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FCC Head Supports Ala Carte Cable

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-little-of-this-a-little-of-that dept.

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."

1 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And, as a nerd just why do I need 50..... by toejam13 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...