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Bill to Bring A La Carte, Indecency Regs to Cable
An anonymous reader writes "A bill introduced this week would force cable operators to offer à la carte cable and so-called family-tiers of service. Those opting for à la carte programming would get refunds on their cable bill, but the legislation would also extend broadcast indecency standards to cable and satellite TV for the first time: 'In accordance with the indecency and profanity policies and standards applied by the [FCC] to broadcasters, as such policies and standards are modified from time to time, not transmit any material that is indecent or profane on any channel in the expanded basic tier of such distributor except between 10pm and 6am.' As Ars points out, 'With the parental controls built into every television set, set-top box, and DVR being sold these days, the need for such legislation seems questionable at best. Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite.'"
I am now basically convinced that only people from an engineering field should be allowed to draft laws. Why? Things like this. All it will end up doing is driving up the costs of cable service, undermining the buying power of families.
But politicians are, in general, too stupid to understand that. So are the American people, in general, because they keep electing leaders who are leading us toward national economic suicide. More regulations, more taxes. Gee, you wonder why jobs are leaving America? Could it be the cost of compliance with every asinine regulation that some moron drafts?
Sheesh. The people who are too lazy to regulate their own kids' use of TV will love this. They'll get their "family tier," only it'll probably cost them about $20-$30 more per month than the current system costs.
Then they'll institute price controls because these same whiners will demand $45-$50 or less. Then, the cable companies will make less money per customer, weakening their position.
Need I go on?
This violates free speech plain and simple. They managed to slip this crap through on radio by claiming that broadcast radio was pushed out to consumers. Supposedly this meant that broadcasts were equivalent to yelling in the street. That was a fairly lame argument since you had to make an intentional effort to actually hear those broadcasts but whatever. Cable TV doesn't even meet that shady criteria. You actually have to pay to have a wire run into your home and pay a subscription to receive it. Cable TV is like speaking privately in your home. In your home YOU and not the public and not the FCC decide what content you want to purchase.
Cable companies and content producers should ignore this. If the FCC tried to claim to that they are a higher authority than the constitution they would quickly be put in their place by the courts. This provides an excellent window of opportunity to get rid of all the censorship the FCC has forced upon television.
That bothers me too. I support a la carte cable. I had my cable cancelled a few months back becasue I was paying $80 to get 60+ channels (&HD) and really only watched about 8 channels.
But with a la carte cable might feel they have to go the way of network TV and try to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator instead of their niche audience. Which would destroy the entire reason cable is worth having in the first place...
Plus the whole decency thing is just stupid.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
The beauty of this is, is all of the FCC decency standards may be struck down as a consequence. Not only because of the channel subscriber argument, but something like Comedy Central's Secret Stash is going to be protected speech (Richard Prior, South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut, etc). Remember the original decency regulation argument is based on the idea of a lack of plurality. There isn't that much choice in radio and TV as compared to printed material because of the capital investment required, and if there were no controls, famlies might be left out. That argument is ridiculous now with most cities having a couple major papers and a handful of what amount to pamphlets, dozens of radiostations, a half dozen tv stations and 500 cable channels.
I say bring it on, the FCC is engineering the destruction of their own moral authority.
The indy channels disappeared a long time ago. What you think of as "indy" channels are just the media monopolies doing odd stuff to try to capture niche audiences.
The real indy channels went away when the MMs used their clout to force the cable companies to buy big bundles of channels. ("If you want to carry the local Fox station, you have to carry our new FX channel too. Yes, we know there's nothing on it yet. We'll worry about that later.") That left no room for all the weird little cable channels you used to see: the channels run by obscure religious sects, the public-domain movie channels (I saw the entire work of Ed Wood on one of those!), the Flat Earth society channel, the origami fetish channel...
Of course, these bundles aren't cheap, which is why cable rates are so ridiculous.
I think the folks that want alacart (I insist on spelling it that way, given the context) aren't interested in saving money or "protecting" their kids. They are just are pissed off that some of their money is going to pay for "un-Christian" content. In other words, this is just another lame "culture wars" battle that has no relation to the real world.
It's not really a'la carte. They make you subscribe to the whole tier then refund the cable company's cost for each channel you drop from the tier. Every cable company will immediately be paying a fee to allow channels from each media company then pay only a penny per channel per subscriber. That way they can charge $20/tier then refund $.50 when when you opt out of every channel in the tier. This will be rife with abuse!
Congress can also remove old stupid laws. Maybe if they spent odd numbered years getting rid of old laws, then the laws we keep might have a bit more dignity. Or maybe if they really paired down our "Code of Law" to under 5000 pages or so our judicial system wouldn't be such a "game" played by lawyers, and could actually return to being about justice. Wouldn't that be novel.
We are all just people.
I pulled the plug on my TV about 2 years ago. Not bragging about it, I just got upset about a $40 a month fee, biased news, empty programming, endless reruns, series based on previous series that were based on...., series based on commercials, 20+ minutes of commercials in an hour show.
I took about 6 months to get use to being without the TV. I am busy enough with my normal life now that I would not want to lose the hours I use to spend watching it. It's strange now when I am at a friend's house while their TV is on, I get mesmerized / hypnotize by it, all intelligent thought is removed.
A lot of people find it enjoyable; great for them, I found it to be an addiction.
Actually, I think the opposite may be true. Currently, it is difficult to target a niche audience because you, as a television channel, have to convince broadcasters to add your content to their lineup. It is a risky venture for cable companies. They don't know if their viewers really want the content.
With a la carte, cable companies have little to risk about adding a channel since they can pay for what their customers use. N subscribers makes them pay $N for the channel.
Channels will have to continually produce content for their viewers, too, or customers will sign up for the months when new content is on and cancel afterward, much like many people do with HBO/Shotime/etc. Of course, this can also bring in a new market sector of channels: those that are only on air for a few months out of the year, reducing operating costs and having a very strong profit for the few months they are on air showing good content.
I don't, however, like this getting tied in with even more indecency laws. Laws and indecency have nothing to do with one another, even for broadcasters. If we allowed anything on air and current statiosn suddenly went apeshit and started swearing about the mother fucking fire on main street that caused the anchor to be late for mother fucking work while blaming it on those shithead firemen a new market sector would instantly appear: the moderated, tame, channels. Especially if we had a la carte.
It looks to me like the bill was written to fail. It's a classic US congressional move: 1. Author a bill for something the public really wants (a la carte cable). 2. Add a provision to the bill that makes it almost certain not to pass because of the overwhelming out rage from the constituency (decency standards on cable and satellite). 3. The bill gets defeated in committee and the people can't gripe to their congressmen about it because we told them to vote against it.
This way Congress can pander to the cable companies and still say "Hey, you told us you didn't want that bill to pass!"
It's the exact same argument that failed against A Birth of A Nation, Playboy (even when they published a 16 yo playmate) and Lenny Bruce, and and and. It's always failed. There have been temporary successes. And I think FCC imposed decency standards have endured the longest, and they are the most vague, abstract and speculative. The more intense and necessary the conflict the more likely they are to lose. The weight of tradition, caustic political speech and the guarantee of free speech in the ultimate law of the land is too much to fight. Keep in mind that it was these same flawed decisions in more reactionary times which gave us public access loons and porn. Viva Free Porn!
I agree. Although I'm not nearly as concerned with this as I am with the "indecency" regulation; censorship isn't a good idea under any circumstances, it is distressing to see it creep further into the realm of acceptability. It is also distressing to see how little commentary has been made here with regard to it, at least thus far. I don't want a small group of people regulating what everyone else can see. If people don't like something, they can turn it off, change the channel, or simply stop watching entirely. There's no reason the rest of us have to wear blinders and earplugs.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In fact, a line item veto was also included, Article I, Section VII, Paragraph 2 reads:
http://www.law.ou.edu/ushistory/csaconstitution/
Indency laws and regulations might be read as variations to the old addage "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". Of course the various possibilities of finishing "your right to swing your nude tits ends where ___________" could have some amusing fill ins. Words are another matter as well, they vary in meaning greatly around the country and around the world and can depend a lot on inflection as well as who speaks them and who hears them. An American hearing that an Aussie or a Brit is "pissed" would assume he was very mad about something when he is probably just inebriated. The word "yankee" varies greatly in perception around the world too and in the United States. Old saying in Texas: "Three things that scare a Texan the most in order from least to worst; a black man with a gun, a Mexican with a knife, a yankee headed south with a U-Haul trailer."
Note to parent: I know I am just taking a few of your words out of context to respond to, but I couldn't resist. IMO, any discussion of indency is going to end up with out of context remarks.
Nudist colonist: Officer, that is the person I called about behaving indecently.
Police officer: But they are the only one here with their clothes on.
Nudist colonist: Yes, here that is indecent behaviour.
1) Comcast is required by law to block any channel you want, including their own programming guide. All cable stations are.
2) Alternately, considering you both sound like adults, you could just take the programming guide off the list of channels and not manually type it in.
3) Alternately, you could not be such idiots and realize that a commercial for porn is not, in fact, porn.
I've seen commercials for Playboy before, and not one of them was 'indecent'...you get more nudity and sex (Which is apparently all that is 'indecent'.) on actual broadcast TV, exactly because they know people are already going to perceive the Playboy commercial as somehow magically obscene to start with. Objecting to the TV saying, 'Porn exists, you can get it by...' is way past any rational moral objection...at that point, it's literal thought policing...objectors don't want people to know certain facts about a perfectly legal product.
So you've got a lot of option there.
But, hey, if you want to make it a bill to make it illegal to show any content on the listing channel besides the actual listings, I'll be right there beside you. Their little TV shows and ads are idiotic. If they can be required to carry public access channels, and broadcast channels, they can be required to carry a plain listing channel without anything else on it. (They, of course, are free to run ads on whatever other channels they want.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?