Kyle McSlarrow is the head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. He sees the FCC’s attempts at legislating the cable industry as hurtful to consumers, particularly the idea of offering us a la carte pricing which would basically allow you and me to subscribe only to the cable channels we actually watched. He says it would "fundamentally wreck business models and hurt customers."
The two basic sides of the argument are as follows; The FCC thinks that people shouldn’t be required to subscribe to ESPN2 just to get ESPN. The cable industry says that bundling ESPN2 with ESPN results in more viewers for ESPN2, which results in more ad revenue for ESPN2 and if people only subscribed to ESPN, it would cost more in order to offset the loss of ad revenue for ESPN2.
To those of you cable subscribers out there, what do you think of the idea of a la carte cable? I’m interested to hear your opinions. I’m leaning towards a la carte because I only watch a handful of channels regularly but I have a major fear that big cable would use it as another excuse to raise rates so high that subscribing to just 15 channels would cost more than the 200-some unwatched channels I have access to now.
Head of Cable Lobby Condemns FCC Report [Washington Post]
I would be ok with a la carte as long as it was cheaper that way. I watch maybe 15 channels everyday – and have many that never see the light of day on my set (the outdoor and speed channels come to mind) – a la carte would be great if there was a good selection and lower prices – if it was around the same price as the whole package I would probably keep what I have now.
I like the theory of a la carte cable. But, I know in practice, the cable companies would just use it as a technique to screw us even more than they already do.
Man, I wish I could get my neighbor to shop down their tree. Damn line-of-sight.
A la carte seems like it would be nice, but I’m pretty sure I will just get 25 channels for about the price of the hundreds I currently get. Why doesn’t DirecTV take any hits for this, too? They package channels pretty much the same way cable does, for pretty much the same prices.
A LA CARTE FTW. If a la carte pricing actually happened, I would hope the “business model” would change so that the one company not trying to royally screw everyone by raising the prices would get the customers.
I currently DON’T have cable TV anymore because of this packaging nonsense.
I would love to have A La Carte channel selection, but I have no doubt if cable companies are forced to offer it that it will be at our expense.
Unfortunately, it really doesn’t matter what happens; we’ll either have to pay too much for 200 crappy channels, or pay too much for 20 decent ones, and I have a feeling it’ll cost the same no matter what. Worse still, if a la carte pricing is mandated, we’ll all probably end up paying more for it anyway, in the way of “restructuring fees” or “downgrade charges” or something like that, just like the way we’re paying a monthly fee for the “free” telephone number portability act.
Whether it’s regulation or deregulation, nothing good ever comes from it. Just look at telephone deregulation, and electricity deregulation; has the consumer benefited, or has big business benefited? Are we paying less, or paying more? Are we getting more for our money, or less? Has service improved or worsened? Has it resulted in more competition between more small companies, or more collaboration among a few giant companies?
Cable companies are regional monopolies, with sub par service, slow technological upgrades, and little to no incentive to change. And I hope they stay that way! The longer they stand still & resist change, the greater the opportunity & motivation for us to continue improving P2P & torrent technology…
I must admit I am on the fence with this issue. On the one hand I don’t like paying for a bunch of channels that I never watch. On the other, if it weren’t for bundling some of the channels I do watch regulasrly would probably not be available to me or be to expensive for me to subscribe to.
I find it amazing that the cable companies keep raising prices as they get larger an larger audience. Only about 30 years ago probably only 1 in 100 households had cable. Today it is probably the opposite 1 in 100 don’t have cable (or satelite). And yet cable cost about 5 times what it did back then. Part of the problem is the cable company is a local monopoly with its only competition being satelite. If I want cable I have one and only one choice.
I think a compromise solution would be to make the cable companies provide an ala carte selection of bundles. Bundle all similar content type together (i.e. all sports channels, all movie channels, all history channels, all music channels (like MTV), etc.) Then allow us to choose which bundles we want. The other thing is why do we have to buy three levels of service upgrades before we can purchase a premium channel? I should be able to purchase a premium channel with out purchasing any other package or service level. I shouldn’t even have to buy Basic cable service to get a premium channel.