Cox Cable: No Refunds for Channel Blackout

The cable dispute between Cox Cable and Raycom — the one that took a couple channels off the air for a few days — has ended, but customers aren’t quite satisfied.

Rev. Dave Connor, a Lakewood resident who reached out to Cox, said his request for a $1.50 refund was intially denied. He had calculated that the loss of service was equal to about 50 cents per day. 

After some back-and-forth, the company finally agreed to grant Connor the refund he'd asked for.

“Some ‘friend in the digital age,’” he said, referencing the company’s ad campaign. 

Dana Alexander Nolfe, the director of communications for Cox, said that the company granted his refund as a “gesture of goodwill,” but added that no one else will likely be given a similar refund.

“We are not crediting our customers as a result of the Raycom dispute,” she said. “We offer a package of channels, not individual channels on our lineup. We regularly make changes to our lineup, mostly with additions, but at times, regrettably, when a channel is removed from our lineup.”

She said that in this case, “Raycom removed their channels from our lineup. We understand the impact on our customers, but we were not legally permitted to air the channels once Raycom removed them.”

Nolfe also noted that both WUAB and WOIO are free, over-the-air channels.

“That is also part of why we had the dispute,” she added. “Raycom was raising their fees on Cox because the FCC allows them to do so, but simultaneously they transmit their signals for free.”