Slashdot Mirror
Congress Turns Up The Heat on FCC's Chairman
Fletch writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin could be in for an uncomfortable spring, as House Energy Committee Chair John Dingel (D-MI) has requested a truckload of FCC paperwork relating to some controversial decisions Martin has made. Those include the FCC's reversal on the a la carte cable issue and newspaper-television cross-ownership restrictions. 'This request has got to be turning the FCC completely upside down. Significantly, it appears to reflect a bipartisan discontent with Martin's performance. Democrats and some Republicans are upset over his recent move to relax one of the agency's key media ownership rules, as well as the rushed manner in which he handled the matter late last year. Other Republicans dislike what they see as Martin's persecution of the cable industry, especially Comcast.' The Committee originally announced its intention to investigate the FCC in January."
just ignore congress and shred every last document. Why not? Everybody else on Bush's team does this and gets away with it. Democrats in congress make a lot of noise but always bend over and take it when Bush gets angry.
The checks cleared in time.
Saying congress is turning up the heat on the FCC is like saying Chaney is turning up the heat on Bush to get out of Iraq. They serve the same agenda and they're not looking out for the people.
Nothing short of removing power from both congress and the FCC will keep these jokers from leeching from the public.
Comcast & other big media could not fully corrupt the FCC into doing what they want but with greater power comes greater corruption and congress turned out to be easier.
The summary seems to suggest that some in Congress want Comcast to have the freedom to throttle its traffic the way it does, and the FCC was standing in their way.
Comcast deserves all the examination it has gotten, and more. They have been terrible.
And "a la carte" cable is the obvious and fair thing to do. The claims of "undue burden" and "technically infeasible" are just so much crap. If they have the tecnical capability to do "On Demand", then they have the technical capability to do a la carte. Q.E.D.
Plain and simple: they just don't want to. Because then they can't charge exhorbitant rates for their bundled "packages".
And Martin is a great target, because communications decision-making is so controversial. However, there's still a huge number of telco/carrier contributions to various political campaigns and funds that are being ignored here. What of the millions of dollars used to influence policy and legislation? What of congressmen that shill for MPAA/RIAA and the cable/comm companies? It's all PR. Nothing but media blasts and putting Martin on the hotseat (which he richly deserves, for so many reasons).
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Not all people are as independent-thinking as you are. The Iraq "war" -- and the continued presence of Gworge W. Bush -- are excellent examples, demonstrating that an awful lot of people in this country believe what they are told by the media, no matter how ridiculous it is.
A newspaper is only as strong as its readership base.
Remind me again where the problem is?
It's in the readership base -- when was the last time the average American actually looked at (say) a foreign newspaper? Let alone a foreign-language one.
That said, there's no reason for the FCC to go out of their way to enable Information Domination. And do you seriously think that any of these companies would be happy to leave the Internet as an unsullied source of pure truth from outside their grip? No, they'll try to monetize that, and (as collateral damage) limit citizens' access to external sources of information. Not out of a Vast Conspiracy necessarily, but when your business model is predicated on grabbing as many eyeballs as possible, you don't want them looking at other networks, ja?
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
The relaxation of ownership rules, today, is by itself an issue that well warrants investigation. It is, plain and simple, a dangerously BAD IDEA.
You asshole moderators, stop modding "troll" just because you disagree with someone's statements. That kind of behavior makes you worse than half the government pricks that get discussed here.
It is also part of the cause. The argument "I did it because I could" is not morally or ethically defensible. Unfortunately, it might be legally defensible. But that's not good enough for me.
This is because cable and satellite companies fill the pockets of congressmen with continual loads of fresh green cash... These companies have powerful lobyists. They understand that under a la carte they will no longer be able to charge people $49 for basic cable when all people want is 15-20 chanels. they also understand that if they value certain chanels too highly under a la carte, then those chanels will fall dramatically in ratings as people switch to watching programming on less expensive cable networks. Cable companies will loose money under a la carte, I have no doubt about it, and they have no intention of letting it happen. The millions they blow in kickbacks and other funding given to congressmen is nothing compared to what's at stake under a la carte.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
There is more to a la carte channel selection than simply the will of the Cable Co's themselves.
The reality is that the bulk of programming costs for the cable company are directly attributable to a few companies, such as Disney, HBO, etc.
First, you have to understand how pricing for channels from the channel owners is done. Its done based on volume, usually negotiated per head. When Disney and a provider (doesn't matter is its cable or satellite) negotiate a contract, they end up with a per-consumer cost that the cable company pays to carry the channel.
There are two reasons that more than 50% of the channels are complete crap.
1) The really crappy ones are so low cost that they have a negligible effect on the consumer. Channels provided by the non-big companies fall in this category. The one that comes to mind is the Christian Broadcast Network, which only cost pennies per month to the cable companies.
2) The bundle effect. In order to sell advertising, the big media providers (Disney, etc.) want to have as many channels as possible carried, preferably the ones that are in the starter bundles. Therefore, you get at least 3-5 ESPN channels. Unfortunately, none of the cable (or satellite) providers have any negotiating ability here at all. This is unregulated territory, so Disney will just sit back on its haunches and say, "You want ESPN? Guess what...you have to also put ESPN2, ESPN Classic, and ESPN Sports Nobody Cares About" in your Basic Tier.
Do you really think that a local cable provider will be able to refuse? So Disney ends up with a fairly significant portion of channels, which means they get to sell more ad revenue, and build up aftermarket sales of DVD's and paraphenalia.
The cable company is damned if they don't, effectively. They can't negotiate, as there isn't much choice about carrying Disney Channel and ESPN.
So, because of these contractual agreements, the cable companies *CANNOT* unbundle channels, at least in any meaningful way. Because there are only a handful of meaningful channels provided by a handful of extremely large companies, unbundling would, at best, mean having a Disney group, a TimeWarner group, etc. And the big media conglomerates will *NEVER* allow this. If they did, it would eat into their already shrinking ad revenues so fast the shareholders might explode.
So, not to defend the cable companies, but this matter is one that is largely unregulated, and the cable companies are unable to win the battle. While this isn't the only factor (certainly the cable companies want to charge you as much as possible for as many tiers of service as possible), it is one of the biggest. Remember, the highest margins for the cable companies are in the in-house services they control: data, phone, etc. When they have to pay per subscriber (or per event, such as On-Demand or PPV) they don't make nearly as much as they do for services they control.
Remember, also, that some channels *ARE* regulated by government, especially local access channels (my system carries 3-4 of them, I think). This is a huge waste of bandwidth that the cable companies are contractually obligated to provide in order to get local franchises. Again, crap. A waste of resources. But the cable company has no choice but to spend a ton of money and bandwidth to meet these obligations.
The future of cable is obviously to move to digital only services. I know of one small cable company that is actively looking to migrate to PacketCable exclusively, which means that they would deliver everything via packets, rather than channels. The minute the FCC lets the cable companies drop Analog services, expect this to happen quickly.
However, its unfair to only blame the Cable Co's. The Big Media is as much to blame if not more than anyone else.
Bill
Democrats and Republicans in bed with the corporations. It's all about Comcast, a witch-hunt, pure and simple. It's pretty unnerving to see this unfold.
IIRC, the reason why the cable companies don't want A-La Carte pricing is because the law only applies to consumers.
Businesweek 12/7/05
While it may be years before any such model is put in place and it's hard to say how the end result will look, a consensus is emerging that some channels would suffer -- if not fall away altogether. Content providers now compel cable operators to offer their niche channels by bundling them with must-haves like ESPN or MTV. Without being bundled into a bigger package, less popular channels such as ESPN Classic and MTV2 could struggle to garner a large enough audience to survive.
So while the consumer can choose what channels he or she wants, the cable company still has to pay for it. It's kind of like if the Grocery Store (cable company) forced you (the consumer) to buy the fruit salad because they bought all their fruit from the same company (TV station) who charges them the same regardless of how many individual pineapples or watermelons they bought. Oh, and noone else is making these varieties of pineapples or watermelons. Now, if you want Papaya (specialty station) you can go to the Grocery Store down the street (Satellite) but they make their fruit salad without the Pineapples which you want.
So the consumer's best option is to get his tropical fruit off someone selling out of his van (P2P), which has it's own set of risks entirely.
As a fifth generation American, I find it bizarre that most people seem to be aware that we are being governed by hired prostitutes, and yet everyone seems to think it's "normal".
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Networks offer packages to the local operator (or big nationals like Comcast). They are package deals. I can personally verify that the small (8k subs) cable operator I work for would never carry MTV2, MTV Jams, or MTV Hits if they weren't part of a package that included Noggin and Nick Toons.
The problem is at the networks, not the cable operator. They are just like the recording industry who still thinks you can put an hour of crap on a CD, throw in two good songs and ship it out the door.
Now that digital cable is really getting wide deployment (again thanks to the FCC), ala carte wouldn't be hard technically, but the economic constraints placed upon an operator by the networks like Turner, MTV, Scripps (Discovery Channel), Fox, etc. prevent an operator from doing so.
Though I pity your absorption into the Comcast world (which I wouldn't wish on anyone), you'll have a lot more options with DirecTV. What's so "god-awful" about it? There's very little on cable than you can't get from them, the big thing probably being some kind of on-demand thing, and their new HD receivers will have that soon.
With satellite, you at least have a choice of packages to generally get what you want. In fact, if they don't have what you want, you might want to call them and ask about specific offerings. They used to have special packages that they didn't generally advertise.
The big issue here (AFAIK) isn't the lack of a la carte offerings by the cable companies, but the cost of offering them. This is the part that most people don't seem to want to understand. If you think cable is expensive now, watch what happens when the Congress forces them to offer channel-by-channel packages (which, when it happens, will once again demonstrate the Law of Unintended Consequences).
Current cable distribution technology doesn't allow for users to pick a few channels and pay that way. The cablecos (and satellite companies, to some extent) have to pay per-subscriber fees to carry many of those channels. These fees are charged differently for different tiers of programming (basic, basic extended, etc), which is why some so-called "premium" channels are only available with certain packages (Note: this is the big issue involved in the dispute the NFL has with cable carries regarding NFL Network).
In order to provide a la carte, the cable companies are going to have to build new user equipment that will provide such a service, or alternately, build new transmission equipment that allows them to select channels for each destination at the source. Now, we both know there is technology available to do this now. But to mass produce it, deliver it, test it, then figure out a way to make sure the customer billing matches their channel choices is going to cost a LOT of money if they're forced to do this. I'm certain that as time progresses, they will come up with ways to do it that they can roll out on a gradual basis.
In the meantime, since you're getting satellite, just cutomize your receiver to display only the channels you want. It's easy to do, allows you to password-block specific channels from your kids, and makes your on-screen guide easier to maneuver. On my receiver, I remove all the shopping, foreign and religious channels (except EWTN, in case I skip mass on Sunday), along with specialty and sports channels I rarely watch. You can bring them all back up with one keypress on the remote, unless you block them, which requires a password.
I know this doesn't make thing cheaper. But a la carte will NOT make cable and satellite bills go down. In fact, I guarantee they'll go way up...and everyone will be screaming at John Dingle to do something. At which point, he'll probably ask who the idiot was who pushed a la carte on everyone was.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.