Funny this is coming up now since I just had a conversation with a park owner who is facing the same dilemma. In his instance, both the cable provider and he decided there is no way a loaner box system would work, since it is a transient park. Comcast does partner with some outside services that would install a private cable system (20 channels) for the park (at a substantial cost) and use the cable feed for programming, however the cable provider is wanting an astronomical amount per site, per month to provide the feed and of course the cost would go up as the number of channels increased as would the cost of the equipment for the private cable system.
They have tentatively decided to go to a private cable system fed by Directv. Such a system costs around $20,000 for equipment to convert the Directv service to cable channels. Again, they are looking at around a 20 channel system. Their monthly costs to provide cable will also be increasing nearly three-fold. They are one of the larger parks in their area and they are hesitating. Some of the other parks have already said they aren't going to invest in a system, so no cable whatsoever. I wouldn't be surprised to see that as a trend across the country, $20,000 plus for equipment, plus higher monthly bills will be a tough pill for smaller parks to swallow. And since RV parks are probably a small fraction of a percent of the total subscribers the cable systems have, they aren't going to be doing too much to accommodate a park's rather unique needs.
