Time Warner Joins Rate Hike Festivities → Not competitive?

Nonsense.

Most households have a choice of 3 or 4 pay-tv options.

Its the content.

Perhaps they do in SoCal but not most of the rest of the country.

I agree Charter was basically going to raise my internet price by 50% in one bill, and I don't even use that much bandwidth....If they don't have other options soon I will be leaving them and getting basic ATT DSL at 30$/mo. I will NOT pay for speeds I won't use and don't want.

Where is it in this country, that a Time Warner Cable customer not have access to the two major satellite vendors, and possibly, TelcoTV?

I'm wishing TW has the guts to put ESPN in a special Sports Tier.

If you rent the apartment or house you can't just put up a satellite dish or even outside antenna without permission and sometimes paying a deposit to put the dish or antenna up.

Hogwash. I have at least 4 here in small town America, where cable internet doesn't even reach(without the help of my 2.5 mile wireless backhaul link to a modem I have hosted across the lake I created to get Time Warner Cable internet back and ditch dreadful Verizon DSL, the whole town's only option). It's called crappy analog cable from Charter(all they offer here, no HSI or phone) or Satellite provider A, B, and C(maybe more). The Satellite providers compete with cable nationwide and with each other. Now, if you said there was no competition on affordable fixed-line broadband, I would agree with you. My town, only served by Verizon with 6 week service calls, a slow, lossy connection that goes down more than a $2 whore, and numerous billing errors that get referred to outsourced tech support, is a shining example of this(Why I spent a few grand on equipment to backhaul a TWC connection, which is serving me very well).

It must be magical to be inside your head where economies are always perfectly competitive and cable MSOs never do anything wrong. Truly, the Kool-Aid you drink is a heady brew, indeed.

Many place. You easily ignore line of sight issue with Satellite. Up till last year when UVerse finally got to my area, most people on my area had ONE choice for TV... Charter because most did not have line of sight for either satellite provider and there wasn't anything else.

Wrong.

Anywhere in the country, you can ask permission to place a satellite dish in an apartment or condo, and you don't have to ask, if you have your own private space, i.e. a balcony.

No balcony in my apartment, and my landlord doesn't let me put a dish on the roof or outside wall.

Nope. Economies are never perfectly competitive, but even duopoly competition is usually better than government regulation.

MSOs have done plenty wrong, but they've done more right in the past ten years, and they deserve credit for it.

If you're upset about your pay-tv bill, that's the result of content costs, not cable profit margins; if you want to lobby for anti-trust action against content bundling, go ahead, its worth a try.

Indeed, we too live in that same boat, void of satellite rights and TelcoTV options.

But that doesn't prove a lack of competition - our neighbors on all sides have access to four flavors of pay-tv.

If that was important to us, we would move, as we have in the past when utilities failed us. If your landlord isn't flexible enough, and you so desire satellite over cable, you might consider the same.

Your cable company is still competing with satellite, even if you can't obtain it - they aren't yet sophisticated enough (yet) to determine that or use it against you.

While that's true when it comes to TV, I don't consider the major satellite vendors or my local telco competitive at all when it comes to Internet service. So unfortunately my family is pretty much stuck with TWC for Internet service at the very least which is around $60/mo as a standalone service.

That would be great if all providers did that, but it won't happen because then they'll no longer be able to easily hide behind ESPN as an excuse for raising rates. I think it would be nice if the price of channels were itemized on everyone's bill so they could see just how much certain channels are contributing to their overall bill.

Yes, you can, so long as you have a private area, such as balcony, in which to place it.