how-to block ads
|
Comments on news posted 2007-04-19 10:54:53: FCC chief Kevin Martin pushed a little harder for "a la carte" cable pricing this week, going so far as to suggest that he would support legislation forcing cable operators to offer cable channels individually. ..
| |
 
ArgMeMatey
join:2001-08-09
Milwaukee, WI
 ·AT&T Midwest
| Big Media Monopolies say "Choice BAD for US!" Giving consumers more choices is bad for monopolies & duopolies. Forcing them to unbundle actually gives the consumer more information and power to choose. That is always bad for business, when they would otherwise have a captive audience.
Saying "We think prices will go up" and then making it happen is evidence of only one thing: market power. If that's what happens, more regulation is needed. Sorry, libertarians.
Unbundle! Let me and everyone else pay the true cost of whatever services I am using, plus a reasonable profit! I will pay you each month to maintain your pipe into my house, but let me choose to not accept some of the garbage you are shoveling into your pipe!
--
USNG:16TDN2870 Find your Lat-Long: Geocoder | |
| 
truedalife
join:2003-01-10
Brooklyn, MD
| A La Carte is wrong! It's so wrong. Ever scan the channels and find a new show, then become a loyal watcher of that program. Ever change the channel and find an old show that you haven't seen in years, then you find out that the channel your watching plays show like that every week.
So for one, grouping channels provide programming choices. Each channel fights to win you over as a viewer. CNN was born this way. We would have never been turned on to TBS, the Food Channel and The Hallmark channel if there was A La Carte. BET and TVone would have never been born. A La Carte CNN and it would have never been so popular. Diversity!
Yes, you will pay more for A La Carte. Here's why! When a cable provider negotiates a channel, they try to get the biggest discount for carrying that channel possible. The larger companies may use total subscribers reached, not possible subscribers that might pay for the channel. For example. The Disney channel (ABC/ESPN/Disney group) and it's sister companies were just renegotiated. It is a multi years deal estimated value at $1 Billion dollars.
The price of the Disney/ESPN deal is spread out to all the 25 million Comcast subscribers. It is said it cost $2.00 of your monthly bill ruffly for the group of channels. Based on the fact that Comcast had increased it's basic subscribers base by more than 70% since the last time the two companies sat down and agreed to the now expired re-trans rights; it used that growth as leverage to negotiate.
The subscriber base only gives a little power to the cable companies when negotiating, but it's enough. Now Disney is a package deal for that $1 billion dollars. Let's say one channel may cost 100 million to re-trans. That price won't change for a cable provider. The money hungry content providers are asking for more and more money for re-trans deals. Even though they have new sources of revenue every year being created (like IPTV, Mobile TV, FIOS, PS3, Xbox 360, AppleTV and many more to come) all wanting re-trans rights. The providers are asking for cash on delivery now, since the bankruptcies of smaller cable companies.
So if the channel cost $200 million and only half the subscribers want ESPN, it would cost subscribers around $5.00 for that single channel or more. I would rather pay the $2.00 rate and get more channels for my buck. When the multi channel cable services began, customers were paying $40.00 for 10 to 15 analog channels. Do the math people! You get more today as far as channels for your money then you do back in the day per channel.
Plus you get on most basic digital packages added services like on-demand, interactive TV guide and more. 30 commercial-free music stations. I remember what it was like when I was younger. There was only the 3 major stations. ABC, CBS, NBS in black and white. We wanted more. And now that we have more, we all of a sudden don't know what to do anymore in life. We can't raise our kids now because of MTV.
Don't blame your bad ass kids on the cable channels or on the cable company. It's you! You're a bad parent. Face it! All TV's have a V-Chip in them. Lock the channels in question out. All cable boxes have parental controls. Use them. The cable company will send a tech to help you set it up for free even. Or better yet. Stop letting your kid close his/her bedroom door and tune you out. Get off your ass a turn it off and unplug it if you have too. And go do something outside with your kid. But don't blame cable for your parenting mistakes.
I'm fine with all of my channels I get. I can't watch them all but thank God for my Comcast DVR. I record programs from almost every channel. When you folks complain there is nothing on TV, I turn to my DVR. And I can skip the commercials. I have over 60 programs on scheduled record. If you don't have a DVR, get you one. Or get a TIVO.
If the FCC wants to help fix my cable bill, they need to start with the content providers. Make a fair system for re-trans rights. And not this highway robbery BS that goes on now. Your bill is high because ESPN is popular. So they hold there re-trans rights until the highest price is meet, without making the cable company too mad. Sometimes the PR gets nasty, like the COX cable and ESPN feud.
The cable company is a business so of course they're going to pass the bill to the customer. I was always told most TV station make there money from the Ad's they sell. So why is the re-trans fee's increasing every year, if this money has nothing to do with the operation of a television station. It's a new source of revenue that the content providers are just starting to extort.
The biggest proof that the current retransmission system doesn't work, is the NFL Sunday ticket re-trans deal. DirecTV takes a loss every year on this package. I can't get it on cable or FIOS. The re-trans deal is unfair to consumers and loyal fans of football. The MLB re-trans deal is no better, but at least I have a choice of satellite, FIOS or cable to see it. The package for MLB is very expensive for most consumers. The re-trans deal for MLB was in the billions. Making the price of a season TV pass like going to the Ball Park for real.
When will it stop.
By the way, cable is the innovators and everything else is just coping from the daddy of it all. FIOS is using equipment built originally for the cable television industry. And most consumers don't even give a crap how there picture is delivered. It could pipe in from the toilet bowl. They just want it to work when there ready to watch. Who truly started this broadband race? Remember @Home? Verizon was still pushing dial-up. The Cable industry has provided innovations for years and will continue to do so in the future.
Verizon is on a live or die mission, at the stockholders expense. The stockholders should be outraged. Verizon has inflated the price of fiber with only a few plants in the world producing pure glass fiber cable. They could have ran fiber to the node cheaper than FTTH. VDSL equipment is cheaper. FIOS optical video terminals, and ONT's are expensive. And the install is hell if you have no Cat-5e cable in the walls.
Here is a few real reasons Verizon is redlining communities:
Low income communities wouldn't be willing to pay some of the expense cost of the install. Also the churn rate is higher, meaning FIOS equipment sitting in someones house turned off would be costly. High to Medium income customers are more likly to keep the service going. Verizon doesn't want costly truck rolls to recover all of the FIOS equipment either(the ONT, OVT, boxes and etc.).
Also a higher income customers would use on-demand more and add more premiums channels. These customers aren't just the average $99.95 subscribers, they don't want that customer. Your not going to settle for 15/1 speeds, your going to pay extra for 30/15 and HBO/SHO/STARZ and DVR with HD. Your now the $170-$150 dollar customer they want. A high profit margin to get back the stockholders money quicker. Some serving area's of FIOS will be lucky if the Video franchise included non exclusion rules. But these agreements have been only a hand full of area's.
Don't get me wrong! I am a smart dude. I know fiber would be the best transport system. But the cost are too high to venture with right now. The reason why the top 3 cable stock prices are doing well, is because they are using what they got, smartly.
DOCSIS 3.0 (100 Mbps Up/Dn), switched video (over a 100 HD channels waiting at the Edge QAM), node splits (reduces capacity lag issues), and more backup power systems (for that 99.99% up-time) are all cheap upgrades that allow cable to be competitive. Jim Kramer likes cables futures, and Wall street likes it too. Comcast triple play will pass by 100 million homes this year, before Verizon reaches just a mere 2 million. More homes for Comcast to pull in with there $99 dollar deal. Homes that Verizon chooses not to serve. Competition also brings lower prices too. Look at Virginia and Florida right now. A win win for consumers.
A La Carte would only work if the content providers change there re-trans fee's to match. They won't, so A La Carte will never happen. | |
| tmc8080
join:2004-04-24
Floral Park, NY
| bottom line The cable industry does NOT want the average consumer to KNOW how much a channel costs individually, otherwise certain channels would NOT remain viable. It's the buy the three bundle method small, medium, large (supersize) or buy NOTHING. So, there will come a day when consumers will download content, and buy NOTHING from the cable industry.. it will be their day of reckoning...
As the aggregate wholesale cost of bandwidth goes down (in price) thus increases the cable industry's peril..
In order to compromise, they will have to find some way of offering plans such as: pick 12, pick 25, pick 40-50 channels of your choice in addition to broadcast basic channels, because that's all the consumer watches anyway at the MOST depending on your time/taste. | |
| 
bumwolf
@direcpc.com | A La Carte Ala carte is already here if you have a fat bandwidth pipe Itunes and Joost. Just buy the programs you want. The Internet is going to kill cable it's coming. | |
|
erpster1
@mindspring.com
| re i actually have to pay more cus i hate those set top boxes and stick with 80 channel analog for my "cable ready tv". if i could i would delete 3/4 of the channels as they are programmed out of the tv anyways. all the news, sports and local programming would go away. no more oprah or springer, yay! | |
| | 
PGHammer
join:2003-06-09
Accokeek, MD
clubs:
 ·Comcast
| Re: re So you watch a hyperminimum of the channels you have available, and then fell into the *trap* of thinking that there are a lot more people out there like you. Judging from the successful (yes, I said exactly that) marketing of channel bundling (cable companies, telcos like AT&T and VZ, small and large-dish DBS programmers, etc.), *bundling works* (even in big-dish land, where ala carte exists, bundles are still the dominant sales method, not ala carte). Martin is well aware of that (especially in terms of big-dish) and therefore wants to kill bundling (leaving a la carte as the *only* way to select programming). The NCTA is (thankfully) resisting because of the increased headaches for them as both individual comnpanies (you think things are a mess now, think of having to police individual subscribers down to the individual-set level!) and as an industry (the additional confusion of consumers *will* backlash onto the industry, even though they are actually blameless, and the NCTA knows it). These so-called *family groups* are not just anti-cable (in fact, most of them started out as anti-CATV activists) but also anti-DBS (the smaller groups also campaigned against big-dish usage until shot down by an amendment to the Cable Act roadblocking anti-antenna covenants). | |
| | | UncleDirtNap
join:2006-08-26
Pittsburgh, PA
 ·Verizon FIOS
| Re: re Part of the campaign of confusion orchestrated by those opposed to ala carte pricing is to make people believe that it's one or the other, which it is not. Nothing proposed to date would prevent operators and content providers from offering bundles. If as you claim they work, which they don't but that's another argument, they can still be offered as one of many options, the difference would be they can't REQUIRE you to buy a bundle of products you don't want.
Yesterday I went to the grocery store to buy my kid a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal and a gallon of milk; while there Quaker Oats was offering one free box of their cereal if I bought any two of their others. A good deal since I knew I could use the products eventually. You know what Quaker Oats Company was not able to do though, REQUIRE me to buy one of each of their products to get the one I wanted. Nor was the dairy company able to make such a requirement or any other manufacturer of products available in the store.
In fact their is no other business model anywhere that operates on the assumptions that they are permitted to force bundling of products on consumers.
Don't let Viacom and TimeWarner deceive you with their lies: An ala carte requirement WILL NOT eliminate bundling. It will simply eliminate the highly unethical, anti-competitive practice of FORCED bundling. | |
|
No to ESPN
@rr.com
| ATT U-Whatever Ain't No Better I just got back from the International Festival in Houston Texas and walked into the ATT tent to hear their line about their TV over internet service. I asked if I could pick and choose and was repeatedly told about their 200 and 100 channel options. I then asked if I could get HDTV channels only and was told that HDTV was a $ 10 a month adder. Again I asked if I could pick and choose and was again told about their 200 channel option. I then said all I want is Discovery, The History Channel, CNN, E and something my wife wanted. Again the guy started talking about the 200 channel option and on demand services. I finally told him that I hope the FCC approves the ala carte plan and requires all the services to use it. I asked him why he kept pushing the 200 channel option that I did not want. I looked at him, asked if he could understand English, and then walked out. | |
| | | |
|
