dslreports logo
 story category
A La Carte D-Day Comes for Stubborn Cable Industry
“I’m not saying the jig — er, business model — is up, but if your platform, your programming and your audience are all under attack, the degree of difficulty in selling big packages of entertainment over cable is increasing," writes David Carr in the New York Times, noting that the cable TV practice of forcing customers to buy bundles of channels simply isn't sustainable. "Ultimately, it isn’t any one thing that will pull apart what has been a durable generator of profits; instead it will be the accretion of options and the changing habits of consumers who want to choose their programming according to their tastes, rather than having it pushed at them in bulk by a cable company."

Most recommended from 80 comments


elefante72
join:2010-12-03
East Amherst, NY

4 recommendations

elefante72

Member

Take some parallels to the music industry

Look at the music industry. When I was a kid the only way to get music (legally) was to buy the entire album, and that album cost pretty much the same regardless of the quality of the music (which is personal), but there was some real s**t out there. Just like cable today, and there is LOTS of sh**t.

Someone got smart when CDs came out because people started ripping them. They then took the $14 CD (yes back in the 80's which would be over $20 today), and then made a mini CD (with the one good song and two shi**y songs) and sold that for $9.99.

Eventually Apple came along and destroyed the album (well music did that because albums today have no cohesion--just like cable), and then was born the .99 track. The album was gone.

Profits went down (as they should) and the shi**y material doesn't get any revenue. HOWEVER the platform for any said artist to emerge has exploded. Essentially the curator (middle man) died, and now the choice in music is amazing, and cheap. The middle man went off and still survives and brings even more middle of the road crap for the masses, and also went out and started buying venues and jacking up live performances. The new money maker for artists....

Long story short, the same will happen to cable and this is all possible because of broadband, PERIOD.

Since cable is not creative, they will follow the same path. Break it up slowly--put the headliner show in there and a few crappy ones to pad the bottom line, and then voila you get what you pay for. Programming quality will go up immediately and the choices will be amazing. And actors will get paid a reasonable wage again, and the curators will be sucking wind. They will start buying up venues (Comcast, Disney, etc.)

The ones who suffered were the artists. They fat middle man was sitting back smoking cigars and making all the profit. They say they were taking the risk, which is BS because they OWNED and monopolized the distribution channel so their risk was limited and known--hardly worth the lions share of the profits they were keeping for themselves.... Now today the artists can sell directly and reap the benefits of their creation, the way it should be...