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FCC Head Supports Ala Carte Cable
MikeyTheK writes "PC Magazine Reports that Kevin Martin, chairman of the FCC, supports ala carte cable.
In a letter to several minority groups on Wednesday, Martin said "While I believe all consumers would benefit from channels being sold in a more a la carte manner, minority consumers, especially those living in Spanish speaking homes, might benefit most of all,". He goes on to argue "Cable companies act as gatekeepers into the programming allowed by the expanded basic cable package, preventing independent content producers from reaching viewers,", citing the example of Black Family Television, which was forced to go online-only because cable operators refused to carry it, even after it reached 16 million homes."
Television is still mostly paid for by commercials. Any channel not generating much viewership isn't generating much sales. Either that, or the target audience doesn't buy things as much.
Either way, a la carte would end up looking exactly the same...except probably with less variety, since channels that are currently not competing would start.
Of course, I'm with the majority, so it'd be great for me. USA, Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi Channel, and Comedy Central are my channels, and I know that they're all pretty popular. Then again...I wonder what's more popular. It could lead to more of that reality-tv crap infesting my channels. There are already full channels that run nothing else.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Naturally, but this might also point to cable companies' desire to stop pushing everything over coaxial at once and move towards a TV over IP system. It's probably cheaper to gain bandwidth by pushing out new cable boxes to everyone than digging and laying new lines. For my parents, who only want one or two international channels, this would probably be a good move.
I hope that it cuts down on the number of folks around the country watching crappy tv once they have to shell out cash for it specifically. If moms and dads aren't willing to pay for MTV anymore, we might actually see the Viacom monopoly start to crumble, fingers crossed. Maybe folks will even start tuning into PBS more often! Yay! Quality entertainment, despite the terrible telethons.
Agreed.
ESPN is a shining example of why bundled packages don't work. ESPN is one of the most expensive channels for cable and sat companies to offer. This is, in part, due to the huge costs associated with the acquisition of broadcasting rights for various sporting events by ESPN.
It is compounded by ESPN's growth model, which is to spawn more specialized sporting channels that they then shuffle semi-major sporting events to. This was done with ESPN-2 and is now being done with ESPN-U. (see here) So if I want more of the specialized channels *I* want, I end up paying more for ESPN channels I could care less about.
The icing on the cake is this - about seven years ago, I paid over $600 for an ATSC/DVB-S receiver in order to pick up HD stations. The sat provider that I went with offered several HD channels for free. Several more channels were added to the HD package over the years, but the cost remained the same. This continued until ESPN-HD arrived. Suddenly, I was asked to pay a small fee to continue to watch all of these channels.
I subscribed to it for a while, but why? Most of the programming on ESPN-HD was simply upconvered NTSC analog programming. So I dumped it. Kept my sat service for a few more months then dumped it completely. Now all I get are local channels, TBS, WGN and Discovery that come free with my cable company's digital cable package.
Both my cable co and my former sat company bombard me with offers for HD PVRs and several months of free service. Why? All of it except for one or two channels is nothing but junk to me. The only way for me to pick and choose is to get a C-band sat, which my HOA would never approve.
So in the end, this cartoon from the CSMonitor sums it all up...