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À la carte cable
So the FCC was supposed to make cable companies offer À la carte channel selection. And it seems the cable companies are now in agreement. They also want À la carte. But of course, there is some misunderstanding as to what that means exactly.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/29/some-cable-companies-are-pushing-for-unbundled-channels-but-n/
That, my friends, is what we call bullshit.
If cable offered TRUE Ã la carte channel selection, I might actually pay for it. That means I can choose my own channel lineup, one channel at a time. And it means I pay only for those channels at a reasonable price, and not for any other channels. If I only want three channels, then my cable bill should be like $1.50 a month and I should only get those three channels.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/29/some-cable-companies-are-pushing-for-unbundled-channels-but-n/
That, my friends, is what we call bullshit.
If cable offered TRUE Ã la carte channel selection, I might actually pay for it. That means I can choose my own channel lineup, one channel at a time. And it means I pay only for those channels at a reasonable price, and not for any other channels. If I only want three channels, then my cable bill should be like $1.50 a month and I should only get those three channels.
Comments
I have no interest in the outcome of this battle. It pits my enemies against themselves, with no possible beneficial outcome for me.
You can't force a to-the-home provider to carry a channel since those require contracts. So if they don't have a channel available to them, it's up to them whether or not they want to pay to get that service.
Your cable bill will never be just $1.50 a month. There's a certain amount of cost that you are going to shoulder just to get service itself, and it's going to be more than $1.50. It's something like paying for dry-loop dsl. Getting connection from the cable companies equipment to your homes equipment, they can charge you what they think is appropriate.
The initial package pricing might, for financial purposes, just be those costs and they "give" you the channels they want to come with it for free (and you can opt out of them, but it saves you nothing). That would still be "a la carte".
Similarly, they could manipulate the rules by selling you bundled channels in the format "buy any of these for $x, get these other channels with it free (if you want)." It's stupid, but it manages to allow customers to buy any particular offering piece by piece, and the cable company keeps their money.
If you really want to be able to control your selection, I think you're going to have to stick to "over the top" services (stuff you can get through the internet). It seems to me that we are going in that direction anyway, it's just a matter of time.
Let's pretend that regular cable pays Comedy Central $0.50 per subscriber. Netflix could offer to pay $0.75 per subscriber. Then Netflix could be like, hey add Comedy Central to your Netflix streaming account for $1 a month! If they do it for enough channels, cable is in big trouble.
Right now, it is still literally faster to torrent an entire season of a show than it is to sit though even one set of ads.
Why even pay for this extra infrastructure when you already pay for Internet access? The Internet is the pipe for everything: it's silly to pay for another pipe that's just television.
If I had my druthers:
Everything is on-demand, DRM free, direct download or streaming (perhaps with nominal re-streaming bandwidth charges if you watch it multiple times).
Pilots and the first one-to-two hours of content per show (so 1 to 5 episodes generally) are free. Similarly first games of every season of every sport are free, and the first round of playoffs.
You can buy into a show at a per-episode rate that might be a bit high, but this is the base rate.
You can subscribe to a show for nominally less, locking yourself into a contract for that season. Roughly half price.
You can also subscribe to a show collector's edition style, where you get the boxed set with special features and other merch.
And for everyone who is interested in it but not interested enough to invest any money directly, provide limited access at set intervals to a couple episodes at a time. This still theoretically helps push people towards buying the physical media, merch, and following seasons.
Archer I'd pay a dollar or two for an episode of, but don't have the option. My Little Pony I'd also pay a dollar or two for an episode, but the ones available to buy are bad quality. Not true. Torrents win on convenience, not price. If "legit" DRM-free downloads were easy to get and cheap, even if not free, I wouldn't bother with the torrents at all.
I would pay mid-single-digits a month for a channel that was old Cartoon Network Cartoon Cartoons, Toonami, and the old Adult Swim.
I think your views on how much TV "most people" watch are not accurate. Most people don't live like you. Hence the obesity problem.
Aside from a handful of maybe 14 channels and a couple dozen shows, most every other channel/show is of no interest to the majority of TV watchers. There are an amazing number of low-rent channels that I'd believe no one at all watches.
A la carte as a concept will fail because most everyone watches from the same subset of channels and shows, and the rest are of no value to most them. Everyone thinks they'll pay a tenth the price because they're only subscribing to a tenth of the channels. But that tenth is the vast majority of the demand. If everyone drops the same 300 useless channels, there's no incentive to drop their total cost by even a cent (as they were paying as much as they're paying now already and are losing nothing of value).
A la carte fails from a simple game theoretical test of the incentives and utility of the players.
People make shows and get money from channels even if nobody watches.
Channels get money from advertisers and cable operators and give some of it to the shows. Even if nobody watches.
Cable operators get the money from customers and advertisers and give it to channels. Even channels nobody watches.
If you cut out the middle-men shows can sell themselves directly to customers over the net, or even on DVD. Tthe money will go direct from viewers and advertisers to shows bypassing cable operators and channels. Shows that people actually watch will make a fuckton more money, as they well deserve. Customers will be happier paying less money overall, and only seeing and paying for shows they care about. Many thousands will be unemployed as the false economy is destroyed. Crummy shows, the channels that air them, and lots of people working for the cable operators, will be out of jobs and their revenues will tank.
Just another case of our entire economy being held up by a useless and inefficient mechanism of middle-men.