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Cable TV A La Carte Part 2

Posted by chrisd on from the happy-new-year-from-the-cable-company dept.

Ravi Swamy writes "Here's a followup article in Business Week to the Cable TV A La Carte story from last month. For those who actually read the story it was only A La Carte if you wanted to add HBO. Apparently cable companies don't know about the law or are going to reclassify HBO as a 'tier' instead of as a channel to get around the law."

1 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Legislation isn't needed! by arkanes · · Score: 4, Informative
    Except, of course, it wouldn't. As with any industry with a high barrier to entry, the current providers can lock out newcomers. The whole reason we decided to have local monopolies in the first place was so that there'd be some benefit in actually rolling out the wire - how many cable providers do you think there'll be when each and every one needs to run it's own cable network? A regulated monopoly is much better than an unregulated one.

    Sure, we could have a "regulated breakup", like with the baby bells, where people who own the cable are required to allow others to provide service over that wire. We saw how well that worked out with DSL, right?