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The Problem With Cable Is Television
Saul Hansell writes in the NY Times about how various services offered by cable companies affect their spending and their revenue. As it turns out, a lot of the cost increases and investment needs are coming from television and video services rather than internet connectivity. The scramble for high-def and rising licensing fees for programming seem to be the biggest headaches for Comcast and Time Warner right now. Quoting:
"By all accounts, Web video is not currently having any effect on the businesses of the cable companies. Market share is moving among cable, satellite and telephone companies, but the overall number of people subscribing to some sort of pay TV service is rising. (The government's switch to digital over-the-air broadcasts is providing a small stimulus to cable companies.) However, if you remember, it took several years before music labels started to feel any pain from downloads. As the sour economy and the Web start putting more pressure on the cable companies, they may be forced to consider breaking up the big bundles of channels they now insist that consumers buy and instead offer individual channels or smaller groups of channels on an à la carte basis."
Because they're largely an unregulated monopoly. The reason why they require you to pay for the basic tier is so that they can make more money. There may also be a bit of money from cable TV being used to subsidize the cable internet, but it's mostly a matter of profit.
The DSL here is a bit the same way, except that you get a $5 a month discount for having a phone line on top of the internet connection. That's a savings of ~$8.50 a month over having both. I'm guessing it has something to do with the way that they bill for the maintenance of the telephone lines.
Most cable companies charge you $xx for internet access if you're a cable customer, or $xx + $yy if you're not. $yy is conveniently the same cost as the basic cable package.
I agree, but so much of the stuff on History and Discovery anymore is just more reality shows.
Ideally, you could subscribe and pay per program, and I could watch "How It's Made" during prime-time whether advertisers like it or not.
And I demand a pro-rated refund for "shark week".
Maybe the baby boomers, but I don't know anyone in the 20-35 age group that pays for cable unless they want to watch sports. We all have internet access, hulu, and netflix.
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
Where are the insightful and informative mods?!?
You must be new here... there are no insightful and informative moderators on /.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
>>>I have to pay for basic cable, and then pay an internet fee on top of that, even though I never watch TV.
No you don't. You could get DSL like I have. Only $15 a month.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Your $13 a month estimate is unrealistic. Cable companies that do provide a la carte charge a $10 flat fee, plus $1 per channel, so you'd be paying $23 a month.
By an interesting coincidence, that's how much Dish Satellite's cheapest service costs ($20). Maybe you should sign-on with them?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Part of the problem is the paranoia Cable Labs has over licensing Cable Cards for use in HTPCs. You have to buy an OEM HTPC with Cable Card tuner and a special BIOS so it only works on that machine. Until one can go onto Newegg and buy a Cable Card compatible ATSC/QAM tuner card that works in ANY PC, WMC isn't going anywhere fast in the DTV era (at least in the US, I hear WMC has decent DVB support).
...Except for the fact that the videos are DRM-ed and doesn't really work. If I remember correctly you can't play HD content on "non-authorized" monitors, and forget about putting it on anything other then an iPod/iPhone/Windows or OS X machine/Apple TV. This basically means that it is much better to buy the DVD version of the shows so you can do what you want with your purchased content.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Jesus, try HDTV. They have a full 22Mbps bandwidth over broadcast for a super sexy HD picture (that they can fill to the max) but over cable it's much less (don't know where to look it up).
So that means that they have to compress the hell out of HD Cable... if you ever get a chance to watch a sports game over antenna vs. cable, you'll notice a huge difference.
To be fair, I don't know how they handle the HD OTA channels over cable (234 is Fox DTV in my area) - it might be the original compression, but I doubt it.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Dish Network has the Family Pack for $19.99. That gets you 55 channels. Sure most are family orientated but you also get channels like:
DO IT YOURSELF
FOX NEWS CHANNEL
Outdoor Channel
RFDTV
THE SCIENCE CHANNEL
Or The Welcome Pack for $9.99 (23 channels)
Comedy Central
Home & Garden
Oxygen
AMC
TBS
MTV2
Boomerang
Discovery Kids
Learning Channel
MSNBC
Dish Network is moving to the small packages and it sells pretty good.
Dan
>>>How do you know what your preferred channels will cost.
Because it's publicly available information that is published in the trade journals. My preferred channels charge:
50 cents Sci-Fi ...per subscribed home. Even if we assume an outrageous markup by Comcast to $2 per channel plus $10 service fee, that $16 pricetag is still a LOT better bargain that the 65 frakking dollars they currently charge for ~50 channels I don't watch. A La Carte benefits the customer and that's precisely why the cable companies do not want it.
60 cents USA
89 cents TNT
Furthermore:
I don't understand why Dish can supply cable tv for only $20 a month but Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner, et cetera can not sell a similar deal for its lower-income customers to help save money. It's not logical.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Then pack the fuck up and leave. Nobody is stopping you.
The United Arab Emirates have a 0% tax rate; perhaps you should consider immigrating there.
Amen to that. The simple fact you consider taxation robbery, but put up with it every year, tends to discredit your claims.
Taking my money to benefit you and yours is fucking wrong,immoral and exactly what the founders of the USA were dead set against.
So completely wrong. "No taxation without representation" is not an alternate phrasing of "no taxation". Contrary to common thought, the famous example of the Boston Tea Party was in response to the British government reducing taxes on tea imports. The colonial smugglers who had been profiting from the higher cost of legitimate tea imports wanted to maintain the status quo; i.e. keep taxes high. I believe Benjamin Franklin was one of the people to publicly suggest the course of action opposed by the smugglers.
If there's going to be a long argument about what the founder's wanted, make sure you include the colonial / state constitutions wherever you cite the US constitution. If one thing's clear, it's that the limits on the federal government were largely to stop it from interfering with the states' powers over their citizens, which of course included taxes.
This bit on the Boston Tea Party simply isn't true. While the British did reduce taxes on the East India Trading Co. in Britain to help reduce losses due to the smuggling of tax-free tea from the Dutch, the Tea Party was actually in response to multiple factors including the Townshend Acts which levied NEW taxes on the colonies (including one on tea) by the British Empire.
The Boston Tea Party had little to do with smugglers and more to do with a tax imposed on the colonies by an empire in which they had no representation and the fact that the taxes were used to pay local officials (which made colonials question their loyalty b/c they were paid in part by the crown) and the monopoly on tea held by the East India Trading Co.
For further evidence, there were protests over the Stamp Act and other similar laws imposed on the colonials by the empire. To imply that the Tea Party was a response by smugglers over losing profits instead of the culmination of years of anger by protesters over taxation rights is a gross misrepresentation of history. I suppose next you'll blame cause of the American war for independence on the opium trade.