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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?
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.
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
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
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!
I would NOT pay the $50 bill. I've pulled the plug, and started using Online + Netflix to cut my monthly bill by some $100. Got rid of the Dish DVR, the dual-tv plan. Now we (in my household) all use laptops and two workstations with big screens. We still have one of the old NTSC TVs for playing video games.
Online TV Rocks!
On-demand TV has an interesting quality - when you discover a show you like, you can immediately jump to see past episodes you missed. Case in point: Heroes. I just discovered this excellent fantasy show, but jumping in "mid-stream" leaves lots to be desired. I'm able to watch past episodes all the way back to season 1, in order, on my schedule.
There is no combination of Cable/Satellite/DVR that will give you this.
The result is that I suddenly have a desire to explore, try new shows for a few minutes, see if I like it. Sure, the chances of me liking some new show are relatively small, but the payoff is so high!
It's a whole new way of doing TV made possible by a decent quality 3 Mb Internet connection, Hulu, Netflix, and Cast TV
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
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.
...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
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.