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FCC Report Supports a la Carte TV Pricing
An anonymous reader writes "The FCC may soon allow cable/sat companies to sell individually customized TV channel packages. From the article: ' FCC chairman Kevin Martin spoke to a forum, sponsored by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee in Washington, which has been examining indecency on radio and television. Martin told the forum that the FCC will soon release a report that concludes that offering TV programming a la carte is economically feasible and in the best interest of consumers.'"
I've been wishing for this for as long as I can remember. Now that I am paying my own cable bill I want it even more. Why should I pay for channels like Lifetime if I never watch it?
The cable industry really has a choke hold on consumers. I'm glad the FCC is finally doing something right.
What does indecency have to do with this? Am I going to be able to get just the indecent channels now?
They believe that a la carte pricing would make it too expensive to offer less-popular channels that presently are bundled with popular channels.
Of course, nevermind that the channels that are "less-popular" are probably useless beef anyway.
Am I the only one concerned that this appears to be coming about from the efforts to protect Joe Righteous from "harmful" television instead of a desire to protect the consumer from price gouging package deals?
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
A la carte pricing could be really great (I haven't studied the economics of it, but it sounds good). But it irks me no end that this conclusion is drawn in the context of fighting "indecency" on the air.
Now, I certainly don't want television to become nothing but porn and violence--but the way indecency restrictions work these days is quite ridiculous. Moreover, its only purpose is to push strongly religious-based values as if they were the "one, true way", when our Constitution explicitly forbids the government from so much as suggesting that there might be a "one, true way".
Why not let us make our own decisions about what to watch--and let the networks make their own decisions about what to air?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I don't like this idea. If we give people the power to buy channels on an a la carte basis, that means the ones that don't get purchased as frequently will probably go out of business (as TFA says).
If I watched MTV, CNN, and the Country Music Network, I wouldn't care. But since I watch the History Channel, the Science Channel, Discovery, etc, I do care. These channels will probably fall by the wayside as their revenue is reduced by a huge margin. =(
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Nooooo! Now the cost for: History Channel, Discovery Channel, Science Channel, etc is going to be $50 per month each (because there will be few subscribers), while: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPN4, ESPN5, ESPN6, ESPN7, ESPN8, etc will be 10 cents each.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Questions for the FCC Overlords of Programming:
Who determines how much a channel is worth? The FCC? A parental group who hates Howard Stern and anything deemed indecent by their 'decency' standards?
Will you have the choice of either or plan? To opt out?
Can you choose from something other than one monopolistic cable company that only serves your area?
If you do not have the choice of leaving your plan the way it is, I see this only increasing the price of your overall bill if you want to keep the same amount of channels you already had. Then again, maybe this will inspire people to stop watching TV altogether...but probably not.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...I can see it now. The most popular channels will be the porn and violent ones.
"But Mr Cheney, you are already subscribed to all the porn channels we offer."
FLR
Forget Channels Alacarte. Why arn't we just doing TV shows on demand. On demand is by far the best feature ever invented with TV. Its the only reason I even pay for cable.
You mean you had cable TV? Back in my day, we had to settle for whatever we could get by playing around with the antenna, and no remote controls 'cause they weren't invented yet, and we LIKED it!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
A person stepping out of the shower is natural, legal and a very real part of millions of people's lives and yet it is "indecent" to show on television. On the other hand, an action sequence with some demon from the pits of hell tearing a person apart in front of their children is fine for a Sunday afternoon movie promotion. I like to watch an occasional sporting event with my kids (11,6,2,2 years old) and have to have a hand on the remote. It would be one thing at 9:00pm, but quite another at 2:00 on Sunday. I would like to let my oldest watch a football game (he is more into it than I am), but you can actually see a response to the flashing explosive movie trailers in my younger kids.
I am frustrated as a parent that the human body and sexuality that is natural, legal, etc...is considered too dirty for television, but antisocial violent behavior that is both illegal and unnatural is "fine for family viewing". It's a strange world we live in!
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I've been waiting for this a long time. I'm paying $45 a month for analog cable, and the way it is now, I can't get HBO without subscribing to an additional digital cable package (which includes a bunch of channels I'll never watch) and an HBO "plex" (including about 5 HBO channels). That's an extra $40-50 a month to get the one channel I want. If I could just pay for the channel I want, I could actually subscribe to HBO instead of downloading the shows I watch from BT.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
ESPN is already one of the most expensive channels for a cable service to carry, because they know that no cable service can really be a major success without it. They then require carriage of ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPN News if the cable company wants to carry ESPN.
Unless you watch all of the channels you currently receive, look for your cable bill to stay about the same, while you end up paying for only the channels you want...
-JMP
Why do so many people think this is a good idea? What channels won't be included that would otherwise provide quality viewing? Who would pay for their provider to include PBS, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, or CSPAN (besides me)? What incentive would stations have to put out quality programming any other time than prime-time? Won't this narrow the market down to a few stations able to provide the most flash and sex? A free market approach doesn't benefit the consumer if the consumer loses programs of artistic merit or education.
With PVR's now common and soon Video on Demand over broadband it seems to be the next logical step.
You only have to look at how popular recorded TV episodes have become on bittorent sites to see that people these days don't want to sit in front of the TV at prescribed times.
If they want to stop piracy they'll have to provide programming around other people schedules. People have a lot more things to do and are not prepared to fit their lives around their schedule.
This will give people like me the option of only paying for the channels that are in HD. Right now, with Brighthouse in Florida, in order to get the 10 channel "HD Pack" I have to subscribe to 200 crappy-looking "digital" channels that I never, ever watch. Technically, I should be able to subscribe to only the major networks HD channels (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC) but they repeatedly say I can't do it without purchasing the entire digital tier.
If people only subscribed to HD channels it would give the other networks some incentive to switch to HD.
I hope this comes to the UK. There are only a few programmes I watch, maybe 10 a month, so this would be ideal for me.
:o)
I would probably end up watching more TV
I can't see it being a great deal for couch potatoes though
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
You think by now that we would have learned by now that Big Government only has our best interests at heart. Like HDTV. You know any action will ultimately cause some kind of damage, they will realize it, and change policy to cause damage in a completely new direction.
Indecency has nothing to do with this subject. If only people (parents) would exercize their parental rights and use the already present Goverment mandated control systems built into TVs and cable boxes....
But I would like to see the God channels as well as Home Shopping network, QVC, and Womens Entertainment survive on their own merit instead of the current situation (because I wont pay for them).
Also, does not the FCC require that the providers carry some of the God channels? What if no one wants to pay for it?
Disclaimer: What the heck do I know anyway?
Why would it be disallowed? I remember DISH or some other sat provider fighting to offer a la carte, but the content producers wouldn't allow it. Why does the FCC have a role in this?
Quite backwards, I think. Unfortunately for mankind, more people are interested in Sports Star "n" then they are in actual quality *entertainment*. Personally, I'm just waiting for the cheap TV.
Of course, there will be technical limitations to overcome for this, assuming you are not on the digital cable thang...
This is an absolutely fantastic idea. The whole "to get the channels you want, you have to take these other ones too" concept is ludicrous. Just imagine if other industries did that...
What if every time you bought a ticket to an NBA game, you were forced to buy one for a WNBA game too? Not fair? Don't like it? Tough.
What if every time you bought an X-Box 360 or Nintendo DS, you were forced to buy an N-Gage, Gizmondo, or Virtual Boy too? Not fair? Don't like it? Tough.
What if every time you went to see a popular movie, say Revenge of the Sith or Harry Potter, you were forced to buy a ticket to something like Gigli or Ashlee Simpson's Undiscovered or the latest Uwe Boll masterpiece? Not fair? Don't like it? Tough.
Consumers generally appreciate having a choice, and hate the feeling of forced decisions, especially ones that don't seem particularly logical ("What? You like to watch CNN and The Sopranos? Well you're sure to love the Competitive Quilting Channel too!")
It's sad that this is being rolled out in the name of "decency", but it's still a good idea.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
With the digital set top boxes, it'd be a piece of cake.
I don't see it being offered with the possibility to save you money on your cable bill, though. It requires individualized effort (unless they tie a web interface to the head end, and allow you to select your channels online, which would be cool). Even then, there would have to be added cost to do it. But I'd love to get rid of shopping channels, crazy religious channels, and other channels that I will never watch (spanish, BET, etc).
Right now there's a TON of crap on TV, and I don't mean 'offensive' I just mean crap (every reality show ever created comes to mind). And if a la carte means that some of the crap will go away for lack of interest, that's fine by me.
But just because there's a minority of interest doesn't mean that a channel will necessarily disappear. It just means that the viewers of that channel will be called upon to donate to the content providers to help keep the channel alive (much like PBS' tele-thons). That's where the real interest will be shown by the viewers of the content.
I mean consider for a moment that not everything on TV should remain on TV. When a business starts up, it needs to be able to maintain some market share and operate within its revenue streams. When the revenue stream disappears for lack of customer interest or access, the business dies. In our current situation these "other channels", like the struggling businesses, would be dead or dying if it weren't for subsidization by the giant channel packages. I think that's not necessarily good because anytime someone wants to throw in a niche channel that will have 5 viewers, the cost of support for the whole thing necessarily increases to take on that additional burden. It's TV socialism.
I'm also not saying we shouldn't have any packages at all, just not 600 channels in one bundle (though that could certainly still be an option - as long as it's not the only option). For example, with most cable/sat providers, HBO and others come in packages of 3 to 5 or more channels of that type of content. You get all or nothing, but that's ok because you're paying for movie channels, not for some eclectic mix of different content much of which you're not interested in.
Only time will tell if the FCC tries to take this too far or just leaves well-enough alone by opening the door for a la carte.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
This will still depend on the cable/sat companies wanting to provide this sort of service. Sky here in the UK only recently bowed to pressure to provide more flexible packages. Is there any suggestion that the US cable/sat companies are eager to provide the same?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
People should not have to pay for channels they have no desire to watch. What gives you the right to have other people subsidize your enjoyment? The problem is too many people they are "entitled" to what they want even at the expense of others. Terms like fairness are often used and if that doesn't work discrimination and disenfranchisement are then employed.
I don't want to pay for certain channels let alone fund them. Currently I don't have a choice, if I want certain channels I have to pay for those I have no intention of ever watching.
What this is all about is the cable companies make money hosting select channels, channels that pay to be shown. Those channels will continue to do so but now they may actually have to develop an audience.
The only negative is that the entry costs to push a new channel will be higher but hopefully that will lead to better entrants.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The way I understand it is the pricing mechanism works roughly like this (not as simple but the principle is the same):
Alice is willing to pay $1 for channel A and $2 for channel B
Bob is willing to pay $2 for channel A and $1 for channel B
We can maximise profits by charging $3 for channel A and channel B. This gives them $6 rather than 4 if they charge $2 per channel or $1 per channel.
This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
Well, it's not necessarily a good idea, for two reasons.
a) It will mean higher prices.
b) It will mean fewer choices.
Pretty much exactly the opposite of why some people seem to want it. Let me explain.
Right now, you pay what, $30 for 100 channels or whatever your cable company charges for the package you have. Switch to a-la-carte and do you really think any channel is going to allow themselves to be priced for under a buck a month? It's one thing to be included as part of a package, but if you break it down and say "this channel is worth 20 cents, this channel is worth $2", no channel is going to accept being priced on that low end. And the whole point of a-la-carte pricing is to take the power out of the cable company's hands, so it will be the channels themselves that do the pricing.
A lot of channels right now are subsidized by other channels that whatever media conglomerate that owns them requires the cable company to include as part of a package of other, more popular channels. This is how channels like Sundance Channel and BBC America exist. It both helps new channels mature and grow a customer base and it brings prestige and cross-marketing opportunities to the channels' owner. These channels will be gone under a-la-carte pricing, because they will be forced to pay their own way from day one, and they will not be able to command the prices required for them to operate profitably.
What you're going to end up with is a bunch of lowest common denominator, mainstream channels that are as driven by the cable equivalent of "ratings" as the major TV networks are now (in cable's case, those "ratings" would be represented by subscriptions). Is that really a good thing? Not to me, it isn't.
Now, you can argue that it's the free market, blah blah blah, and that's true, but I'd like to point out that it's the free market that made Titanic the #1 movie of all time and Britney Spears the #1 selling music artist of the past few years. Do you really want to be relying on your fellow customers to support the channels you want well enough to keep them afloat on their own?
Now, I'm not saying the current system is perfect; it isn't. It needs major changes, and it is a government-sanctioned monopoly right now from the bottom on up. But one of the good things about the current system, which will be thrown out the window with a-la-carte pricing, is a sort of immunity to mainstream whims that the major networks have to contend with. It's why cable channels can be a little edgier, why they can take more chances in finding and building an audience. You should really be asking yourself why it is that the FCC is recommending this in the name of promoting decency on television - it's not about price. It's about putting out of business channels that do anything outside the mainstream.
Isn't this the sort of thing that the v-chip was designed for? And hasn't it been included in every TV made for the past 5-10 years or so? If parents can't be bothered to use the filtering controls they already have, then why would we expect them to sit down and take the time to figure out which channels are okay for little Sally to watch? Not to mention that were this ever to actually happen, the cable companies would price individual channels at something like $3.99 a month each. Or you can get 120+ channels for only $39.99! We all know that Americans are totally rational when faced with a (perceived) bargain...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Why can't There be a sports package. Tier one is ESPN, and Comcast Sports Net. Tier two gets you ESPN2, ESPNews, OLN, Speed, and the Golf Channel. Tier three gets you Fox Sports Net, ESPN Classic, ESPNU, and whatever other sports channels I'm forgetting.
Then, theres your "Pop Culture" package. Tier one is MTV, VH1, BET, and Fuse... tier two gets you mtv2, vh1-c, whatever, whatever. A third tier gets you more options.
Then you have a package with History, Discovery, and Science Channel on tier one, Military, History Interactive, and Discovery Times on tier 2, etc. Another package would put CNN, CNNHN, Weather Channel, CSPAN, and CSPAN2 on a tier, followed by Fox News, MSNBC, Bloomberg, etc on another.
Even better yet, you wouldn't have to buy tier 1 to buy tier two or tier 3. If you only wanted Sports Tier 3 for ESPNU or only wanted News Tier 2 for Fox News, you could purchase those tiers.
Now yea, theres the possibility... ok, probability, that the companies would try and take advantage of this and spread out the channels we want with junk channels. And by no means take my above descriptions of how I think the tiers should be, I was just giving example. But I think this could be a way that COULD help us, the consumer, and satisfy the corporations.
...Unless the FCC forces content providers. to unbundles what they sell to the cable companies, too. An example: for cable companies to carry the incredibly popular ESPN, they also have to carry ESPN2, ESPN News, and ESPN Classic. I think they even have to carry Disney channels, since ESPN is owned by Disney. So there's no way that the cable company is going to pay for these crappy channels at a per-subscriber basis and then allow you to opt out of them.
The cable company isn't the only bad guy here. Look at the content companies.
Somehow cable companies are going to make it work for them. I would like to believe I can get a handful of channels (the ones I actually watch) for less than I am paying now. However, somehow I see them jacking prices up to compensate and I'll be paying at least as much as I am now.
However I'd love to see this work assuming the consumer doesn't get screwed.
economically feasible and in the best interest of consumers
Yeah, but not for the cable companies. Many companies pack channels the way they do in order to get people to sign up for larger packages so they can get the 2 or 3 channels they want. Besides, I doubt the big cable companies will make the rates of a la carte TV reasonable.
If they do, you can bet I will only have like 30-40 channels and 12 of those will be my HD channels I get now (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB, PBS, ESPN, Comcast Sports HD, Discovery HD, TNT HD, inHD, inHD2) . This would leave the standard def of 10 of those 12 channels plus Sci Fi, Cartoon Network, TBS, Comedy Central, ESPN2, OLN, ABC Family, Spike, USA, AMC, TCM, History Channel, and maybe some others I am missing.
Trust me, the will make sure that costs me as much or more then the approximately $60 or so that my cable costs me now. Add about another $40 on that for the internet and I pay Comcast more money then I do for my three "essential utilities" (Electricity, Gas, Water).
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I've heard in this thread lots of complaints that (little viewed) channels like, Discovery, History and PBS would be dropped using this approach. Wrong! These channels have huge followings as they get referred to, time and again in diverse public forums other than Slashdot. Think about it, both SciFi and Food channel were once part of the basic Direct TV satellite package years ago until the little phone cord attached to the back of every box tattled to the marketing guru's that they were getting lots of viewer time, so they got bumped up into premium packages.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
Channels that I'd like to get -- BBC America and Discovery Times -- are only available in my area through digital cable, an additional $45 (Comcast). The last time we bought a TV was in the 90's, and I think it was a 34" analog Sony (in the days before Sony the evil empire). $45 would literally buy a couple of channels I'd want.
a la Carte would kill said channels, especially BBC America. So perhaps, instead of full a la Carte, maybe allow customers to change 5% of their current lineup to other channels they don't subscribe to (except premium channels like HBO and Cinemax). For me that would be 4 channels (we probably get around 80) and that would be just enough to get what we don't currently get. And to keep it cost-effective, limit the times it can be changed -- once every six months, once a year. We have three or four Spanish channels in a household that speaks English and Japanese; I would gladly drop them at least to pick up English or Japanese-speaking channels.
Dish Network used to do this. They had a package called Dish Pix. You could purchase channels at $1.50/mo each, with a $5.00 minimum purchase.
Customers with the 50/100/150 channel packages (which have since become 60/120/180 channels) could also subscribe to individual channels (I had subscribed to 8)
The problem with this was that customers were tying up customer service reps hemming and hawing about what channels they wanted to have. It ended up costing too much to do, so they stopped.
www.wavefront-av.com
Oh come on everyone wants ESPN "The Ocho"
"Is Sausage bad for printers?"
FTFA:
Martin said he doesn't plan to push the industry to adopt a new business model, but he suggested that more restrictions on basic cable programming be added if the industry doesn't offer consumers more choice.
Does anyone else read this to say the FCC will begin overstepping their bounds and begin to regulate cable television?
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Also , think about to poor cable company taking 152354 calls a day from people wanting to change thier channel lineup . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Sadly, this is the "solution" to there being too much "seamy" stuff on television.
http://www.tv.com/story/story.html&story_id=2524
Isn't this precisely why the V-Chip hullabaloo was created? I guess that didn't work cause people don't know how to set the stupid parental lock password?
So instead of people actually parenting, the government wants people to pick and choose their cable options? This is a horrid idea (i'd be all for it so I could actually limit the number of extranneous channels I have to surf through), everyone knows products customized on a per person basis causes them to be expensive. If people actually knew how to work their tv sets, this wouldn't be a problem (that and if watchdog groups would loosen and grow up). Then again, how many average people know how to set the clock on the VCR?
Insert Sig Here
It should be more economical to buy a package deal than to buy each channel individually.
I'd be happy to pay up to $6 a month for each of the 5 or 6 channels that I watch, rather than $60 per month for the 250 channels that I never watch.
If choice means I get to choose between 250 channels of pure garbage, I guess I don't care so much about giving it up.
I still think the majority of the public will go for the large package deals because many people watch a wide variety of channels, especially families.
A la carte pricing will reduce bills for that only watch a couple of stations. If you watch a diverse number of stations, expect your pricing to go up significantly to cover lost revenues.
Right now I pay $45.28 a month for the basic cable service with Comcast, my ONLY choice becasue they refuse to open their lines to competitors despite what the federal law says. While I could go with satellite the cost is essentially the same but I'd have to have a dish hanging off the front communal porch area.
For that price I get way less than 100 channels and only watch on a regular basis, maybe, 15 channels. I'm only including channels which I physically watch or tape a show from. If I happen to see something on a channel I don't normally watch I will watch the show but won't make an effort to come back at a later time. In fact, I have all the shopping, religious and oldies (Hallmark, Game Show, etc) channels plus the local Comcast craptacular channel blocked out of my channel selection because I'll never watch them. When surfing the channels they don't even appear.
Now, if I could pay roughly the same amount for 20 channels that I would watch, I'd be all for it. Just don't make me pay a monthly service fee for the box which will be required to limit me to my choices.
That being said, you are correct that this issue is not about price. It's about the tightening of the screws by the religious right in this country to stamp out anything they consider indecent. After all, we wouldn't want little Jimmy being exposed to temptations of the flesh by seeing a scantily clad woman on tv, now would we?
Instead we'll let him watch WWE where people beat the snot out of each other using chairs and other implements because that's just good ol hometown entertainment.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It sure would be nice if they rated commercials, too. I remember, years ago, a commercial for the new Ripley's Believe It Or Not came on at dinner time (during the Simpsons, I believe). Without warning, the commercial came on, and a guy started hammering a nail up his nose. Then somebody had worms crawling all over them. Suddenly my spaghetti didn't look so appealing, and I barely managed to keep down what I had already eaten!
I for one am glad that they are considering this. I don't particularly care why it is being considered, although there are channels that I have blocked on my reciever because I don't agree with the subject matter, that new channel Logo comes to mind. Regardless, I might as well have blocked .75 of all the other channels that I have access to because I don't actually watch them. Lifetime...nope, Speed....nope, AMC Movie channel....nope, but I still pay for these. It just happens to irk me more when I pay for channels that I don't agree with their subject matter, just so I can watch channels that I do like. I have said this for a long time, currently I am paying 60+ dollars a month for 100+ channels. That is ~60 cents for each channel, I would gladly pay five times that for each channel if I only had to pay for the 10 or so channels that I do watch.
You're obviously forgetting about a little show called the GOLDEN GIRLS. You don't realize how much you'll miss it until it's gone...
The cable companies are allowed to sell on an ala-carte basis now but they won't because the content providers don't want it. It's an all or nothing deal with the content providers.
The FCC does not require a package or tier structure (other than local channel "Lifeline" service) nor do they prohibit selling programming on a per-channel basis. The FCC has resisted requiring the cable companies to make programming available on a per channel basis.
Or they simply cater to a much less mainstream taste, such as literary or arts programs. Just because something isn't to your taste (or mine) doesn't make it "useless beef".
Actually, if it isn't to my taste and I'm paying for it, it's useless beef. Let the people with fringe interests pay for it.
It finally happened. Someone described literary and arts programming as useless beef. (Personally, I find no beef worthless. It is all tasty to me, but I guess some have forgotten they have canines.) I guess it was inevitable that the arts and history programming would become relegated to fringe interests. I mean, no one watches Biography or Modern Marvels anymore. History Channel, anyone? Beuler...Beuler? I guess that is why Criss Angel:Mindfreak and Inked are on A&E.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Open up all the channels to be viewable by anyone, and you only pay for the channels that you watch on a given day, perhaps for the amount of time that you watch them if you watch for more than 30 minutes total over the course of the day (allows for free channel flipping, to a certain point). Sure, folks with TiVos would get screwed on this for those times that TiVo isn't actively recording something and is just sitting there... although when TiVo is just sitting there, it's usually just sitting on a channel that has already been recorded, so maybe that's not an issue. (TiVo Suggestions automatically recording notwithstanding)
The point is why should someone pay for SPEEDCHANNEL (for example) if they never watch it? But if there's something that happens to be on that channel on a particular day, then let me watch it and pay a nominal fee (pro-rated monthly amount, comes to what - $0.25 a day?) for the time spent watching without having to buy that particular package for the month.
With this model, then you don't pay the cable company for the usage while you're not home, just like the water/gas/electric bills work. It turns the cable industry into a true utility instead of a continual money drain for resources you may or may not be utilizing 100% of the time during the course of the day.
I don't know if that's economically feasible for the cable/sat companies or not and I'm sure that's not how the content providers want their content priced, but it is similar to how CDs and DVDs are priced. Sure CDs and DVDs vary slightly on how much they cost based on popularity, but for the most part they're all about the same price ($15 for a CD, $20 for a DVD).
This would allow the cable/sat companies to provide "plans" just like they have now ("Choose 60" or "My 120") for $20 - $50 per month, but the customer can now select the channels they want to see and leave out the cruft. Or perhaps, it's not based on a number of channels, but a minimum purchase amount (to make it economical for the cable/sat companies).
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
If you've followed how content providers (like Disney, HBO, etc.) negotiate with cable companies (like Comcast, DirecTV, etc.), you can see how a-la-carte pricing is going to cause serious changes--and probably not for the best--to your monthly bill.
For instance, Disney owns ESPN (which has 4 full time channels on DirecTV by my last count) and all those Disney channels like NOG, Disney1, Disney2, Toon Disney, etc. When a large content provider renegotiates with the cable company, that gives them leverage to push their less popular channels based on their more popular ones.
These contracts are usually written in such a way that the content provider is paid a base monthly sum for each channel of content, and then is paid further based on the number of subscribers for each channel. That means that ALL "basic" cable content providers want "all" their channels in the basic package, because all cable viewers are considered subscribers to those channels.
For instance: Let's say that the fictional BigContent copany has a couple of very popular channels, like SportsWorld and AllStandup. And they've got a really unpopular one called StampCollecting. Their arguement goes something like this: SportsWorld should be considered a premium channel. BigContent research has determined that SportsWorld is the single biggest reason that people decide to get your cable system. Since you won't make SportsWorld a "pay channel" (like HBO), we demand that you make StampCollecting one of your basic channels as well!
So that gives BigContent a ton of guaranteed revenue for a the StampCollecting channel that costs them virtually nothing to produce, which nobody will watch, but it keeps the "price" of SportsWorld down to a resonable level.
If I can start to choose SportsWorld on an a-la-carte basis, that completely changes the negotiation. Now when BigContent negotiates it's next contract with Comcast or DirecTV, they're going to start demanding more per month for SportsWorld, to the point where Comcast will have to pass that pricing on to the end user, making SportsWorld prohibitively expensive, both for a-la-carte viewers and for package viewers. It also means that BigContent has less interest in producing their StampCollecting channel, because it wont' be much of a revenue stream for them anymore.
So yes, while I'd be happy not paying for CMT and FOX news, I would hate to have to start paying "market price" for ESPN...and I just don't see how this will work without certain channels (ESPN, MTV, Comedy Central, etc.) becoming prohibitively expensive.
----- Connection reset by beer
Allow? Are they not allowed to sell thier service that way now? I don't want the FCC to 'allow' cable companies to do this, I want the FCC to force cable companies to do this.
Technoli
Some consumers will pay less, many will pay more. Total revenue to cable companies will stay about the same. Some content providers will prosper and some will suffer. It is they for whom we should be worried.
Regulations already force cable companies to carry local channels, so they are safe. Popular mainstream cable channels like ESPN, CNN, MTV, FoxNews, and even History and Discovery are probably safe. The feds will make them carry C-SPAN. What this does primarily is raise the barrier for entry of new content providers. With no means to build an audience, I don't see very many willing to risk putting their new channel on an a la carte menu.
I'm shocked to see how many people are blindly in approval of this. Think "big picture" and think "long term"... There are plenty of channels that I watch on occassion or very unpredictably (like TNT when they have a sporting event I want to watch). Do I want to pay what they'll charge (noone's even said what an individual channel would even cost yet) to watch one or two shows a month? Sure, there are a handful of channels that are "must haves", but out of the rest in the package, there are a TON of them that are "on occassion" viewing. How pissed will you be when owners of channels shuffle popular shows between their channels just to raise funds on the less popular channels? If sales of Discovery Kids is low, who is to stop Discovery Channel from moving Mythbusters over there to increase sales? In the long run, ala-carte will probably end up costing most of us MORE (due to increased fees), and we're going to be upset when we can't watch half the shows we used to because they get shuffled to less popular channels. Throw in the death of many of the "fringe" interest shows and you end up with satelite/cable being just another Network TV paradise of reality shows all vying for more mass viewership instead of quality programming.
Television is an awful medium for education. It's passive, and it's single speed (you can't go back and study a bit that you missed, or didn't quite understand, or skip through the simple bits easily). About the only thing television is good for is passive entertainment - when your brain is tired and wants a rest.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
The underlying idea of A la carte programming seems like a good idea, and will even cost those of us who couldn't care less about sports a LOT less (disgustingly enough, the bulk of your "extended basic" cable bill goes toward subsidizing the sports channels, which cost more than premium channels like HBO and contractually force cable carriers to include them in anything beyond their most basic package).
However, BEWARE of this FCC "ruling" - It counts as little less than an attempted power-grab.
The FCC does not currently have the authority to regulate cable. They can't tell the cable companies to unbundle their offerings, and more importantly, they can't censor cable-only channels on the basis of content. In even looking at this issue, the FCC has bluntly said "we support this extremely popular move, but don't have the authority to make it a reality... But! If congress would just give us a little more power..."
I'll gladly pay a bit more if it means the PTC can't make cable as pablum-like as broadcast TV. I would hope that some day the cable companies would grow a pair and tell the sports networks to take a hike, but in the mean time, I'll take bundled programming over all "child friendly" programming.
Ah, but I'd be willing to bet that Joe Average only watches about six or eight channels on a regular basis. In order to protect their income, they'll probably set it up so that you have to pay $x for the ala carte service, and then another $y per channel (which will vary per channel), so that when Joe Average subscribes to his 6-8 channels, the amount he's paying will be similar to what he pays now.
See, cable is practically an institution in this country now -- I don't know a single person who doesn't have it -- and they've established a pricing structure like the cellphone companies have. Exorbitant costs for something that costs them next to nothing now that the infrastructure is established and has probably given them complete ROI.
blog |
Just saw the probable pricing for some of these channels. ESPN currenty charges the cablecos about 2.50 per customer in a package deal from their owners. If they go separate they will be looking for 12-17.00 per month. I suggest be very careful what you ask for as you may get it. And it will cost a lot more not just a little. The popular channels know they are popular and will charge accordingly.
And I could cut out about 95% of the channels being offered with my cable provider's base package but my cable bill will probably go up too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Lets get down to the real issue people. Those "indecent" channels are too expensive, some almost half of what my cable bill is. The FCC needs to do something about that! *grumbles about a prude America and censorship*
I highly doubt that moving to this á la carte scenario will result in them dropping packages. Chances are that they will price point it to where if you get say two channels in a suite (like Discovery), buying the whole package will cost about the same, pennies more, or possibly less.
What would be nice about this is that I wouldn't have to pay for stuff I never watch at all. There are stations I watch on rare occasion that are worthwhile, like TNT and Spike, but others, particularly MTV and MTV2, that I never watch. I'm not interested in having Disney on my TV (I have no kids).
Depending on how they price it all out, I could end up saving money. Or perhaps buying the whole big package will save me money. For me, buying a whole bundle of services through Comcast makes no sense right now, but for my mom, who always has kids in her house, it makes a lot of sense, with her 5+ TVs, and her four computers online.
If I could drop myself down to basically the networks, CNN, History, History International, TNT, Spike, Sci-Fi, BBC America, Comedy Central, Discovery, TLC, Cartoon Network, TBS, and a premium lineup like HBO, I'd be pretty well set. I'd have around 30 channels, and I'd have about as much to watch as I do with 150+.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
as someone pointed out, they bundle ESPN with ESPN 2 but thats not even the half of it, a lot of channels are bundled with unrelated channels under the same parent company, it's total BS really.
Don't Blame me if I seem bitter, I'm at work, and the TV only plays soap operas.
Bullshit...It didn't mean higher prices for c-band sat's so how would it with dbs sats and cable?
I welcome it!
A related example to that one is stuff like PBS which is required to be carried and is subsidized by non-profits and by the government. That wouldn't change in this pricing model. PBS could still be subsized and the consumer won't even know it.
Actually, that's how all channels are now. Ratings = more viewers = more advertiser dollars. Actually, I wonder if some channels will actually become FREE in the hopes of selling ads. (I guess that didn't work in newspapers and magazines, but they are cheap.) I know that you are obviously a much better consumer than everyone else, with better tastes. That's because you read Slashdot.Totally off the wall: I am curious what cheap TV programming was never available before, that might become available now.
Secondarily, the reason that I consider this decision by the FCC to be good without regard to any belief system is this: Religious preferences aside, true consumer choices on cable in terms of which channels are paid for, profitability of the cable companies themselves will be more directly tied to who has the best content, and if the indicators from Hollywood are any indicator (most of the top earning movies of all time are at the most PG-13), less junk equals more profit.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Interesting idea. However with most true utilities the model is "standing charge" + "usage charges". Sometimes the standing charge includes a basic amount of usage but that is dependent on the model. This is a reasonable cost or a utility because there is a basic cost of the infrastructure (how much this is may be debatable) and the unit costs of the material shipped through the infrastructure is determined by the market (or government edict). The producers sell their inputs to the "grid" and consumers buy it. Hmmmmm....
Imagine that model with TV! The producers of say "The Sopranos" charge the Grid 5 million bucks to pump out an episode a week, first let loose at say 9pm Tuesdays and the grid charges all those that watch it a buck and change through their "meter". Once the beast is loose it gets P2Ped to death and nobody has to pay again. Man the possibilities here are way coool. you could have a "voting" or "patronage" system whereby punters could fund the programs they like through the "box" and still watch whatever the other punters have managed to "fund" without having to pay extra.
Nice!!
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I only use cable for internet access (40.00 US dollars) and the mandatory by law offer of basic channels for 9.95 (US dollars). This is mainly for a tv lifeline that is geared to retired folk on fixed incomes. If I could get 7 channels for under 10 dollars of my choice, I might like this though... Right now I get about 35 channels geared toward the mainstream. It is interesting to see how they live.
Tired of the cable companies forcing standardized channel lineups. Wait till the phone companies start coming in with Fiber to the premises. This is when the consumer might actually start to get some leverage here. When we have cable, telephone and satellite companies all competing for your dollars, then we might get a more customizable channel lineup.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
It did happen. Dish Network used to offer a "Dish Pix" package - $15 a month for ten basic channels of your choice. It's not available to new subscribers but I've still got it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The a la carte approach is one step in the right direction of not subsidizing channels that I do not ever care to watch (any religious network or music tv). But even with that improvement I'm still faced with networks which carry shows I do like perhaps once per week, but the rest of the week I wouldn't watch that network.
Better still would be if there were ways to let individual users in a household pay for the programming they want to see. That way if the wife wants to watch some awful programme I can be happy knowning that *I* didn't have to pay for it.
Why on earth does that concern you?
This proposal allows the viewer to decide what is indecent and what is ok.
Everyone, including Joe Righteous, should have a right to do this.
Remember, You do not have a right to impose your values on 'Joe Righeous' any more than he has a right to impose his on you.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Welcome to the age of the PVR, where you can indeed rewind TV or skip ahead. I often find myself skipping back when watching Mythbusters to see some detail of their setup. And it's no more passive than books.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Thank you! I was thinking I was the only one who knew that it's been possible for years elsewhere.. Now, getting my dad to shell out the $x a month for the sci-fi channel, when I was the only one in the house watching it was harder.. but I eventually succeeded and we got every channel we wanted that we now have on some_expensive_cable_package we have, but it was 25% of the cost of what we're paying now (we don't watch that many).
If only that satellite receiver hadn't died, we'd likely still be doing it.
I agree with most of your article, except the last bit. I would say that parents in general (at least if they're good parents) are concerned about limiting what their children watch, not just the "religious right" nuts. I fully agree with your sentiments about Comcast, as I pay $62 for digital cable and I watch about 15-20 channels. I think what would be better (this may be directed more towards the poster ABOVE your comment), are channel "groupings". -Networks -Family Channels (ABC Family, PBS, etc) -Educational (Discovery, History) -Sports (ESPN1-?) -Movie/General/Etc (FX, TNT, TBS, etc) However, if it were really per channel, you'd have to tack on the "service" fee which would be like $20, plus $2 average per channel. My 20 channels would cost me $60. So, yes, it is very flawed. Just lower the prices altogether, don't try to rip us off coming and going!
Starmen.net
Good points. But just because cable companies might start offering subscribers a la carte options does not mean that the companies will stop offering customers the current packaged deals. A lot of people will probably stick with the current options.
I also believe that an a la carte option will still use the current on-screen programming guides, meaning that you still see all of the channels you don't buy. If you only want seven channels, fine, but those channels will be spread across hell's half acre.
Wow, you're wrong in so, so many ways... You seem to think that stations make all their profit from the cable companies, but that's not just true. They get a lot of revenue from advertising. And offering channels for $0 answers most of your issues. First of all, why can't a channel allow itself to be "sold" for under $1? In fact, many channels might want to be priced at $0 so they have the largest possible viewership. If you could select channels for $0, would you? "[Fledgling] channels will be gone under a-la-carte pricing, because they will be forced to pay their own way from day one, and they will not be able to command the prices required for them to operate profitably." Again, if they got sponsership from another channel with bundles, why would that stop for a-la-carte? They'd still get funding, offer the channel for $0, and the viewership, again, would be the same. Only the people who "opt-out" of these channels won't get them, and they probably would never watch anyways. And finally, you suggest that the only successful channels will be determined by the "lowest common denominator." That's how it is today, buddy. Allowing people to pick their own channels won't change their viewing habits, and no show that already has a large following will suffer. And no show that has a small group of very dedicated fans will suffer, either. What I like about this is that I can make my TV decent. I could finally get rid of all that profane religious garbage, stop my children from being damaged by seeing senseless Disney cartoons, and not have to channel flip by the sound-byte happy conservative news stations :) (Not actually, but I'm trying to get a point across, the road goes both ways).
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
This has worked for me wherever I've lived.
Step 1, subscribe to Extended Basic cable (~40/month) - I don't bother with digital, I just like my HGTV, TLC, etc...
Step 2, a few months later switch to Basic cable (~10/month) - This is just the basic channels, mostly ABC, NBC, etc...
The best part, the cable companies NEVER come back and reduce you to Basic cable, so you pay $10 / month for Extended Basic cable. They'll reduce your bill, but the guy who turns on your cable told me that it isn't worth it for the installers to come back and switch you from Extended Basic to Basic, so they'll just leave it alone. I guess it is illegal, and I'm a bad person, but I only watch HGTV, TLC, and CBS a couple of times a week, so I consider this my a la carte pricing solution. This has worked in the last four places I've lived.
Considering the market that porn enjoys I think that per-channel pricing could end up doing the opposite. New offerings will have 50 XXX rated channels, 30 cartoon channels (for children and stoners), 30 sports/WWF/NASCAR channels, 10 news channels, 10 "movies for women" channels, 5 educational/discovery type channels, 5 DIY type channels and 1 tech channel. (And no, 24 hours of gaming and game reviews is NOT a tech channel.)
There is a MAJOR technical reason that none of this is going to happen for quite a while. Cable companies are in the weird position of being both an analog and a digital media provider. Digital media lends itself to alacarte/ondemand services, for analog it is a nightmare. There is not a single user of anlog media who can choose what content they get offered. You buy a magazine, you get a magazine, not only the articles of interest to you. Same goes for print, radio, over the air TV and analog cable (which still accounts for the bulk of cable customers). A cable TV signal is multiplexed to a carrier wave that travels along coax. The only way to add/remove certain services is to notch out certain frequencies. To notch out frequencies to your house in most areas requires a technician to install a device between your set and the source of the signal. Next time you go out - check up on the telephone pole outside your house - you'll see a few barrel-shaped devices that control service levels. If the cable company had to roll a truck out every time a customer decided that this is the week they actually want the sports channels, or that uncle Harv is supposed to be on that news channel tonight, it could only drive overall prices up. If and when FCC mandated digital switchover that we've all been hearing about for at least a decade arrives, then this will probably take off, but then the complaint is going to be that you have to rent a box even to watch TV.
This used to puzzle me as well, but the more I thought about it, I came to realize that people don't seem to mind their kids seeing violence as much as sex because they don't actually think their kids will do any of the violent things they see, but they might actually do the sexual things. Certainly there are those who think kids do mimic the violent things they see, and for a very small subset of society, that's true. But, the vast majority of people exposed to violence rarely re-enact it. But, if kids see "natural and legal" sexual behavior, their going to think, "Hey, why can't I do that?" And therin lies the concern about sex in the media.
Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun -Troy McClure
Right now basic cable comes to my house unscrambled. I can hook it up to any cable ready TV or VCR in my house with no problem. I need a cable box to unscramble the pay-tv channels but everything else is pretty easy to get. If they impliment this will that mean that ALL of the channels will be scrambled and we will need a box to unscramble even local channels that I could get with an antenna anyway? It seems to me that they offer a bunch of channels for basic cable because it is easier for them and for us. I do not want (nor do I think they want) a cable box for every TV that I have cable hooked up to. Will this make older cable ready VCR's unable to record programs on different channels? Or will they force me to rent a box that nicely blocks some of the channels that come through unscrambled anyway? My guess is that it will still cost $40 a month or whatever for basic cable, or you can rent a channel blocker for $30 a month that would then let you pick channels ala carte for $10 each.
Yes, you can setup up your Tivo or MythTV to work with a Digital Cable Box, best case you setup a Firewire connection which also handles channel changes. But in many cases its an ugly hack at best.
As the parrent poster mentioned, this is possible, but REQUIRES each customer use a cable box for each set in the house (for typical customer usage). "Cable-Ready" TV's, VCR's, and PVR's all become useless for tuning. The Cable company can't leave anything in the clear because it might offend someone, or at least is not wanted (not paid for).
Even the entire spectrum of digital channels would have to be encrypted/scrambled, with new QAM256 tuners in some HD sets and DVB cards in homebuilt PVR's. In the end I see this making TV much more controlled and Closed source we currently enjoy, despite the high prices.
Right now there's a TON of crap on TV, and I don't mean 'offensive' I just mean crap (every reality show ever created comes to mind). And if a la carte means that some of the crap will go away for lack of interest, that's fine by me.
I think you need to get out there and find out what the mainstream actually likes instead of projecting what you like onto them. Yes, reality television is utter and complete crap, but it's immensely popular crap. You see while geeks obsess over interesting objects and ideas, most people out there obsess over people and relationships. Reality TV is all about that -- alliances, double-crossings, pettiness, ego, short-lived romance, and broken hearts. Extroverts eat it up. It's the car accident of human relationships. It engages that same parts of the brain that make people rubberneck as they drive by. I've even gotten caught up a time or two before slapping myself and asking, "Why am I watching a bunch of attention-starved narcissists compete to see who's the biggest, most manipulative choad?"
No, reality TV won't be hurt in the slightest by a la carte programming. It's the fine art, esoteric documentaries, and fantastic fiction that will be hurt. If you already think that the History channel is the War Channel and that the Discovery channel is the Sharks & Aliens channel, prepare for it all to get worse as informational and cultural stations fight to survive by pandering as much as possible. The Sundance Channel? Gone! BBC America? Gone! G4-TechTV? Gone! (Well, good riddance anyway...) ADV's Anime channel? Gone! Sci-Fi channel? Well, it better keep churning out Battlestar Galactica like hits instead of recycling crap the other networks dumped.
TV will condense itself down to a handful of channels -- network television (with all its reality TV), news channels, sports channels, the major movie channels, ethnic channels, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Food Network, and the Weather Channel. Pretty much anything else is doomed to struggle unless they're free (like C-SPAN or probably the shopping networks). New channels will have to face shelling out tons of money to get cable/sat providers to show them as freebies for a few months to try to build up enough of a potential subscriber base to survive. This will kill anything fringe -- especially when the market model comes down that refuses to let channels be sold for less than a dollar.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I dont know what I would do without the "Ocho" and my OSQ.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
When we had analog tv via the air, and the big thing about having cable and paying for it, was to be no or fewer commercials. Well today, we pay for cable, the show, and have more commercials than ever before. I dont believe it will save any money, but instead cost us at least 25% more than we pay now for the same thing.
Right now, they make up a slate of channels and keep track of the numbers of packages sold.
The consumer doesn't get involved in the apportioning of revenue between the content providers and the cable companies except as a sales figure.
That's VERY cheap to track and, like any statistical measure, can be manipulated by the cable companies to support any aim or claim.
If they have to mediate between 'Joe Sixpack' and 'ESPN 2' that gets them into details they DON'T want to get into.
Right now all the revenue figures are based on the warm and fuzzies of the Nielson ratings which are themselves cheap to track and, like any statistical measure, can be manipulated by the cable companies to support any aim or claim.
And they only need to track some statistical sample of WHAT'S AVAILABLE.
If 'Joe Sixpack' doesn't want to watch 'Pooftahs at the Royal Ballet' but is definitely behind 'Trailer Trash Olympics' (despite not being able to spell it) right now, he's getting PBS regardless.
Imagine a world where 'Joe Sixpack' gets to negotiate DIRECTLY with the producers of a show and PAY for exactly what he wants to watch: "Naked Hippie Snuff", shot on location at a local 'tornado magnet,' uh trailer park.
That's what the cable companies are scared shitless of. Having to actually mediate between the consumer and the producer.
They become just a wire, plugged end to end, and wire's cheap because wire can't charge under the guise of 'adding value.' (Or make all kinds of sweet heart deals with people who want to 'sell the eyeballs' to people who want to 'buy the eyeballs'.)
Guess what the internet IS? Its just a wire.
It delivers its content, whatever its size, from anywhere, whenever its requested, as best it can, to anywhere, and said content can be stored locally for consumption whenever the user has the time for it.
Time shifting, geography shifting, direct linking, direct producer paying media service. Its the pimp's and the screamer's WORST NIGHTMARE.
No more "'News at 11' in a minute, but first a word from our sponsors!" And you HAVE to sit there and watch it.
It totally breaks up the broadscasting paradigm and the revenue streams that are funded on it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
A la Carte is not the answer.. Maybe we should make every Tv manufacturer inbed V-chip devices to limit access to content.
Oh Wait we are already doing that. At who's expense the tax payer and the comsumer. Someone had to write the legislation, then someone had to intergrate the chip into the television. It's Obvious that the V-CHIP was a complete and utter failure other wise we wouldn't be talking "protection" again.
The Cable companies should be required to offer a "decency" package. Thus Providing the people who no longer care about bringing up their children another way to blame someone else.
I'm tired of my Tax Dollars being wasted..
They are your children, Care for them, Don't leave it up to the government.
Actually, I wonder if some channels will actually become FREE in the hopes of selling ads. (I guess that didn't work in newspapers and magazines, but they are cheap.)
some channels alread do it...they are called over the air and have existed for many many years (even before cable--gasp!!!). and i know a great many people that don't have cable or sattelite and only watch these "free" channels.
seriously, it shows that it is possible for a company to broadcast without charging a fee. heck making yourself available over cable should theoretically be cheaper than broadcasting over the air, because then you don't necessarily need all those expensive transmitters.
I look forward to the day I can call my cable provider and say "I'd like everything I'm getting now except for that piece of [expletive] G4."
There are a base set of channels for $10/month, then you can pick 20 more for $20, or 30 more for $30 (or something to that effect). You can change channels any time you want, either through the cable box or through their website, as long as the channel you no longer wish to pay for has been subscribed to for at least one month.
It's a nice little deal. Hell, they offer this with 'high speed internet' and phone service over the cable network (it's VoIP) for $70/month.
The shopping channels actually pay the cable/sat companies for carriage. You can't get Dish network without them. In their early days Dishnet had an ala carte plan but were forced to discontinue it by the likes of ESPN and others
So all the years of educational programming on PBS, the History Channel, etc. have been a huge waste of time and money?
Your opinion flys in the face of research showing the benefits that educational programming gives to children.
It finally happened. Someone described literary and arts programming as useless beef. (Personally, I find no beef worthless. It is all tasty to me, but I guess some have forgotten they have canines.) I guess it was inevitable that the arts and history programming would become relegated to fringe interests. I mean, no one watches Biography or Modern Marvels anymore. History Channel, anyone?
The History and Discovery channels are very popular and I watch them all the time. It's pretty much ALL I watch on TV, ever, when I do rarely watch it. If they weren't very popular I would pay to watch them. I described programs I'm not interested in as useless beef - just because someone else used the example of art and literary programs you assume I consider them so too. Not the case.
I don't want to pay for the other 500 channels I don't watch and don't care about - Surgery, underwater basket weaving, The Learning (and home redecorating) channel, etc.
Ever notice that the videos on "Beavis and Butt Head" are getting more and more muted?
That's because the music hasn't changed and, while its suppopsed to be a parody of the crap listen to, its becoming nostalgia over the crap we used to listen to.
What's the difference between QVC and MTV?
There's isn't any anymore.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The other reason the FCC is reviewing this is that the telco's are starting to look at providing video. The last thing the cable co's want is to offer individual channels, but if the telco's come in doing it then that would give them a leg up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
a) It will mean higher prices.
b) It will mean fewer choices.
You forgot one..
c) It will suck
Think of this: there are channels out there that built their viewer-base through popularity. (FoodTV, Discovery) How did they get popular? People could tune in and check it out because they already had the channel. How will that work if people only get certain channels? Will there be a preview option? How do you know if any of the other channels are interesting? What if a channel kind of gets out of "focus" for you? I thought I would love having the Speed channel, but it is mostly crap now - NASCAR, American Chopper knockoffs, NASCAR. blech. I am glad I have it because I can catch something interesting every once in a while, but if I had to choose whether or not to pay for it, I probably wouldn't.
I have been channel-surfing or have seen something in the guide that made me stop and watch it, sometimes on a channel I would never watch. Sometimes I am in the mood to watch a dog show! But I don't think I'd pay for Animal Planet. But I guess I am not "normal". I don't have 30 different shows that I follow religiously. If I miss a show that I do like - oh well. One thing I wish they would do is if you buy a channel, they give you a free re-run channel so you can catch things you miss.
But the big point that some people are missing is that you probably will still be able to buy your tier channel packages, they will most likely just add on the ala carte channels as an option. And probably a relatively expensive one too. If the cable companies don't want you to use this option, they will make sure that you don't. I do think it is a great idea, in theory. But I think that the media companies will make sure that it isn't so attractive. They can then comply with the gov (who they are clearly in bed with) and still keep doing what they are doing.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Everyone is forgetting how and why cable began, it was to offer commercial free premium tv for a subscription. Originally it was never meant to charge for commercial TV. Ted Turner was the last to cave when he ran into financial problems and the cable providers threatened to remove him from cable if he didn't scramble his satellite signal. Channels with commercials should be free or nearly free and supported by the advertisers. I am kind of suprised that Murdoch hasn't started offering all of Fox offerings for free just to boost revenues. But I watch about 10 channels, scifi and most of the history/discovery stuff and news, they are all stuffed with far too many commercials and I'm paying to watch commercials, pretty ridiculous.
The underlying idea of A la carte programming seems like a good idea, and will even cost those of us who couldn't care less about sports a LOT less (disgustingly enough, the bulk of your "extended basic" cable bill goes toward subsidizing the sports channels, which cost more than premium channels like HBO and contractually force cable carriers to include them in anything beyond their most basic package).
So THAT's why I have ESPN8 (the Ocho)! Seriously, I've watched ESPN2 maybe twice, once when I was bored and wanted to watch sumo wrestling and once when I was bored and wanted to watch the Worlds Strongest Man contest (I wish I had a name like Magnus Samuelssen). It would be great if I could drop most of the sports channels along with all the Christian channels and Lifetime and BET, etc etc and get cheaper cable.
I HAVE cable and I find indecent programming and nearly every channel except ABC, CBS and NBC !!!
Why can't I get cable with just those three channels???? (plus maybe PBS... but I'm undecided cause they sometimes have shows with 'foreigners' in them, very indecent...).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The FCC is charged with managing the over the air bandwidth etc. What does the FCC have to do swith Cable or Satellite (and other pay for use) transmissions? I can see with the FTC might be involved but this is outside the FCC's enabling legislation.
How much would you pay 'per episode' when its something you're really interested in?
... in which a troupe of bunnies parodies a collection of movies by re-enacting them in 30 seconds, more or less. You won't see that on Channel 2.)
Stop thinking 'I got to be at home for eight.' (You wouldn't have to anyway with a Tivo.)
Stop thinking 'What? My show got canceled?'
Stop thinking 'What happened to this scene? I remember it as being much longer. Too many commercials.'
And producers, if you need 1:07 instead of 1:00, wouldn't it be nice to TAKE 1:07 instead of having to be merciless and draconian.
Likewise, if your format is a 10 minute piece, make a ten minute piece. (Or shorter: The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library ~
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I submitted a story last evening regarding this which also included that the Chairman was also looking to take control of Cable/Satellite TV content. Of course the story was rejected :)
In any case I can't find the exact article yesterday, but this one contains what I was worried about. The quote that really got be bothered was
"You can always turn the television off and of course block the channels
you don't want," he said, "but why should you have to?"
The slashdot community I would think would be more interested in this then "al a carte" pricing.
Oh my dear God, it is? One of the cavets was that packages were non-negotiable, that you were locked in regionally by different franchised packagers. Direct TV did, or the franchised package sellers, as I stated before, move both SciFI and Food from the basic package to a premium package. My only alternative was to upgrade my package to get it back,...or...find another carrier. I switched over to Dish TV to get a better deal. Before you say, "horray to the FCC for keeping things competetitive" remember that Direct TV was trying to get the FCC to allow them to buy Dish TV, because there would still be competitition with cable. The deal almost when down, under Chairman Powell. Unless you live in the boonies like me, cable is an alternative. Direct TV still call us once a month to try to lure us back, with the promise of a replacement(premium) package with my favored channels. Both the dish and reciever are in the shed.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
Right now, you pay what, $30 for 100 channels or whatever your cable company charges for the package you have. Switch to a-la-carte and do you really think any channel is going to allow themselves to be priced for under a buck a month?
Only the silly ones. Yes, they only get 30c from every viewer that wants to see their channel. But they also get 30c from everyone else which happen to be in the same package. Chances are pretty good it was some of the 99 other channels they actually signed up for. So in order to just break even and earn as much as they did before, I expect each channel to cost a dollar or two. I mean on average, people will watch far less than 100 channels. And if your viewing habits are average, expect the cost to stay roughly the same. It's not like they're going to give you a huge rebate by moving to this system.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What do you mean allow? They're already allowed to do it if they want. More like force.
The cable and sat companies are not fans of this and are already complaining that the less popular channels that are bundled with the ones people actually want to see aren't going to sell if they're not bundled. (ding! ding! ding! Perhaps if they don't sell it is because they suck and you should just rid of them! But that's a side point.)
- AMW
What I'll never understand, though, is that anyone of drinking age who is watching football (and doesn't have anything moral or medical that keeps them from drinking) already has a beer in his hand, knows what beer he likes, and isn't going to be persuaded to switch from Miller to Bud just because of the half-naked sexy women surrounding Bernie Mac. Duh! :-)
I disagree completely,
The cable companies will need (or desire) to maintain about the same level of profit they currently enjoy now. If you choose only a handful of channels, rest assured they absolutely WILL increase in price, especially, as the grandparent post mused, if they are popular channels.
I can sell you a bag of rice at $10 a bag or if you prefer a grain-at-a-time for $0.12 a grain. Take your pick.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
a la carte pricing is already an option. I called my cable company (Time Warner) and demanded a la carte pricing and saved over $30/month. The only cable station I care about is HBO and now that's the only one I have! Try it, you may same some money too and cut down on time wasted surfing through a wasteland of junk.
BTW - At first, the Time Warner rep insisted it wasn't an option. I had to press him on it and speak with a manager. Apparently there is already some sort of regulation that blocks forced bundling.
And all this time, I thought the sat company just didn't want us to have a la carte. We really don't need to pay for 135 channels, when we just want 30.
Ad Astra Per Asper
That's got to be the stupidest thing I've heard. Most lectures are also passive and single-speed, yet nobody is saying they are worthless. Besides DVRs are quite popular, and address all your concerns.
I don't imagine there's anything I can say that will convince you of how very wrong you are. All I can suggest is that you actually WATCH some of the educational shows some time. Nova, Nature, etc., all do a much better of educating you on a subject than reading an article would be able to. An hour of well-done video can be immensely helpful in educating someone on a subject.
Consider this... In perhaps 2 hours, I can watch a Shakespeare play in it's entirety, and get the very same thing out of it, as you can by spending several days READING that same play in print. Plus, it's much easier for most people, while the long and drawn-out process of reading it would be deathly boring to most people.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That's what will make everyone happy. This way the ESPN and HBO and Showtime can rape us on the charges, the soccermoms get to feel noble and all protecting the children and shit and the do-gooders get to pretend it all magically evaporated. I really don't see a downside. Wouldn't YOU pay extra for for Celebrity Fear Factor xTreme reruns where they eat rotten horse balls?
You'll have to excuse me, I just dropped in from an alternate timeline where cable customers got broadband service and shows are listed on RSS feeds -- sometimes presented like a restaurant menu. You tell the provider what you want and it's downloaded to your home hub via P2P for $0.75/hour (shows go on sale periodically, and there are "live" streams for special events that are generally $0.90/hour). You can even get D2 and low-bandwidth stuff (like cartoons) cheaper.
I guess a channel is like an RSS feed of available shows then?
So I settled for cable. The local cable monopoly charges me $49.95 a month for a mere 55 channels. And this is on top of the $44.95 a month I pay for cable internet (they gave me a whopping $5 discount on that for being a TV subscriber). Mind you, that I live in a rural area where I can get exactly four over-the-air channels.. one PBS, one independent station, one Spanish, and one home shopping. Of course, I'm too far from the CO to be able to get ADSL, so they have a monopoly on broadband internet access, too. And when they finally get around to shutting down competing VoIP service I'll have to pay their $35/mo. for VoIP instead of the $20/mo I now pay with Lingo. So, if this isn't price gouging, I don't know what is! They are the only game in town, and thanks to the FCC, are completely unregulated monopolies now. Our town was the only town on Long Island that had TCI cable instead of Cablevision 10 years ago. They offered more channels and lower prices. Guess what? Cablevision bought our town's cable service from TCI, cut half the channels and raised the rates.
Something has to be done to stop these predatory monopolies. I would love to be able to pay $3 a channel for the 10 channels I actually watch and have my bill go down $20 a month!
Lets not forget Thomas Jefferson, who wrote "The Philosophy of Jesus Christ".
Most definitely NOT a christian by the traditional definition of the word.
And don't forget, most of our founding fathers were products of the age of reason.
Actually, I would argue this as well. As an undergrad, I found lectures eithr dull, or entertaining but not an effective way of learning. Courses I didn't bother attending lectures for, but instead spent the time reading up on the subject, were the courses I did the best in.
As for Shakespear, I don't think it takes me longer to read the play than watch it performed, but I will agree I get more benefit from seeing it acted. I would qualify this, however, by saying that I have never seen a TV production of any of his works that comes close to seeing it performed live.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They should try this with packages where you get to pick a certain number of channels. Say $30 for the first 30 channels, you get to pick what the channels are. A certain amount of those channels can be popular (based on ratings), say 20. Then you can get a package above that with say 50 channels 30-35 of which can be popular. Of course, you can purchase each channel individually for a small monthly fee ($2-$3/month). I could see this working in the above fashion, and being beneficial to the consumer, rather than making you pay $3/month per channel period.
As far as the censorship part of the programming goes, it is so easy to manage what your children can see at home with a set top box. Or maybe you could even try something absolutely crazy, like keeping an eye on your children!
Cheesy Movie Night
Dick Cheney doesn't get cable in his secure, undisclosed location.
Take a look at the FCCs website for the statistics of this organization. 99% of all indecency complaints originate from the PTC. In fact, this link shows that 99.8% of all complaints originate from this organization.
Just like the minority christian evangelicals raising the biggest stink about supposed religious harassment/infringement, this organization has the loudest mouth about indecency issues.
If you look at this page from the PTC you can see how many complaints they've filed about tv shows in 2004/2005. Look at some of the shows they've complained about. CSI, Big Brother and NCIS.
While my comment might seem like a troll, as one moderator apparently thinks, the facts seem to support my statement.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Tansposed: "I'd like to take this opportunity to offload the responsibility of this issue from the FCC to the cable companies, who share no vested interest in lowering costs for their subscribers nor for the regulation of telecommunications. Thank you and goodnight, my TiVo is waiting for me at home."
Basically, Martin has just said "yeah a la carte is a great idea. We at the FCC think the cable companies should continue to think about it." That's not exactly a fantastic event.. the FCC just seems to be avoiding a confrontation with the media giants.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
What's the difference between members of government expressing their religion through law and a state-sponsored religion?
Mostly in the sectarian nonsense. The early history of the US was filled with Christians discriminating agasint Christians. State sponsored religion meant that the restrictions came down to very ticky and irrelevant matters such was what could be said in prayers and how music should be handled. It also led to sensless hate and division. The First Amendment puts freedom of religion into the Constitution to avoid a regression to that sort of behavior (as well as to ease inter-state tensions since many states were Catholic states, Puritan states, etc.)
I'm going to go off on a little tangent for a bit before returning to the difference between state-sponsored religion and democracy that follow religious values.
Most religions share the same values -- don't do to other people what you wouldn't want done to you, help out the less fortunate, and avoid selfish behavior. Most of these agree on certain specific ways of expressing these core values -- don't sleep around, don't kill or hurt people, don't steal, don't go around trying to offend people, do give to charity, do spend time with your family, do spend time helping other members of the community.
Religion also often have a bad side due to their function as a binder of communities. Most religions treat those who don't follow their precepts as flawed people to encourage shame/guilt reinforcement of the morals they espouse. Most religions have some sort of code of behavior, dress, or food preparation that help distinguish believers from non-believers. Many religions actually proscribe punishments to be meted out against those who break their codes of behavior -- Judaism and Islam are well noted for this. Some religions promote certain unequal hierarchies such as a caste system or wives being always subservient to their husbands.
The real problem with religions (especially state-sponsored religions) is their abuse by people following mankind's tribal instincts. We have evolved with powerful mechanisms to support the livelihood of our communities. We naturally group people into either "us" or "them." We then ignore flaws to bind "us" together and accentuate flaws to encourage competition with "them." The power-hungry have always used religion as an excuse to feed atrocities that the religions themselves abhor. "We" are culturally & morally superior than "they" are. "We" should bring our englightened ways to "them." "They" are Evil and should be crushed.
This is in no way limited to religious entities. Marxism used hatred of the poor and sneering at religion as a tool. In the Spanish-American War, our president promised that we'd spread the values of Christendom while our current president promises that we'll spread the values of Democracy. It's all still about one group telling another how to live because they believe that their way is best. We proudly beat our chests about the good things about our way of life and obsess over the bad things about their way of life. Whether we're right or not is irrelevant; we're still following instinctual behaviors.
Even though, this tribal attitude isn't limited to religiously-linked communities, state-sponsored religion has always resulted in persecution at home and conquering abroad because it very strongly enforces "us" vs. "them" divides. However, the modern system of democratically voting in shared beliefs (while protecting against restriction of religion) has been far more successful at promoting the community-building nature of religion over the abuse of it by encouraging tolerance and consensus. If the majority feel that something is bad, then the laws will reflect that and will preserve community harmony which is the purpose of Law. If the majority overrides and seriously disaffects a minority, then unrest will arrise, and the Law will eventually be corrected to reflect what will restore harmony. This is the democratic process.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I disagree. Currently Nielsen polls people to find out what they watch. There has been a lot of press in the past couple years about how certain subsections of the population are being underserved by the current ratings scheme. I think allowing people to actually pick and choose what channels get funded it would quickly sort out the junk. I think you would be surprised to find out how many people would subscribe to the under represented channels that actually have quality content. I The only thing better would be allowing me to subscribe directly to individual programs. VOD for cable TV should be the future. P.S I have been happily watching broadcast TV for the last 9 months and the only thing I really miss is the Daily Show. I would happily pay $5 a month for that one show but I refuse to pay $50
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Digital TV in the UK did this kind of customisation a while back before it became Freeview. You paid your base subscription for the base channels, plus any 6 of the 'extra' channels. You could then buy more 'extra' channels one-by-one, or buy a package with another 6, or buy a package with them all.
:(
It actually worked quite well, except for the fact we ended up with 50 auction channels as base channels
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Therefore, all systems that involve human choice should default to the best option for the individual that has to make the decision, and shouldn't have more than 10 options. If there are more than that, you should split it into sub categories.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
The trouble with groupings is they sometimes exclude channels you might want to watch even though they're out of your "market" so to speak. For instance, I'm a childfree adult, but I sometimes like to watch old cartoons on Toon Disney or Boomerang. However, I'd have to purchase a "family" grouping to receive just those channels. This grouping would contain all kinds of channels I don't watch, just because I have the desire to occasionally get nostalgic about old cartoons.
A-la-carte channels, at a reasonable cost, would be a great thing. I expect the cable companies to try to rip us off anyway, though.
-Z
I don't mean to be rude but you are missing his point. We used to get television over the air. It had commercials. We all understood that commercials paid for the programming.
Then cable arrived.
The promise of cable was that if we PAID for programming, then we would NOT have commercials. Guess what, now we have far more commercials than we used to have, plus we are STILL PAYING for television! That's why I don't watch AMC or Bravo anymore. My viewing has switched to IFC (The Independant Film Channel) and TCM (Turner Classic Movies).
On top of that you now suggest that we PAY again for a Tivo AND it's mandatory subscription?
You're adding insult to injury with your suggestion.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
The only reason it worked for you is because you asked for a channel that doesn't have strings attached. If you had asked for ESPN, MTV, or Comedy Central without any of the other channels they would not have been able to do it. viacom and company generally attach a lot of strings to their popular channels that require cable companies to bundle their useless stupid channels if they want the good ones.
I read the internet for the articles.
I have added a single cable channel to my basic package before. I didn't ask if you could only order "a la carte", but I was able to purchase one additional channel that wasn't included in the basic package and I didn't want the premium package. The channel wan't HBO or anything either, it was the Science channel. The price was rather high for just a single channel, something like $6 - $8 per month if I remember correctly.
I do hope that the less popular channels won't dissapear with "a la carte" ordering. The cable companies will probably still push the package deals and that is what most "consumers" will order, so they are probably rather safe.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Isn't this common sense? Whoops... sorry, forgot that doesn't exist in government.
This is about giving people choices, I thought that was a good thing.
Your children aren't people?
This will spell DOOM for all the public TV stations and local access TV
We will never see the likes of Waynes World again!!
Lets see... It will make competition between stations extremely fierce. It will also force them all into the most lucrative demographic, forgetting all others, so they will be the one of 12 channels you pay for. Which means that eventually they will all look the same, sound the same, and suck the same.
And I'm pretty certain that the net effect on the consumer is his TV expenses will go WAY UP!!! for the same number of channels that are actively watched on a weekly basis today. It will cost us hundreds per month to keep all the channels that you would need to retain just to catch the one sports event you want to watch, or the one show you like on a particular channel.
Personally, I have a lot of channels that I religiously TiVO for one or two shows a week. Hardly enough to pay for, but in this new model, I'll start looking for them on Peer to Peer networks.
Isn't that ironic? In order to raise more money the model changes to pay by channel. The net effect is more illegal distribution of television content on the internet.
There is a compromise here, and it is what is often done in Canada.
Sell by theme-based packages instead of tiers.
Sports, movies, variety, news, education, lifestyle, music, etc...
This permits some more popular/less popular bundling by the channel
owners, and lets people opt out of categories they don't care about.
Channels that permit it can also be sold individually.
It works like this:
You pay a base "maintenance fee" which covers your connection
to the system and provides a common set of public interest
channels (C-span, local government, etc.). On top of that
you buy packages, including local broadcast channels. The
cable/satellite provider then charges a market rate for each
package or a bundle discount for buying 3 packages, all packages,
etc.
The main opponents of this type of system are the media
conglomerates that have very profitable, limited-appeal channels
(Disney/ESPN, Viacom/MTV) that get big advertising dollars because
they can claim huge distribution (aka theoretical eyeballs). If
it could be quantified just how many people DON'T watch these
channels, they'd lose millions in advertising, to say nothing
of the diminished subscription fees, and the people who do watch
ESPN , for example would finally feel the full force of what the
NFL is costing them.
Lesser channels could still be bundled into their respective
theme packs, and new channels could be free for several months
to hook viewers, and even be used to lure customers into buying
a pack they don't subscribe to.
There are very good reasons to be against this. The reason for this is to make sure parents can restrict young viewers from watching adult content. However, that technology exists, by law, already, in nearly every TV. It is called the V-Chip, and it allows a parent to lock out all the content they don't like. The trouble is, that parents don't bother to use it.
So if this legislation passes, it is not going to do anything. Parents are not going to give up Showtime, or Spike TV, or any of the other possibly offensive channels.
Parents don't want the tools to raise their children. Parents want the government to raise their children. Deep down, the only thing that will eventually make them happy is when all children are taken away forcably to be raised in government camps... with the children coming home for holidays or whenever for token love and affection. We already have this for 5 days a week, 9 hours a day. But there is unfortunatly still large chunks of time where parents have responsibility. No-one wants responsibility anymore, so everyone wants the government to protect them from responsibility.
I don't care what their reason for it is. I pay for 100+ channels, of which I watch 3 with any regularity. Do you think I want all of those channels? Do I want 10 "discovery" type channels? What's the point? They all recycle each others content, so just give me one.
We don't get al la cart now because they don't want us to have it. They want to be able to push crappy products out there. Yes, a lot of channels would go away if they did it. Yes, a lot of channels SHOULD go away.
Lets move on to on-demand programming. I'm willing to pay per episode for quality programming. I'd pay to watch Serenity, but not the "Large mutated animal on a rampage" crap that sci-fi normally dishes. I'd pay to watch Starget SG1 and Atlantis, but not 12oz Mouse. I'd pay up to $2/episode of what I wanted to see when I wanted to see it. So I pay $50 for a whole season of SG1. Fine. That's still better than $600+/year for all the crap I'm not watching today.
Would some good stuff disappear? Sure, but under the current system good stuff disappears (Serenity, Farscape, etc.) and the crap just keeps comming.
If we got rid of the channel bundeling, how would people find new shows? Word of mouth. Imagine a world where the production company gets paid per download/episode by the ultimate consumer. Shows that are popular continue. Production companies with good content make more money. Shows that would otherwise be cancelled because they don't appeal to 90% of America, may go on because the 10% that do like it are enough to pay for it.
Laugh and scorn if you like. This is already happening. There are fan produced projects that rival or even better "proffessionally" produced material.
More channels has not made for better TV. It's gotten worse. It used to be you bought cable to get commercial free programming. Oh yeah, I'd pay money to watch good shows, commercial free. Now I just pay money to get bombarded with advertising.
Hey cable execs, get a clue before I convince my wife we should just dump it altogether. Better hurry, the more expensive it gets, the closer I get to convincing her.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Bittorrent, Usenet, etc.
I get what I want, when I want it (almost), I get to keep it forever, and the price is right.
I'd be willing to pay my cable company if they could get rid of my "almost" above. But they better move quickly, or they will soon be irrelevant.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
they're meant to die in war.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
TV programs like those I listed are certainly not dull, and they use the video to great advantage, which lectures just can't do. Educational programming on TV is at the very least far better than lectures.
Then why do you insist that learning from TV programs is a waste of time, and reading the vast source material is necessary instead?
Obviously, because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it does not exist. You could film a live performance, broadcast it on TV, and get exactly the same thing from watching it. Anyhow, Shakespeare isn't a favorite subject of educational programming. That's more along the lines of Masterpiece Theatre.
In any case, it's quite unfair to say educational programming on TV is worthless, because you prefer to watch mind-numbing shows instead.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We have evolved with powerful mechanisms to support the livelihood of our communities.
We have been intelligently designed with powerful mechanisms to support the livelihood of our communities.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
On the television in my bedroom, I already have a channel add/delete option on my remote. I delete the majority of the channels, and then I just flip through the ones I like until I find something I want to watch.
As far as indencent content on television goes, I am opposed to censorship. It should be up to the viewer to decide what he or she wants to watch, not some regulatory commission financed by my tax dollars. Also, parents that do not want their children to be exposed to such content should just use the parental controls. If you are extra paranoid, put your children in plastic bubbles and throw away your television sets. Remember that the television is not a babysitter, it is up to the parents to monitor their children's viewing habits if they want to be sure that the shows they are watching are beneficial to their learning. My niece loves to watch Dora the Explorer, and she learns many different things like Spanish, problem solving, and positive social values. I make sure that what she is watching reinforces her understanding of the world, I do not let her watch television without parental supervision.
I don't understand how you're disagreeing.
I said that a package deal SHOULD be less expensive than buying the channels individually.
$6 per channel IS more than I pay right now. What I'm trying to say is that I would be willing to pay more per channel if I get to choose what I want, and as long as the total monthly bill doesn't exceed my current monthly bill.
That $6 dollar figure is just something I pulled outa my ass -- call it wishful thinking.
It's obviously only going to work for people who only watch a few channels. Nobody is going to spend 5 times more on their monthly Cable TV bill to get fewer channels... that would be absurd.
On top of that you now suggest that we PAY again for a Tivo AND it's mandatory subscription?
That was the point. Tivo is the next step in the cycle. We all pay for the convenience of being able to fast forward through commercials. Once everyone is hooked (which should be any day now) Tivo will start giving you some nice advertisements.
If lete people opt out of the system it's just going to cause problems.
Find coupons in Greeley
ESPN is the main reason I want ala carte. They demand that cable operators include them with basic or "expanded basic" and not charge extra. So I'm paying for it now whether I like it or not. Drop ESPN and give my back my $2.50.
.20 for DYI there's no way it will be $2 with ala carte. People won't pay it so they'd dry up and blow away at that price. The channels themselves will have to adjust their pricing based on what people will pay and can't hide in a bundle. Some channels that are pure commercials, like the shopping channels would likely have to pay the carriers to include them.
Ala Carte would cause a shakeup in pricing. Channels that show ads will have to live on their ads. If the carrier pays
I'd expect to pay for channels like Fox Movies and Turner Classics since they aren't loaded with ads, but I'd save by not paying for Disney, Nick, ESPN and others.
I apologize. I read that mean prices WOULD decrease. Mea Culpa.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Like political ads, you need to watch who's speaking, not just the words.
With Ala Carte pricing the average cable bill with go DOWN. How do I know this? The cable companies are fighting it. With all the grief they get for $2 monthly rate increases they'd be all over something that would raise revenues and not have the blame fall on them.
It's possible that if this kicked in on a per channel basis that we'd have only 7 Discovery Channels instead of 8, or that ESPN would have to woo viewers based on price. Not a horrible thing.
Buy a magazine on the rack and it's $4. Get a subscription and it's $1, and they deliver it to your house. The reason is that ad revenue is tied to subscribers. If a 2nd tier channel charges $2 and no one wants to pay then their ads aren't going to sell. If it's "free" their potential subscribers increase in number. If it's "free" and the subscribers consciously select it from a list, now they have "confirmed subscribers" and another boost to what they sell their ads for.
Just follow the money. Think of a reason the cable operators would resist a mandatory move that would increase revenue. If people paid more for less channels they'd not only have more income but would free up bandwidth from "niche" channels for more profitable ones. Does that sound like a scenario they'd fight against? No way.
A couple months ago, there was a great article in the Seattle PI about some conservative (read Republican) house frau wanting the government to go after all the nasty things on TV. Oblivious to the irony that this expands the role and spending of the federal government, she was going on about how her and her organization wanted "responsible" broadcasting, and how she was carefull to monitor everything her two boys and one little girl watched on TV and limited the number of hours they could spend in front of the nasty box. The puch-line was the picture of this happy family.
The 15-year old was wearing a Comcast High Speed Internet T-shirt and had a huge smile on his face.
I could not stop laughing. Way to go Mom. All the big bad influences of FCC enforced content with $500,000.00 fines for showing a nipple and your oldest boy already knows how to route around your dammaged sense of so-called morality. If she had any clue what was in the browser cache of that 15 year old...
We all know the solution is simple. As a number of those (although perhaps in the minority on Slashdot) are happy to point out here how proud they are NOT to own a TV, if you don't want your kids watching TV, don't buy one. Don't pay for Cable or Satalite. Or, use the parental lock-out codes (wich DishNetwork runs _PSA SPOTS FOR_) so that you are the only one who can see dammaging things (like the nightly news).
In short, step-up, shut-up, and be a parent. You took the responsibility to raise your kids when you decided to have them. Not me, not your neighbors, or your government. The world isn't responsible for bending to your parental will any more than my childfree will, and we both have to live in it together.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Listening to the congressional hearing on C span was interesting The coalition of small cable providers, and the satellite providers all complained about having to buy programming by tier at wholesale. They wanted to all buy a la carte, and sell a la carte. Many pointed comments at the "content providers" were made by several from this camp. The satellite guys all mentioned EVERY SINGLE SAT BOX OUT THERE HAS BUILT IN PARENTAL CONTROLS. The religious station reps and advocates talked about the first amendment and then justified censorship as decency-asking that "decency standards" by the FCC be expanded to all broadcast media. One called for a return to the standards of the 50's in TV ! The religions broacasters all took care to please make sure those cable and broadcast companies "must carry" us after the digital transition. The actor's guild rep called for parental control (eg 5 year olds watching the Sopranos), and then mentioned that the new proposed indecency fines are insane as written. The Clearchannel rep talked about how they've cleaned up their acts, how they have zero tolerance, etc.....and then called for 'indecency standars' to apply to all media (no doubt sensing a competitive disadvantage)
Sellers don't choose their price based on what sounds good. They choose it based on the supply/demand curve.
Do you actually have evidence of this happening in the cable TV industry? I assumed it to be the case, until a relative of mine was consulting for a cable company and saw the revised channel line up was decided at a single meeting by off-the-cuff remarks from the (described as) egotistical extroverted attendees jockeying for acceptance of their own opinion, unsupported by any data. More a contest of wills and social status within that executive group, than a thought analysis of consumer data (which was absent from the meeting).
-Thomas Jefferson
That is the difference.
Governments exist to prohibit actions which are injurious. Religions exist to proscribe actions which are beneficial.
Both are necessary parts of a healthy society, yet they serve different purposes. The reason for this separation is that governments have the power to enforce their policies, through physical violence, against the will of the individual. Religion does not.
Religion is voluntary. Government is not.
To effect the highest level of individual freedom, it is as important that governments have the power of force as it is that religions do not. History has shown that both religions that act with the power of government, and governments that dictate with the expansive ethical mandate of religion, quickly become vehicles of tyranny and oppressors of freedom that effectively resist overthrow.
The Supreme Court recognized this distinction in the case of Torcaso v. Watkins (367 U.S. 488):
Secular Humanism, while not a religion in the traditional sense, is a system of belief that proscribes ethical behaviour. Some say it has permeated our society, and infiltrated our government under the radar of most people's typical view of what constitutes a religion. Yet it is a religion, in the sense of the Constitution, nonetheless.
The key to this distinction is understanding the Jefferson quote above, along with the basic rights of "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". You have a right to Liberty, and to pursue those things which bring you Happiness. You are free from government-imposed restrictions or duties beyond those which restrict and punish actions which are injurious to others. Governments may not legislate morality. You are free to follow your own set of moral guidelines, as a religion, or none at all. "Good behaviour", in the form of religion, cannot be foisted upon you just as you may not foist your religion upon others.
It is unfortunate that such reasonable tenets of our original government have been so badly eroded as to nearly the point of unrecognizability.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I have favored what I will refer to as "ala carte blocks". Current cable and satellite programming is available as a series of "packages" (30, 60, 150 channels, etc.), with only "preimum" channels being available ala carte. My idea for "ala carte blocks" would give the consumer the ability to choose a first select a number of channels block and then select which channels to view as part of the block. I would still be getting 30, 50 or 150 channels, I would just be able to choose which 30, 50 or 150 I wanted.
Look Out Above!
Can we hurry this up, please? kthxbye
1) Cable box leases for EVERYONE. Currently, most areas do not scramble the standard, analog lineup. Because of this, you don't need a cable box(a physical trap is placed on the line). If the industry had to tier the pricing, every single person would need a box to recieve anything past the local broadcast channels. And don't think the cable companies are giving away boxs, either. Oh, and with all the technicians who will need to go out to install them AND remove previous traps, I wonder where that money is going to come from...
2) "What do you mean I can't just get Comedy Central?!" Comedy Central is owned by Viacom. They own a lot of cable stations.Cable companies negoiate packages with the parent companies that include also the lesser channels.Remember when DISH(or was it DirecTV..) got into that fight with Viacom that had a bunch of channels blocked for a few days? In all likelyhood, you won't be able to get just the one channel you watch, but a group of them.
3) Less populat channels crumble, or have high rates. In your cable bill, each channel gets a small amount of $/subscriber. Without as many watchers, they have to either raise rates, or cut budgets/shows/etc.
Honestly, while the system isnt perfect one way or the other, I don't think Tiering is a good idea either.
Disclosure: I do work for a large cable operator out of the North East. My opinions do not reflect said employer, yadda, yadda yadda.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
Can I get this soon please? kthxbye.
Quite backwards, I think. Unfortunately for mankind, more people are interested in Sports Star "n" then they are in actual quality *entertainment*.
Sport* is the best quality entertainment going. What would you class as quality entertainment? Some badly-acted overrated drama on an island with invisible monsters, or photogenic whiny women fighting vampires?
* I'm talking about the sport we get over here, not all that American NFL/MLB/NHL ad-ridden bullshit.
Now, you can argue that it's the free market, blah blah blah, and that's true, but I'd like to point out that it's the free market that made Titanic the #1 movie of all time and Britney Spears the #1 selling music artist of the past few years. Do you really want to be relying on your fellow customers to support the channels you want well enough to keep them afloat on their own?
No. The free market didn't make Titanic the #1 movie. Distribution and Promotion are oligopolistic markets that are ruled by the dominant players, not market forces.
Same largely goes for cable channels. Good riddance to the bad ones. And for the good ones that will have to charge what they cost (through advertisements or fees or both), and the market won't support that, then good riddance to those as well. Maybe more people will pick up a book or two when they can't afford TV anymore.
It's about putting out of business channels that do anything outside the mainstream.
That's a good thing. Audiences who demand non-mainstream programming will turn to other avenues for their entertainment (DVD rental, video on demand, internet downloads, or something nobody's thought of yet) - and those other avenues will thrive, and that audience will very likely be better off for it.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You have a strange notion of 'Most of the world'. Catholic South America and Islamic countries are more conservative than we are with flesh, and just as liberal with violence (if only we'd read the ratings label on Iraq!). Since Islam is growing faster than the world population, and most parents restrict what their children watch worldwide, there's a good reason to doubt that 'most of the world doesn't think seeing naked people scars the young mind'. In the last few years, we've had Bush's 'surprise' re-election, Al-Qaeda, gay marriage and the French riots. So I ask when will old white people in Europe, Australia and Canada realize they are actually in a global minority representing secular values?
Based on birthrates, the only people having children worldwide are religous conservatives, so it's doubly ironic you chose those words to make fun of us.
As we've seen with iTunes, the reason that the RIAA wants Apple to tier its pricing is so that it (the RIAA) can continue to manipulate the market through its pricing- much the same way that is currently done with payola to radio stations. If you give customers a deal where they can "choose any X channels for y dollars" you lose the ability to manipulate the market peception of what's supposedly "good" and what isn't.
Actually, I wonder if some channels will actually become FREE in the hopes of selling ads. (I guess that didn't work in newspapers and magazines, but they are cheap.) Most magazines probably would be free to consumers if they could. Only small fraction of most magazine income comes from the money subscribers pay. A vast majority comes from selling advertisemen space. A free magazine seems like it would make sense. More readers would have the magazine, right? More eyes for the advertisements, right? Well, actually, wrong. It all comes down to the value of the product. When you pay for something, you tend to associate a greater value to it. You're hard earned cash bought it. You appreciate it more. When you get something for free, you tend to not care so much. What magazine are you more likely to read? The one you got free in the mail, or the one that came because you subscribed and paid money for it? Advertisers know that when you pay for a magazine or a newspaper, you're more likely to actually read the damn thing and actually more likely to be interested in their advertisement and what they're selling.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
I pieced together this ranking for an article I found here:o ryid=1275&cs=1
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117918743?categ
*2 & 3 are not listed but I am almost positive they are HBO and CineMax respectively
Most popular cable channels (in the USA)
1. TNT
*2. HBO
*3. Cinemax
4. Cartoon Network - woohoo!
7. Fox News
8. Spike TV
9. ESPN
10. Sci-fi
12. Comedy Central
14. FX
15. Discovery
18. TV Land
20. Court TV
21. Hallmark Channel
22. Home and Garden
23. TLC
24. Food Network
25. CNN
26. Animal Planet
27. VH1
30. Bravo
33. Country Music TV
35. E!
36. Weather Channel
37. Game Show
38. MSNBC
39. Speed Channel
42. National Geographic
44. Oxygen
46. Discovery Health
48. WE
47. Outdoor Life
50. Noggin
51. CNBC
58. BBC USA
You need to watch Friends. :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You haven't watched Lost, Angel, Buffy, or Supernatural, have you? :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I don't know how you figure several days to read a Shakespeare play, given that every word on the page is spoken by the actors in two hours... it's not that huge of a leap to say that you could speak those same words in the same amount of time, can you really mean to suggest that reading is that much slower than speaking?
I think you're going a bit far to assume that channels will have to "live on their ads" because its not going to be nearly that extreme. Shopping channels where its all one big ad are one thing but people are still going to pay for ESPN in large numbers. And it'll still probably cost more than channels like TCM where there are less ads... The demand is still going to be there...
That being said, I'd be glad to be able to get back Turner Classic Movies since my stupid cable company dropped it. And I'd probably drop ESPN myself...
Personally, I think people are missing a lot of aspects about this. I really think the FCC's primary goal here is a 'protect the children' sort of thing. They've already said they're trying to regulate the amount of "adult content" on cable and satelite television. While I think that a la Carte TV channel pricing is a good thing, I think the FCC reasoning is slightly different than some of the reasoning I see here. I think this is more the FCC trying to cater to such groups as the Parents Television Council, and not your average consumer. This is about giving lazy parents who don't want to figure out how to use their v-chip another way to block programming. This way, parents who just don't want this 'filth' coming into their homes, but still want cable television can do it. They can say we only want the Family Channel, Lifetime, Hallmark TV, and other good wholesome TV. Which is fine. There is nothing really wroing with that so to speak. I just think that THIS is the real reason the FCC is supporting a la Carte programming. It's not necessarily about giving consumer choice, that is just what happens to be the outcome if this particular bending over to busybody groups like the PTC.
On another note, as much as I think a la Carte pricing for TV channels is a pretty good thing, I don't really see it having that much of an impact in the long term. In the next 20 years, probably much much sooner if the big media companies quit kicking and screaming trying to fight it, the landscape of what we traditionally call 'television' is going to be incredibly different. Television is going internet, and in a big way. Think of all the bit-torrent tv show downloads. Think of all the people who don't really watch tv, but rent the seasons of good shows on DVD. People are sick of the traditional televsion program/commercial model. A la Carte channels distributed by cable operators? There isn't going to BE any TV channels anymore. It's going to be A la Carte shows bought off the internet. Apple's deal with ABC to sell shows on a per episode basis is really a significant step. A search aggrigate, like Google, is going to be keeping track of what kind of shows you like, and recommending what kind of shows you might be interested in. There will be no need for traditional television channels. Everything is going to be personalized. I'm telling everyone, right here, we are witnessing the end of the traditional television and media era. Just look at google video.
Right now we're just testing Google Video, so only a small amount of programming from a limited number of channels is included in your search results. But we're indexing new content every day and we'll be adding channels in the near future, so you should see more and more results from your searches in the coming months.
See, they're already DOING it. It's going to expand. It is going to really start with traditional television shows. Google will start telling people, "hey, you like ABC's Desperate Housewives, why dont you check out Irrational Ladies on NBC?" Eventually though, they're going to start mixing all those quirky internet videos in with their television show recommendations. Soon, all those internet videos, while generally have 0 production value, but tons of entertainment value (c'mon, how many times did you watch the Star Wars kid? Have you ever laughed so hard at something on television?), are going to overtake what was tradtionally a domain completley owned by corporate broadcasters and cable companies. We're going to see the end of bullshit lowest comon denominator programming like "Everybody Loves Raymod" and "Friends." Programming is going to be much more targeted at specific audiences. In this new marketspace, independent media, writers and actors, animators, etc are going to be much more on an equal footing with the traditional big players. I mean, look at South Park. That show pretty much came out of a Christmas greeting that two guys made that sort of spread on the internet. South Park could have just as easily ended up
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Here, Mediacom (the local cable monopoly) runs a commercial about how expensive it is to have channels and they must purchase them in bunches to make it all "affordable".
So? The local supermarket buys their olives by the case, but I can buy just a can. I don't care if they get Disney and SpikeTV in the same wrapper when they buy them, I don't want Disney. The middle man can easily break them up and offer them separately, regardless of how they purcahse them. But they don't offer it. Also, the middle man can make demands on the suppliers. Just look at Wal-Mart's demands on those that supply them. They control what they are delivered more than the suppliers make demands. The cable companies could do the same, they just don't care to tell Viacomm to split the chanels.
Learn to love Alaska
It finally happened. Someone described literary and arts programming as useless beef.
So what is the use of listening to some pretentious snob droning on about some overrated book or crap painting?
If you want to know about literary things then read a book, if you want art go to a gallery. Or pay for your arts and literature channels yourself rather than having them subsidised by programmes that people actually want to watch.
Sorry, I didn't realise what you were trying to say. You're right, it IS the next step. Aren't they already trying to block Tivo from skipping commercials? :)
The future is here and it doesn't look anything at all like what I was promised.
Actually maybe this is what was promised. I'm starting to remember things like the book "1984" and a whole host of movies made in the 1970s like "Soylent Green", and "Rollerball".
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Welcome,
Now we can all do like we do on the internet - view only what we already agree with.
Rednecks will only have FOX and the wrestling channels. Fundamentalist Christians (the red states) with have the god and bomb making channels and nothing else. Illegal immigrants (all ~11m of them) can save a ton of money by only paying for the Spanish channels.
And the intelligent with have Discovery, History, Animal Planet, etc until those channels die out from lack of revenue becasue this country doesnt have a whole lot of those people.
But this will save the cable companies money too. They don't even have to offer channels like BET in Utah for instance, but will need ALL the porn channels there.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
"The FCC may soon allow cable/sat companies"
I assume they are refering to small dish sat companies, because the few large dish programing providers that are left still offer some a la carte pricing. I pay for NPS's Absolute Digital Pack, then i throw in a few analog channels such as IFC for $10 a year, and Sundance @ $19.99 a year.
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
I have never seen a TV production of any of his works that comes close to seeing it performed live.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097499/
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I haven't paid a cable company or a dish company for their service for over 15 years. I would actually consider cable tv if they decided to offer a la carte options that let you change your selection at will. Otherwise, it's over the air broadcast and the occasional rental for me.
;)
Funny thing is, the most interesting channel in my area isn't even carried by the cable companies. It seesm so strange that I get to watch lots of interesting stuff that my friends with cable never get to see. We've actually had get-togethers at my place specifically because I could see Aussie Rules Football.
The other thing to consider is that it takes me a lot less time to flip through 5 channels of crap than it does you to flip through 200 channels of crap. It lets me beat you to the bar
Strong Mad - 2008: "I PRESIDENT!"
Good points. But just because cable companies might start offering subscribers a la carte options does not mean that the companies will stop offering customers the current packaged deals. A lot of people will probably stick with the current options.
That was my main objection to the GP's post. I wouldn't think that more than 5% or 10% would opt to select a few chanels for roughly the same cost when they have packages available. We are Consumer America. Give us 500 choices (most of which we don't want) and we'll buy it because it's bigger and better.
I also believe that an a la carte option will still use the current on-screen programming guides, meaning that you still see all of the channels you don't buy. If you only want seven channels, fine, but those channels will be spread across hell's half acre.
That's what I hate most. I would love the ability to block chanels. I would be willing to pay $5 more per month to get all the chanels I get now, but with equipment that would block out all reference to chanels I choose to delete. I had my PC set up as a PVR, and I could do that, and I loved it. I don't care what's on C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News, or any other news chanels, any shopping networks, or all that. I want to pretend they don't exist. Sell me the package for the full package price, and I'll buy it if you let me delete any reference to those chanels - completely and totally.
Learn to love Alaska
It would be nice if they were considering a la carte for a la carte's sake, instead of an appeal to parental groups and religious groups - "Think of the Children!". Back when I still paid for cable, I had this handy feature on every television I'd ever used, wherein you could DELETE channels from the lineup. Of course, you could still get to them if you punched in the channel numbers, but for all intents and purposes the channel was gone as far as I was concerned. Bye bye, religious 24 hour channel, spanish TV, and the 8 home shopping channels or whatever.
Unfortunately for the FCC, it has little to no authority or power over cable TV. They're just asking for it, here, and appealing to the popular religious power of today.
Part of me wonders how content providers would view this; perhaps they'd rather start selling their shows at $2/per instead of $2/month? Or would that provide too much power to Apple and iTunes?
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
I don't believe it's anyone thinking their tastes are better than anyone else's, but more a situation of their taste not matching others or the mainstream.
And to get back on topic, should they create a select any 80 channels out of these 160 for $30/month, that would be fine. But to have to pay for each channel independently would definitely reduce the selection of channels. Personally, I find all shopping channels indecent, along with all religious channels. Do you think any of those will be removed from your selections? Heck no! Shopping channels make too much money, and the religious channels in most cases have plenty of funds to keep them included in the "base free package" you'll start with.
And to address your wondering whether they'll be free, I seriously doubt anything you will want will be free, unless you want religious and shopping channel junk.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Pretty much exactly the opposite of why some people seem to want it.
Only because you have made assumptions which may not be true. You assume that there will be no packages left. I would presume that there would be, and most people would select them. It would only be the fringe that went completely a la carte. There would be some 40% or so that were package only, some 50% that were package with one or two a la carte, and 10% that were a la carte only. This wouldn't greatly affect the cashflow.
The other big assumption you make is that the small chanels will be underrepresented in the a la carte ordering. Though the following for, say, BBC America may be low, it may very well be loyal. Lots of people may watch Nickalodian, but only because they've already paid for it with the package. The percentage of watchers willing to pay for Nick may be much smaller than the percentage of watchers willing to pay for BBC America.
When you presume it will fail miserably and look for reasons it will, it isn't hard to make it look like a bad idea. But when you look at it objectively, we can only conclude that we don't know enough about it to determine whether it will or will not work like we presume.
Learn to love Alaska
It goes deeper than that. If a cable operator refuses to carry any of the ESPN channels (and pay the big fee for doing so), they don't get to carry any of the other ESPNs plus ABC, Disney, and whatever other channels ABC owns. No cable or satellite company can function without the ability to carry these channels at all so they are stuck paying the ABC/ESPN tax.
Hey! Not wanting to watch rich people play games with balls is un-Mer'kin! What are you? A Cromie?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Comedy Channel/Fox News bundle?
I drank what? -- Socrates
This already exists. I signed up for NBA League Pass, $169 for the whole season (which runs from November to June, 8 months, so it's like $16/mo), and I can watch any game. This is great when you're a Knicks fan (I know...) who lives in Arizona. There are five or six games a day, so I pick one or two to watch and bounce between the others for the scores. They even repeat the games later in the day, so theoretically I could watch basketball from 5 pm local time to well into the early morning. (I suppose my wife would then be a basketball widow.)
There's a similar deal for football, hockey and baseball.
The "rules of economics" you refer to also say that in a free market, if there is money to be made doing a thing, someone will do it. A la carte channel pricing is not prohibited now--companies can do it if they want. Yet no cable company offers it. I'm therefore forced to conclude that a la carte channel pricing is simply not a competitive strategy. Regulating it into existence wouldn't change that.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
They have long argued that consumers have parental blocking controls at the box. But consumers must still pay for those channels they are blocking.
They'd lose advertising revenue? The cable industry doesn't profit from advertising, the studio that creates the channel does. If the cable industry is so concerned over losing advertising from a la carte, than that is an admission that the content on most cable channels is so poor that nobody wants to watch them. They're just putting off the inevitable - your content SUCKS!
I don't subscribe to cable, but my parents do. When TW moved some premium channels they had subscribed to into an upper tier which added another $10 to their monthly bill, they dropped the subscription. These are the kind of sleazy tactics that the media companies tries to utilize to draw more money out of our wallets.
When I walk into a restaurant, I can order any item I want from their menu. They don't force four other entrees down my throat because I only wanted just one.
If a la carte works for the restaurant business, there's no reason why it couldn't work in the cable TV business.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Sellers don't choose their price based on what sounds good.
That is mostly but not entirely true. Merchants are very sensitive to how their brand is perceived, so they often have Minimum Advertised Price clauses. If you want to be an authorized Monster Cable reseller, for example, you agree to do your pricing a certain way. Break the rules and they give you the boot.
If TV channels became a truly free market, I am sure similar practices would quickly take root.
In the end, my own preferences are simple: I am against anything which will make F/X stop showing The Shield.
I don't think WS is a good example. After all, he wrote his works on the assumption that they would be performed, not read.
Now I pay about $60 per month for USENET and superior 1UP/3DN DSL (granted its only this much cause i still have to pay for the server/newzbin fees and the phone line). Usually somebody posts the shows I want the same night they come out, at worst a few days later.
Which sounds better to you?
P.S. I think i just broke the first rule of USENET Club...
Don't ya hate it when the correct spelling of your favorite screen name is taken?
As the sibling mentions, premium channels have been dealing with your show-stopping problem for 20 years. They offer free preview week/weekends, etc.
I thought I would love having the Speed channel, but it is mostly crap now - NASCAR, American Chopper knockoffs, NASCAR. blech.
Tell me about it. At least they show bobsled/luge in the winter, instead of NASCAR reruns.
Maybe it's just me....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The list of things I would like to drop:
ESPN/SportsSouth (where available)/Fox Sports
Fox News (even if it means I pay more)
CNBC/MSNBC
Discovery and friends
Any channel that never shows movies except CNN/HN (and maybe even that, thanks to cnn.com)
All of the cartoon networks except Cartoon Network
All of the shopping networks (unless they pay me to take them)
All of the stupid pseudo-radio channels up at the top of DirecTV
In fact, there are probably only about 15 sat channels (not counting local stations that I happen to get through DirecTV) that I ever watch. The rest can go away. Even at a dollar per channel, that would still be $30 less than my current bill.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
>>This is such a good idea. Which means it will never happen.
>
I don't understand why this is a 'new' idea. I was getting channels a la carte on C-Band (big-dish) satellite ten years ago. No FCC mandate/approval needed.
>Well, it's not necessarily a good idea, for two reasons.
>
>a) It will mean higher prices.
>
C-Band prices for premium movie channels were a couple of dollars less per month than cable or small-dish satellite. Multiple companies provided the subscription and billing services, so there was actually some competition involved.
More importantly, once I didn't have to buy the 'package', I could take a serious look at the entertainment value of each individual channel, and realized that most of them weren't important to me at all.
I think I ended up with 5 HBO feeds, CNN, and Comedy Central east/west for around $12/month total.
>b) It will mean fewer choices.
Perhaps, but it will also mean *better* choices. Schlop like E! will just go away when it can no longer be added to bulk up a 'premium' package. Channels will live or die on their own merits.
Better choices for less money -- sign me up!
Disclaimer: I haven't subscribed to big-dish TV for many years, so I have no idea what, if anything, is still offered. At this point I don't have any kind of TV channels at all (Cable/Satellite/OTA), and just use Netflix for movies. The outcome of this decision doesn't really affect me either way.
Regards,
-bitrot.
FIXME: Add a sig here
The underlying idea of A la carte programming seems like a good idea, and will even cost those of us who couldn't care less about sports a LOT less (disgustingly enough, the bulk of your "extended basic" cable bill goes toward subsidizing the sports channels Oh man, I know all of us are geeks, but do you have to make it THIS obvious? (gym class wedge flashback) ...shudder.
I don't know how you figure you can read *only* the dialog of a Shakespeare play, given that much of the information of a play is conveyed visually...
It would be very hard to understand a story you read, if it included only the words the characters spoke. No 'narration' about where they are, who else is around, what they are doing, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Producing television programs does have a higher bar to entry than writing and printing a book, but it's not THAT high, and it's getting lower all the time, and with essentially infinite indexing and storage capacity, who cares? There'll still be niche television channels. They'll charge more, maybe, than the big guys, or they'll cut costs; but that's exactly how boutique/niche retail markets work now, and there's no lack of choice there.
What you're saying here is that because you don't like Titanic or Britney Spears, and since you clearly know better than everyone else, the market is made up of tasteless schmucks and therefore shouldn't be allowed to regulate itself.This is, for lack of a better word, a retarded idea.
Furthermore, did Titanic's success somehow prevent other movies from being made? No. I can get thousands of independent films from Netflix, and a dozen new ones appear in theatres weekly. Does Brit-Brit's popularity mean there are fewer niche music acts around? Nope. There's hundreds of thousands of bands on the Internet I can download music from -- legally, and in many cases, for free, hoping I'll like the music and buy their CD.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Bullshit...It didn't mean higher prices for c-band sat's so how would it with dbs sats and cable?
And in case you didn't notice, C-Band is dying.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
One thing that you missed.
Cable and Satellite companies will have higher overhead because of cheapskates who change their programming 8 times a day so that they only have to pay for 3 channels.
OK, that's an extreme example but when I worked for a Satellite TV company we had people who would switch from HBO to Showtime to Cinemax to Starz two or three times per week.
It costs money to have customer service reps. The computing power necessary to process all of those changes is not free. Lawyers to constantly negotiate new pricing contracts with the networks are not free. Companies are not going to eat those costs. It's going to get passed along to every one of their subscribers.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Hey, you mean I get to choose which cable company runs their line to my house? No? Then it's not a free market, is it? It's a natural monopoly. And we should treat it as such. Ever notice how the gas and electric companies have to ask a government commission whenever they want to raise prices?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
"The FCC may soon allow cable/sat companies to sell individually customized TV channel packages."
^^^^^^
Emphasis on the word ALLOW. Comcast, the biggest offender of raping people into packages, will never do it, even if allowed to do so. They make so much money off rape, why would they offer a la carte?
To get people to not go to Dish? They have other hooks to keep you from Dish (in the SF Bay Area, the only way to see Giants/A's/Sharks/Warriors in HD is on Comcast because Comcast provided FSN- Bay Area the HD truck and made them sign an exclusive deal).
Even Time Warner Cable and other not so rapist-like cable companies make a lot of money on tiers.
A la carte doesn't make sense for cable co's, so it won't happen.
The underlying idea of A la carte programming seems like a good idea, and will even cost those of us who couldn't care less about sports a LOT less (disgustingly enough, the bulk of your "extended basic" cable bill goes toward subsidizing the sports channels, which cost more than premium channels like HBO and contractually force cable carriers to include them in anything beyond their most basic package).
I don't have cable. (I can't afford it.) The handful of channels that I'd like are: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, & UPN, SCI-FI, Comedy Central, History Channel, 4 PBS channels, 5 kids toon channels, 2 anime channels, & 3 educational channels 2 aimmed at my kids and 1 aimmed more at me and my wife) for about $20 a month. (I wouldn't be opposed to packages of 3-5 channels bundled at a discount like Discovery, history and learning channel bundled together. I don't want MTV bundled with Sci-Fi & TNN just to get get the SCI-FI channel though. (I would be willing to pay for Sci-fi 1 Sci-Fi 2 and Sci-Fi 3 bundled together.)
"It's about putting out of business channels that do anything outside the mainstream."
I think you make an interesting point, though I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. I say let the people vote with their $ which channels stay and which go under.
What do you mean by "sterile programming"?
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Excellent point. In addition, I think subscriptions allow them to track how many people are reading the magazine and this would affect the prices of the ads. That, and maybe they make money from selling your name/address. :)
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Years and years (and years) ago, I read in the TV GUIDE that PBS was going to foot the bill(?) to mount and air ALL of Shakespeare plays.
Did they ever finish with that project? URLs would be nice....
I'm curious....
This is a battle that's been being waged for years.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
ad-ridden bullshit? I suppose every team having a sponsor emblazoned across their chest isn't ad-ridden?
I am frustrated as a parent that the human body and sexuality that is natural, legal, etc...is considered too dirty for television, but antisocial violent behavior that is both illegal and unnatural is "fine for family viewing". It's a strange world we live in!
Such programming would eventually/inevitably drive up birth rates, depress wages due to the abundance of ready (willing, and able?) labor, increase corporate competition with lower pricings on goods and services, which lead inexoriably to depressed corporate profits.
The FCC stance on nudity and foul language likely started out because of the so-called 'Puritainism' effect brought about by the arrival of the 'Mayflower Gang' here to America from England in 1620 -- remember the 'Ripple Over The Nipple' from the 2004 SuperBowl football game?....
Over time, corporate America used the 'vast wasteland' that is broadcast television to pander to the 'lowest common denominator' in order to maximize their profits. Why else is 'reality programming' still hot all these years later after Season One of Survivor? (2000) It's because 'reality programming' is cheap to produce and is oh so titilating to that 18-45 year-old demographic that the corporate advertisers desire SO much to buy their wares....so much so that they anger classic pop music fans when they use such tunes to sell their stuff. Remember back in 1995 when Microsoft paid $2,000,000.00(?) to use The Rolling Stones Start Me Up to sell Windows 95 when it first came out?...
If you haven't reached 'the good life' by age 45, corporate America has essentially no further use for you as a consumer--much less a customer....
Actually Cable TV was started to provide television to areas that couldn't receive commercial television signals (e.g. communities in valleys). That's why it's abbreviated CATV (Community Antenna Television). The original intent was merely to rebroadcast over-the-air signals.
The cable companies are allowed to charge what they do based on total number of channels offered. These are rules established by the FCC when they allowed competition in local markets, consolidation, etc. The reason they are fighting it is obvious with this in mind. If pricing is based on total number of channels you are subscribing to then those of us who only want a few(like me) will save a lot of money. The thing to watch out for is how much the FCC would change the pricing system under something like this.
I agree with you about The Titanic. I finally rented it last year and thought 'WTF!? This mediocre movie is the biggest blockbuster ever??' I wanted to barf. Personally, I thought Kevin Costner's widely panned movies Waterworld and The Postman were much much better then the Titanic. But that's just my taste in movies I guess.
This ad space for rent.
It's ridiculous that we're paying so much for ad-riddled content to begin with.
How did we wind up with such a backwards system anyway? Shouldn't these channels be paying your cable company to put their advertisments on your screen?
I think that once you have paid basic cable delivery service a reasonable fee for equipment rental and service operation and maintenance, you should automatically get all of the advertiser-sponsored channels at no extra cost. You could then opt to pay extra for channels which contain no advertisments, and that money would mostly go back to the content producers of those channels.
What is wrong with this logic?
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No, because the game doesn't stop for several minutes to show the adverts on the shirts. Nor does the screen split in half to show adverts on one side and the game on the other*.
It's no wonder Americans have such short attention spans: they're not used to seeing anything last longer than 12 seconds before an ad break.
* THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN AMERICA!!!
...which is why the "rules of economics" lecture above doesn't hold water. That's what I was trying to point out.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I don't mean to troll, but I've found since I cancelled my cable and signed up for Dish Network that not only am I paying a lot less, I'm watching a lot less too. My wife is the TV watcher, I use the TV to watch purchased or rented movies. I might watch TV if the good channels (some of which you mentioned above) were available a la carte, but if they're not there then I'll have a better incentive to save money and just cancel it altogether!
I still don't see this as a bad move. Television *can* be educational -- I fully support PBS, but it doesn't _have_ to be a major part of our lives.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
What's really sad is that I had to get to the end of this article thread before someone finally brought up what is to me the most important issue: When did we reach the point where everyone thinks its ok/normal to pay for channels that are laden with commercial ads? Either give me the commercials or ask that I pay for the content, BUT NOT BOTH. This is why my local cable monopoly hasn't gotten a dime from me in the last 5 years, and until true content-on-demand becomes possible, I'm happy to keep it that way.