MilwaukeeMike
Posts: 3,216 +1,469
I'm not getting into a political debate on a tech website in a cable TV article... but for fun... type 'FDR prol' into google and see what it fills in for you.
milwaukeemike said:
Our system has some serious flaws. The current political strategy is 'Let the other party be in control for a while, because the easiest way to get elected is to let them screw up for a bit.' It's a sick irony..
Anyway... back to cable...
A la Carte! GO! Do It!
Vrmithrax said:
If you suddenly give consumers a choice, I would guess that about 80% of the channels out there today (that are not sports or premium movie networks) would fail due to lack of subscribers.
gwailo247 said:
I can understand how even in a very capitalistic society as ours we still subsidize certain things, I draw the line at entertainment.
TomSEA said:
About frickin' time. I absolutely HATE that I'm stuck paying for a brazillion channels I could care less about.
I suspect that this might be the compromise, buts its better then paying for a 100+ channels you never watchGuest said:
I doubt the ala carte would be true to the phrase. I'm sure it would not be, "pick 5 or 10 or 15 channels from this list". It would more than likely be, "pick this group or that group of channels from this list of groups".
I work for a cable company and actually suggested this two years ago to them. The answer from my company was "great idea! But we can't do that". The reason was actually contractual. We have contracts with content providers, aka channels. These company own a lot of channels, not just one, and our contracts with them require us to carry and provide a certain set of channels together. So for example if we want to offer Fox, we must also provide the Fox News channel to those same people, as well as FX, however their SPEED channel can be offered as a separate, higher level of service.
All broadcasters operate this way, you want one channel, then you have to pay us for two and must offer both to the same customers. Exceptions can exist, but they tend to be rare and similar to our deal with the SPEED channel, we still have to buy it but we're allowed to charge a premium for it. The way this works out is we pay for these channels regardless of whether our customers pay to get them. So if we have 100 customers that upgrade to that SPEED channel or 1 million, we still pay $700,000 a year to have the channel. Cable companies want to use an ala carte system. It's the broadcasters that don't. They like getting a few hundred checks every year for over $10 million for all their channels, and they use that money on lawyers to make their contracts rock solid.
So unless we can get broadcasters to change how they structure their system, this will not likely happen.