click! wholesale broadband services for their high-speed data communications needs.
Russell, the global investment company, links its multiple downtown offices through the network and shows in-house video programs to its associates over it.
“Russell benefits from using a local provider for cost-effective network circuits in the downtown area,” said spokesman Steve Claiborne. “We didn’t always have good options for providers of high-speed data circuits in downtown Tacoma and, without question, Click! was a welcome addition.”
Beyond the tangible, the investment in Click! allowed Tacoma to claim the title, for several years, as America’s No. 1 Wired City – a campaign that drew international media attention to Tacoma as a forward-thinking place to do business.
Leo Hindery, reached by phone in New York last week, thinks differently.
He called Click! a failure.
“It did what we suggested it would. We said it would fail,” Hindery said. “Any cost analysis, any detailed look at what Tacoma got out of it (would prove) it was a flawed undertaking.”
If Tacoma Power’s investment offers two crumb to its critics, it could come on two fronts:
• In the utility’s original sales pitch to politicians, it claimed it wanted the fiber-optic and coaxial cable network to connect all its substations and remotely read customers’ meters from headquarters rather than employing a mini-army of workers to travel the region manually reading meters. The substations have gotten connected, which helps manage power and restore it faster during outages. But only 8,000 customers have new smart meters, partly due to a market shortage. And no one can say when all Tacoma Power customers will get the new technology.
• While the company’s revenues have covered its expenses since June 2003, it doesn’t make enough money to pay off a proportional share of the original $86.3 million spent to build Tacoma Power’s network.
Yet Click! is still around.
“To simply say it’s successful because it’s still around … the Iraq War is still around. That can’t be a measure,” Hindery said.
Hindery became CEO of AT&T Broadband when TCI and AT&T merged in 1999. But he left the business for other ventures. Today, he serves as managing partner for InterMedia Partners, which makes private equity investments in media companies.
If Tacoma officials hired him today as a consultant to advise them on what to do with Click!, Hindery said he would tell them to sell it for full value to the market’s leader, Comcast, as other cities have done with similar municipal networks, and use the sale contract to ensure Tacoma gets the municipal services it needs.
Otherwise, he predicted, future technological innovations incorporated by the large cable companies and satellite television providers will outstrip Click!’s financial ability, as a small provider, to offer the same advances customers will want.
Don’t expect Tacoma to sell Click!. Why should it listen to Hindery today if it didn’t 10 years ago.
Hindery remembers that visit.
“In between the morning meeting and the evening meeting, the first place I went was Frisko Freeze,” he said. “So at least I got something of value out of that trip.”
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
