I know its easy to lay blame on the delivery medium - be it cable TV or satellite, however in most cases these price jumps are a pass through of the cost of the feed.
I am a small cable operator and our feed costs jump every year between 5 and 15 percent per channel. The recent largest jump has been the local broadcast channels retransmission fees - as you may have read in the news where the CBS stations in major markets wanted a 300% increase in their feed costs.
As a cable operator it is almost impossible to remove the broadcast channels from the mix and as a consumer it is almost impossible to obtain the local programming any other way with any kind of reliability.
No matter the delivery method there is an underlying cost to get the signals to the home (wires, satellite, or Internet delivery) and those costs are pretty consistent from year to year so the bulk of price increases are a direct result of increases in feed costs (at least in our case). We make every effort to keep our fixed costs as low as possible so as to keep the annual price increases to a reasonable level.
As a cable operator we do what we can to negotiate the lowest possible feed costs, but at the end of the day we have to pass increases on the the end user in order to stay in business.
I know it doesn’t help the check book. I have DirectTV because I can’t get my own cable tv service so I get to see both sides of the equation.