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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."
I thought the problem was that the programming sucked.
I have to pay for basic cable, and then pay an internet fee on top of that, even though I never watch TV.
If internet is less expensive to deliver than TV, why oh why won't the cable companies just let me buy what I want and need, without paying for the "basic tier" of trash?
The "sour economy" is not putting any pressure on cable companies. None. Most people today consider TV as essential as a cell phone or natural gas. And given the escapism angle, I'd guess most Americans would pay the cable bill with their last $50.
What I want:
HBO
History Channel
MSNBC
CNN
CBC
BBC
Comedy Central
Showtime
Science Channel
PBS
Animal Planet (for my daughter)
Cartoon Network (for my daughter)
VH1 (for the wife)
That's it. I don't watch and don't care for the rest of it, because it's mindless brain drool, and a lot of what is on the stations I listed is also mindless brain drool, just less of it than elsewhere (like Oxygen, MTV, SPIKE, ABC/CBS/NBC, etc.). That's 13 channels I would watch, and watch at least once a week. I would pay a dollar a month for each. That would give them $13 a month they're not getting now. I would not pay more than $1 month, because frankly, TV is a big time suck and mind poison. but that's what I would do, and I am certain there are many people who agree with me.
I don't want the Food Channel. I don't want ESPN. I don't want "Desperate Housewives" or "American Idol". It's crap. I don't want it in my house.
But I am willing to pay for the good stuff, if I can be certain I will get GOOD STUFF.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Possibly OT, but when I installed a little outdoor DTV antenna the other day, I was amazed by how many stations I got. I'm wondering: as stations start taking advantage of the extra stations (you know, running more programs rather than running HD and SD stations with the same programming plus a weather channel) will large numbers of casual TV users decide the monthly cable fee isn't worth it?
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Why should I pay cable companies for a badly compressed copy when I can get it over the air with that $40 antenna I bought 15 years ago?
It't not like there's all that much worth watching on TV anyway - my dogs watch more TV in a day than I do in a month.
If I'm paying then I don't want to see commercials. I don't want to pay for content I'll never view either. So no bundles, I just want to pick the channels I want. The channels must be cheap as in $(basic_bundle_cost/basic_bundle_channel_count).
So far no one is providing a service like this. iTunes has two of the three requirements, but it is not cheap. I can't afford $1.99 for a single TV show.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Don't bother. They're turning to dumbed down dreck like everything else.
I'm not a fan of cable companies. Not in any way.
But the problem with the groupings right now is that the content providers force certain groupings. For example, if you want to offer ESPN and ESPN2 (what cable company could afford not to), then Disney says "okay, if you want to offer ESPN and ESPN2, that'll $2.40 per month per subscriber". Which is $2.40 which goes straight to your cable bill. But then they say "well, but we have this new channel, ESPNU (or Classic or Disney Kids 5 or whatever), if you offer that channel IN THE SAME PACKAGE AS ESPN, we'll give you ESPN+ESPN2+ESPNU for only $1.40 per month per subscriber".
So each year, the providers will basically force another channel into their bundle this way. So each year, each of these content providers is raising the amount of money they get from each subscriber. And the cable companies have to offer big bundles in order to meet the requirements from the content providers.
Furthermore, it gives all the advantages to the big companies who already have lots of channels in your package. They can launch a new channel easily while the small guys are locked out since the bandwidth is already being chewed up by the big guys' new channels.
The internet is definitely the disruptive technology that will stop this. That is, if the cable companies and content providers don't find a way to prevent you from streaming video directly.
There's no technological reason why this bundling is necessary. It's just because the companies (cable and content providers) have found it to their advantage so far. I feel it would strongly benefit the customers to enforce an end to this bundling.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
However, if you remember, it took several years before music labels realised they had the perfect scapegoat on which to blame a failing business model that relied too heavily on back catalogue material as a prime revenue stream, and an extremely low level of quality regarding contemporary content.
Fixed that for ya!
They just don't get it, we don't want to subscribe to a hundred channels. What we do want is watch what we want when we want and not have to subscribe to half a dozen services on top of our ISP fees.
.. Television. I mean, for me, why pay extra to watch television on the Internet ?
.. :) It depresses me as to all the innovators can see as to the future of the Internet, television and adverts. Back to the sixties I guess :)
If the telecoms want to make real money out of IPTV they need to stop subscribing to rights to channels and instead buy up their own material and repackage it for their own subscribers, else all they are doing is relaying terrestrial TV to an audience that can already get on
If may come as a surprise to the telecoms that IPTV is a bandwidth hog, but not the rest of us. What they need to do is provide a high definition broadcast grid for live video, the rest to be provided in a peering arraignment to the local ISP switching center. The consumer then selects from a list of older tv progs and movies and they are delivered overnight to a DVR or set-top-box.
You pay for what you watch when you watch. Latest movie, ok top dollar, old movie, $1:00 a time. You also pay for online game subscriptions, video telephone, research and reference like the Wolfram|Alpha project.
Of course even 'passive viewing' is old century for the current wired generation, they're more into making and being in their own personal movie
See also:
Regular columnist Bill Thompson wants it all. And he wants it now.
Lets face it: the Windows Media Center PC concept has been faltering for its entire existance, and even now in the Windows 7 Release Candidate it still fails to provide anything even remotely compelling. The fact that it will not tune ClearQAM cable channels even when equipped with a capable tuner makes it about as useful as mammories on a fish. Why there has been no anti-trust investigation into the obvious collusion between Microsoft and the cable companies over this issue is a mystery to me.
Off you go, then. Put some money where your mouth is.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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
My first issue with the cable company came when they took SpeedTV (before it became a NASCAR station, ugh.) and made it part of a 'sports package' back in 2001. I had no want of the other stations they wished to 'push' to me as a subscriber, so we didn't pay for the new package. Since then, I have stopped using cable, and have been using such services as hulu and others which are perfectly capable of providing adequate entertainment over my 'turtle-slow' DSL line (note not using cable internet). I am not a promoter of nor benefactor of hulu, but wish to say it might be a better business model for the cable industry than what it currently has in place.
To quote: (and you better know by who)
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons..."
I am sorry, but why should we pay a premium for what is already publicly available?
-cb
The reason we have the larger bundles is that advertising and programming on the more popular channels covers the deficits run by the less popular ones. Programming on Discovery, History or whatnot may be great, but it's the pap like MTV that brings in the lucrative advertising and eyeballs. Breaking the packages up just makes it easier for the stockholders to demand that under-performers get axed... and that's a category more likely to include the ones that we want to see, rather than the ones that the broader public do.
Of course this is a generalization, but in the main the paradox is that free content usually ends up not being worth paying for because quality producers won't make it for long leaving largely low cost/low quality content over the long run. Quality producers and distributors stick to channels where the business model provides a sufficient fee structure (ad revenue, subscribers fees, etc.) via channel control to provide them revenue and profit. But consumers will only pay for content they value--both in quality and speed. The problem right now is most US internet connections are mostly too slow to provide high quality and delivery speeds that will command cable TV-level fee structures for advertising and subscriber fees. The US is way behind the EU in this. So the cable companies and telcos have a huge investment in infrastructure ahead of them before they can profit in the general market. Which is why they want a tiered internet--to phase infrastructure in slowly and match costs and revenues better to stay profitable. Their greed early on has them no painted into a corner--but you can bet they are figuring out how to make to consumer fund their rescue.
...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
But I am willing to pay for the good stuff, if I can be certain I will get GOOD STUFF.
That's just the thing. You won't get good stuff for your $1/month. For me, à la carte channels aren't unbundled enough. Try unbundling to the show level. Oh wait. We have that. It's called the Internet, and bittorrent.
This is where their entire distribution model falls down. They have a channel called the SciFi channel (oops, SyFy, my bad^W wtfstupidmarketing) that is used to cablecast... horror movies and fantasy movies. There's precious little SciFi on SyFy. So if they were offering à la carte channels, SyFy might make my list, but in fact it wouldn't because there's too little content on it that is the kind I want. I have no interest in an endless stream of man-in-a-rubber-suit horror movies.
USA network used to broadcast the Highlander series. I liked it, despite their minor obsession with the correct "formula" for characters leading them to introducing their own Wesley Crusher-esque guaranteed-to-accrue-far-more-power-than-he-ever-deserves character. But the Highlander series is long gone and does USA have anything else I want to watch? I don't know. Their odds are so low that I haven't bothered to find out. So scratch them off the list.
And on and on.
You see where this is going. I want to treat TV exactly the way I treat books. I want 100% of the offering free from the library, and I'll buy the individual works that I like well enough to read(watch) again, but I'm paying no more than $5 for it (for the decrease in entertainment hours vs a $7 paperback), and I want 98% of that money to go to the people directly involved in creating the entertainment ('cause that's where publishers are going to end up one day too). The studios are a giant parasitic growth on the back of the creative types capable of assembling a movie and I'm not interesting in feeding a parasite.
I see the Internet as the death of television as we know it. We'll see more episodic content where the producers don't proudly trumpet the fact that they have no plan at all for the story arc and denigrate their predecessors who did (I'm looking at you Battlestar Galactica), because the networks that screwed with shows in a vain effort to please sponsors and audiences simultaneously will no longer exist. Maybe we can get a spiritual successor to Babylon 5 that doesn't get strangely squashed and stretched by the vagaries of networks, canceling and optioning on a whim.
In short, the Network Age is passing and the Studio Age is upon us. The studio controlled by the creative types will create our entertainment and the distributors that have a stranglehold on the industry will evaporate, supplanted by a vastly more efficient distribution system.
The value in these channel is not for you, it's for the advertisers.
...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.
iTunes Norge have a severely limited selection of movies and series. In part because of the Norwegian Movie and Music industry, and in part because they refuse to follow Norwegian Law. Which is also why Apple/iTunes have threatened to boycott Norway several times. So iTunes is not a viable option since it does not provide what I want, and even if it did I couldn't be certain I would be able to access what I had purchased a few months, or years, down the line.
The Long Now Foundation
There's no technological reason why this bundling is necessary.
There is no technical reason for lots of things. That's why it is called marketing, in this case, and not technology.
But if it weren't for marketing, a lot of our technological toys would not be economically feasible. I don't know the numbers but I suspect this is true for programming too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
the problem with television is cable. not the other way around. I remember growing up as a kid and always having cable television. flipping through tons of channels and only watching a few of them. even after living on my own for a while, moving in to new places and such, getting the cable setup was always at the top of my priorities as far as my utilities are concerned. then one day I said fuck it. I get off work at 5pm, drive 30 minutes back home, and I have a lot of shit to take care of when I get home. clean up a bit, take care of my plants, fish, cats, make dinner for my wife and I, then finally get some time to relax. after taking care of the things that need to be attended to, I can't justify spending $30, $40, $50+ on cable television. DTV has probably been the best thing that has ever happened to me. I don't watch TV enough to need cable, but the television I do watch is perfectly fine and entertaining. in particular, PBS broadcasting is something I think everyone should indulge into a little bit more. yes I thought it was boring and there were too many telethons at first, but then I realized that their primetime television is of very high quality, educational, and is enjoying to watch. it is just my opinion of course, and I'd never take away people's Family Guy, Lost, Prison Break, CSI, and all the other mindless television shows, but I figure if you're going to watch TV, you might as well learn something from it and it might as well be free.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Welcome, once again, to another episode of cable operators complaining about internet delivery and content bundles. All together now - (sorry, I'm very snarky today) - cry me a river.
The real issue is that all of the current non-OTA TV delivery systems have bitten off much more than they can chew.
So far as I know, NO ONE in the USA is offering HD content as advertised:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Lite
http://www.highdefforum.com/directv-forum/29158-hd-lite-directv-picture-quality.html
http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-network-forum/51978-facts-about-hd-lite-e.html
http://forums.joeuser.com/309174
http://www.tvnewsday.com/articles/2009/04/22/daily.4/
(I recognize that some of the above links seem to target satellite TV, but if you read through two things become apparent: users are equally slamming cable, and neither satellite nor cable has their arms around a solution.)
Like it or not, the #1 driver for a cable subscription is TV - and they already cannot deliver on that.
I'm not a big sports fan (but so what if I am or not?), but I can reliably report this: during a hockey and a basketball game, I DVR'd OTA and my so-called high-def service of same channels. Hockey results: OTA clear, puck actually disappeared with paid service. Round-ball results: OTA clear, paid service unable to distinguish if foot over line or ref was blind during slo-mo playback.
And here's some technical anecdotes:
1. Your channel package choice or size of bundle won't impact anything, it's backbone limited.
2. When I upgraded to "HD" satellite, my house's RG-58 didn't cut it due to bandwidth limits on the RG-58. The '58 was ok for the short wall-to-TV pigtails, not otherwise.
3. They can fiber this and cable that and MPEG-4 the other, but no one is supporting the infrastructure to get the job done.
And a real big issue - once you've made the grade to premium cable or premium satellite, and you've replaced your TV - name your reasons, they're all valid: a) I want a new one, b) new TV standards and my set is getting old anyway, c) time to branch out and support my computer and Hulu, HTPC, et al, in the living room - you'll replace that TV with an HDTV and you'll go with the HD package from your for-pay provider (cable or satellite). The HDTV is an investment-grade purchase, just like your PC (any flavor), and the HD programming is too small an incremental price increase to pass up.
Here's the invective we can now look forward to: if you're complaining about your TV quality, you'll be told the bandwidth suckers using torrents are to blame. If you're complaining about your internet service, you'll be told that the primary service is directed at TV quality. Either way, do not expect that the future holds a world where you're really going to get what you think you're paying for.
Mark my words.
(PS - No apologies to those not interested in HDTV, or TV - you're not the big market to these companies, and that's all I'm ragging on - I'm not dis'ing anyone's lifestyle or entertainment choices. HTH.)
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
You do know that MTV/CNN/ESPN are generating the money that pays for many of the lesser-watched channels that you probably enjoy, right...?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I haven't watched TV in ages, not since living in an apartment building that had basic cable service for everyone as an amenity. And even then I seldom found the time to watch aside from when the San Jose Sharks were playing (hockey for those scratching their heads). Now, the "TV" as in "the display device" is hooked up to the Wii and the DVD player, but "TV" as in "programming some big media company beams to my tuner" is unknown in this house. Why bother? I have plenty else to keep me entertained.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The big problem with allowing individual channel selection is that there are plenty of channels out there that exist because of the way channels have beein funded, selected and supported.
So you want a channel dedicated to science fiction shows, movies, etc. You need to sell it to the cable companies and if a significant number agree to carry it - and pay for it - your job is done. You can get financing based on that and it really doesn't matter what the individual customers think. Some of them will watch and it is a ratings game from there on.
Switch to an ala carte model and this changes quite a bit. First off, any channel that exists today will be immediately taken down unless you have customers signing up for it. Probably within the first couple of months. This isn't like ratings where passive viewing is conidered "viewing" and done by sampling. This will be if you don't opt-in for the channel you don't support it. And without people paying for SciFi channel specifically and intentionally, it and many others will just disappear.
Sounds fair, doesn't it. What about BET? Do you really believe there are enough viewers of the Black Entertainment Network channel to keep it afloat in an ala carte environment? What about the Golf Channel? How about the Food Network? Maybe these cable channels should never have existed in the first place because they don't have a dedicated viewer base. But you can assume that it would not be in Viacom's interest to continue BET when there isn't the revenue to support it - no matter how much Jesse Jackson threatens. SciFi channel is pretty much dead meat as well. Eternal Word TV Network (EWTN) is gone. Same with just about any other channel with a narrow demographic.
Similarly, the rules of the game for starting a new channel will be completely different. Sure, a large media powerhouse might be able to subsidize a new offering for a while to see if it takes off. But nobody else will be able to, because it will take lots of money and a very uncertain future to do it. Lots of risk. Just the sort of thing VC money has been running away from lately.
Absolutely, ala carte channel selection is a solution, but we need to understand what the problem is first. It doesn't solve any of the current problems and just creates a bunch more. It might reduce the average consumer cable bill - in fact it probably will. But it will certainly decrease the number of channels available and make it almost impossible to bring a new (really new) offering to cable networks.
The one possibility would be that this wouldn't affect DirecTV and Dish Network - they could then introduce new channels based on selling it only to their management.
They don't generate squat. The parent company of ESPN for instance, requires that the cable/satellite/Verizon people advertise, sell, and bundle ESPN channels in order to get any of their other channels for use on their systems.
It's almost as if they are afraid that ESPN would fall flat otherwise....
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
But at least, as in the grocery store, you would have a choice. Maybe 40 single channels would cost 80 dollars. Then again that would make the perhaps 5 channels I'd buy only 10 dollars. Your analogy would be more like going to the grocery store and finding they only sell 24 packs of soda. Every can is a different flavor and it doesn't matter if you only like 3 of them.
Personally I would be happy to pay Discovery money to be able to download or stream various programs they provide through the internet.
Save your money, get almost everything you want right here - http://www.getmiro.com/ - now available for more than just Mac.
I swear by it - I'm watching the Hubblecast HD right now (episode 27, in fact).
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.