said by travelguy:said by k1ll3rdr4g0n:To simply say that if cable companies went to pay per channel pricing that they wouldn't make enough money is a fallacy.
Lets say that if a customer wanted the scifi channel, and they pay lets say $5/month. Fine, the cable company wouldn't be able to make a profit on that because the cost of sending out a tech to hook it up with the fear that he may disconnect at any moment.
HOWEVER, you are missing the bigger picture.
Shall we step back to reality for a moment? I just went over to the Comcast investor relations web sit and pulled the following details out of their 2009 annual report:Total Analog & Digital Video Subscribers was just shy of 42M, which is a 1M increase over the 2008 number. Their revenue went up almost 4% as well, so subscribers are not trading down to cheaper packages.
So this idea that Comcast and the other cable companies are bleeding subscribers is not supported by reality.
I didn't take the time to compute the actual ARPU numbers, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it takes more than 16 $5/month subscribers to replace one $80/month subscriber. Given that pretty much everyone who wants cable has cable, there isn't a huge pool of starving students sitting around waiting for $5 pricing.
Are you saying this story is false then?
