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John McCain's effects on the TV industry.

edited May 2013 in Politics
I bet many of you have plugged the plug on your TV already, but for those of you who haven't, John McCain wants customers to save money.

Via Business Insider:
John McCain is trying to pass legislation that would unbundle cable packages, allowing consumers to only pay for the cable channels they want.

One of his key reasons for wanting to go to an a-la-carte style is that the price of cable has risen through the years. He cited the data we've charted here from the FCC which shows cable bills rising through the years.

In McCain's view, allowing consumers to pick a small selection of channels they really want should help them save money.
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Comments

  • Are those constant dollars?
  • I don't think those are constant dollars.
  • Ugh, I'm torn. On the one hand, I love the idea of a-la-carte channels. On the other hand, I know that the only reason some channels even exist and why cable is the price it is is because that the price all those other channels pay to be on the the cable system helps subsidize the cost of it overall. It's also the reason some channels even exist.
  • I like this, though I'm not really invested one way or the other because I don't do cable any more. Mostly, I'm glad that McCain is coming back from his crazy period.
  • edited May 2013
    Lol I totally misunderstood that last sentence to hilarious effect.
    Post edited by Pegu on
  • I'm mostly in the same "don't really care" boat as Greg. I disagree with the idea that we need a la carte cable because it's not packages that are outdated. What's outdated is the existence of TV channels to begin with - the Netflix/Amazon Prime streaming model (House of Cards, Arrested Development, etc) is a lot more forward-looking.
  • For a moment, let's ignore the cost of infrastructure, which we can assume is the same flat fee either with a la carte or not. Now hypothetically say that you now pay $50 a month for 100 channels. That's $0.50 per channel. So you only want Cartoon Network, ESPN, and Comedy Central. That should be $1.50 a month, right? WRONG.

    Each channel has a different deal with different cable providers. On Cablevision MSG is $0. NFL Network might be $1.50. Some other channel that nobody watches might be $0.25. So the bill will not be what you think it is. Even with just a handful of channels, your bill will not decrease as much as you suspect.

    But that's not even the real problem. Let's pretend that ESPN is $1 per subscriber and a million people have cable. That means ESPN gets $1 million a month. But not all of those people watch ESPN. Let's say 1/3 of them watch ESPN. If only the people who watch ESPN pay for it, they aren't going to pay $1 a month, they are going to have to pay $3 a month in order for ESPN to keep making the same revenue.

    You also have to consider the effect this will have on advertising prices. Popular channels already charge more for ads due to ratings, but imagine how the ratings will change all over the place for channels that most people simply do not have.

    This is actually a good thing for the free market in that all those cable channels that nobody wants will go out of business. Ones that people actually do want will be able to raise their prices and make more money. Maybe someone will be willing to experiment and serve up their channel without ads to people who pay extra.

    It's a bad thing for the economy since a very large amount of TV production will just disappear overnight. All those people working at the crappy cable channels will be out of work. Lots of low priced advertising inventory will disappear, driving advertising costs up and having an effect on small businesses that do local cable advertising. Not to mention the revenue lost at the cable companies themselves.

    In the end what will happen is people will choose only the channels they want. Getting every channel a-la-carte will cost a small fortune, perhaps even $1000 a month. In the end, people will be paying maybe 10-25% less than what they pay now, and get 90% fewer channels than they have now. People will expect to save 90% on their bills when cutting 90% of the channels, but reality will fall far short of that. Illogical customers will think the old way was a better deal since they were getting a lot more content for only a little more money, even though that is content they never watched.

    You want to really fuck everyone over? Let's do metered TV billing. Each individual show or channel has a cost per second. Basically everything is pay-per-view. As you watch TV it will show you how much you are paying for what you are watching. That will end up being at least the cost of iTunes download prices. Almost all TV shows will disappear from lack of revenues when they, and advertisers, know the exact ratings and not Nielsen bullshit ratings.
  • Scott, do you actually know how Neilson ratings work? They may not be as precise as the metering method you described, but they are far from bullshit.
  • If they do pay per view like Scott described then I'd probably stop watching television, because right now about 70% of my viewing is just turning it on for background noise.
  • Scott, do you actually know how Neilson ratings work? They may not be as precise as the metering method you described, but they are far from bullshit.
    Nielsen is way fucked. First off, it only tracks Nielsen homes. There is a lot of TV watching that goes on outside of homes that is no tracked at all. For example, all that sports watching that happens in sports bars is completely unrepresented. Their technology is so old and busted that it can't track what DVRs are doing. There are too few Nielsen homes in general, so a lot of the ratings for less popular shows have such a large statistical margin of error as to be worthless. That's really only the start of their problems.
  • edited May 2013
    Scott, do you actually know how Neilson ratings work? They may not be as precise as the metering method you described, but they are far from bullshit.
    Their technology is so old and busted that it can't track what DVRs are doing.
    Err, yeah they can. Welcome to eight years ago, dude. It was around the same time they started making a serious effort to track viewership in bars - I know of at least two pubs in my city that give data to Neilsen for sport, I can only assume there are others, but I don't know how many here or worldwide - It simply doesn't work the same as the household method, and it's handled by the bar, not you. I know they have some other efforts to measure group settings other than bars, but I don't know about them off the top of my head, so can't help you there.

    Not to mention they also track streaming viewers and other web activity, they bought a company specifically for the tech, resources and expertise to do so, Webratings or something. Before you go "But what about..." with Tablets, phones, other set-top boxes, consoles, Computers, Macs, and your wi-fi connected prince albert, they track internet and device usage, too.

    I'm not saying they don't have problems with their methodology(Because they do, frankly, including sample selection, viewer bias, sample size, data seperation, etc, etc), but the problems you're picking are almost a decade out of date.
    Post edited by Churba on
  • Scott, do you actually know how Neilson ratings work? They may not be as precise as the metering method you described, but they are far from bullshit.
    Their technology is so old and busted that it can't track what DVRs are doing.
    Err, yeah they can. Welcome to eight years ago, dude. It was around the same time they started making a serious effort to track viewership in bars - I know of at least two pubs in my city that give data to Neilsen for sport, I can only assume there are others, but I don't know how many here or worldwide - It simply doesn't work the same as the household method, and it's handled by the bar, not you. I know they have some other efforts to measure group settings other than bars, but I don't know about them off the top of my head, so can't help you there.

    Not to mention they also track streaming viewers and other web activity, they bought a company specifically for the tech, resources and expertise to do so, Webratings or something. Before you go "But what about..." with Tablets, phones, other set-top boxes, consoles, Computers, Macs, and your wi-fi connected prince albert, they track internet and device usage, too.

    I'm not saying they don't have problems with their methodology(Because they do, frankly, including sample selection, viewer bias, sample size, data seperation, etc, etc), but the problems you're picking are almost a decade out of date.
    Alrighty then. I guess the last time I cared about Nielsen sucking was ten years ago, and I assumed that an old fuddy duddy company like that couldn't possibly have made its way into the 21st century.
  • Alrighty then. I guess the last time I cared about Nielsen sucking was ten years ago, and I assumed that an old fuddy duddy company like that couldn't possibly have made its way into the 21st century.
    Oh don't be a sook. They've still got plenty of problems to complain about, they've just managed to catch up to technology and their own problems a bit, to the surprise of everyone.
  • Alrighty then. I guess the last time I cared about Nielsen sucking was ten years ago, and I assumed that an old fuddy duddy company like that couldn't possibly have made its way into the 21st century.
    Oh don't be a sook. They've still got plenty of problems to complain about, they've just managed to catch up to technology and their own problems a bit, to the surprise of everyone.
    WTF is a sook?
  • edited May 2013
    In that context, it means roughly equivalent to "Come on, Don't be like that". It can also mean "Don't be such a crybaby" (not useful or correct in this context, because you're not crying about shit), or "Don't be such a wuss"(Again, not useful or correct for obvious reasons), or "Don't chuck a pout", which I'm sure you can figure out well enough, but still doesn't apply.

    Man, it's hard to do slang properly without being able to inflect as I please.
    Post edited by Churba on
  • There's also the slight problem of populism. Group subsidy of small cable channels allows for niche programming. Had cable been a la carte since the beginning, things like A&E, AMC, and FX probably wouldn't exist. Experimental shows wouldn't have found a nesting place. Populism leads to Two Broke Girls. It leads to NCIS. Populism gave rise to Two and Half Men.
  • There's also the slight problem of populism. Group subsidy of small cable channels allows for niche programming. Had cable been a la carte since the beginning, things like A&E, AMC, and FX probably wouldn't exist. Experimental shows wouldn't have found a nesting place. Populism leads to Two Broke Girls. It leads to NCIS. Populism gave rise to Two and Half Men.
    Truth. Also, consider that while ponies is big, Discovery Kids/Hub wouldn't have existed in the first place without this subsidy. It had almost the absolute worst ratings of any cable channel before the aponyclypse.
  • Shitty programming subsidizing good shit, so don't complain when people like crappy shit it's how they have the money to make good shit you like.
  • Except the actual monetization model of most of the cable industry is a house of cards. It's all a convoluted way of funneling advertising money around and preventing anyone from really understanding the true effectiveness of said advertising. The channels exist mostly to break up demographics. Somewhere in the chain, at any given time, someone's getting ripped off.

  • Except the actual monetization model of most of the cable industry is a house of cards.
    House of Cards isn't on cable :P.
  • Buy a Roku.
    Except the actual monetization model of most of the cable industry is a house of cards.
    House of Cards isn't on cable :P.
    Netflix origionals loves oral sex. I don't think cable can handle that.
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