Posted on 01/03/2011 4:30:43 AM PST by jimbo123
So that's what happened to the station next to the Military Channel on my system.
Obviously, I never watched it, and started noticing OWN on the listings some time after Thanksgiving.
I’m just sorry she took over the Discovery Health channel. I’ll miss Dr. G. Wish they’d given her the “Green” channel, no one watches it anyway.
How can someone like Oprah be so successful in such a racist country?
1. Cable is a government protected monopoly, therefore they can set the rules.
2. The 'rules' consist of package pricing only, no ala carte pricing. So, if you want the Oprah channel and nothing else, you have to buy 15 MTV's, 25 ESPN's, a bunch of Discovery Channels, etc.
They can't even offer packages that makes sense. For instance, a 'just sports' package, or a 'just cartoons/kid shows' package, or a just news/weather package, for instance.
The 'basic' package gives you one of each category, while higher level packages consist of a lot more of all categories, never all of one category/interest.
Awww...poor people! Maybe Oprah steered you wrong on who to vote for president too...suckers! Oprah is the fattest tick on TV—figured that out yet?
great info on what a fraud that Oprah automobile giveaway was. The woman is shameless
You’re absolutely right. The cable companies have a monopoly on the towns they serve. I am stuck with Charter Communications for cable service and that’s it. I cannot believe this has not been broken up yet in this day and age.
Oprah’s always pushing this and pushing that, and when it goes badly, she denounces someone she formerly lauded, then she moves on to the next big project. Never mind the devastation she leaves in her wake. Obama was her big project a few years ago. Many women have lived by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of Oprah for a long time. (She’s been on TV so long that she now wears clothes that she would have ridiculed a few years ago. Wise up gals!)
Truthfully the package pricing rules come from the channels not the last mile cable providers. If a cable company wants to offer ESPN they have to put up with the fact that ESPN is a huge conglomerate in its own right that wants them to also carry ESPN2, Des Portes, Classic and News AND is also owned by Disney that’s pushing half a dozen of their own channels. This conglomerate gives a better deal to a cable company that takes everything and puts most of it in the basic package, that all in one deal charges the cable company based on their total number of customers. The cable company could offer a la carte but they’ll still have to pay Disney (and Discovery, and Viacom, and History) based on total customer count.
Until Disney (et al) is willing to be paid exclusively by channel and by the number of people actually wanting those channels the cable companies’ hands are tied. The 10 or 12 most popular channels, the ones that are why people get cable, want package deals, both between them and the cable companies and between the cable companies and us, and therefore there will be package deals.
Discovery replace Discovery Health with OWN, which they only have partial ownership of. They exchanged 100% interest in a failing network with 50% interest in a probably going to fail network.
The cable TV (as well as sattelite TV) industry is slowly going away, due to changes in technology. They are the next “long distance” companies.
Remember 1984? The govt. broke up Ma Bell. The result was a bunch of companies that were going to be long distance compaies (AT&T, MCI, Sprint). Where are the pure long distance companies now? They either changed products or died.
The future of “TV” is on the internet (Netflix, Hulu, channel sites, youtube, CollegeHumor,and so on), and (ironicly) free over the air TV (I have some 45 free over the air high-def channels available in my area right now).
Hulu set the model. On demand, and advertising driven. They make money withoug charging customers anything. Sony’s crackle.com is following the same model, and is the up and comming player (imho).
Oprah is getting in on the back end of a dying technology—cable TV. 25 years from now, the idea of pay cable TV will seem as strange as paying a phone company just to provide long distance service does today.
Comcast is today’s MCI. A company that had a great idea, ran with it as long as they could, then died when the technology changed and they didn’t change.
HoPra was the right person at the right time to exploit, profit greatly from, this societal neurosis and breakdown. She is a moron but smart enough to hire the right stooges to advise and work for her. One could say brilliant stooges
Discovery Health is no more. Oprah didn’t displace it, she did a wholesale takeover.>>>>>>>
IOW only women’s health “issues” will get in depth coverage now
Eventually, but not nearly as quickly as people think. Discovery’s revenue are climbing, 11% increase over last year up to just shy of 4 billion dollars a year. And of course they’ve positioned themselves well to profit from the internet too. 25 years from now is a long way away and there’s a lot of money to be made before then.
You’re absolutely right. The cable companies have a monopoly on the towns they serve. I am stuck with Charter Communications for cable service and that’s it. I cannot believe this has not been broken up yet in this day and age.
One dirty little secret is that the highest qualilty HD TV is over the air, not cable. The HD the cable sends out is compressed. Not nearly as good as the free over the air HD. Watch a football game in HD on cable, then flip to the same game on the local over the air channel. The difference in quality is pretty dramatic.
She saddled us with Obama-—I think she has overstepped her power in setting up this network. She better put on some shows people want to watch or it will go belly up in six months. She will try to use her new network to spread her socialist propaganda and end up another MSNBC. A new home for Juan Williams perhaps.
I have removed Channel 189 from my menu along with Current and Green Channels.
I’m thinking more like 5 years.
The number of people that subscibe to cable TV/satellite has already peaked. That number is already declining.
Internet ready TVs (which are just now hitting the market) will be the death knell for Cable TV. The technical barrier to dump cable has been too high for most people, but not anymore. As people discover how much is available over the internet they’ll be viewing cable less and less, and eventually ask the obvious: is it worth paying for cable anymore?
I’m thinking it will take about 5 years for internet ready TVs and boxes (like google’s) to get into enough of the market to cause cable providers serious losses.
Cable providers aren’t where the issues are coming from. It’s the cable channels that are dictating the terms of how channels are packaged for delivery to us.
And of course most folks with high speed internet are getting it from their cable companies. So in many ways the market won’t change that much even if it changes dramatically.
I think you are missing my point.
Cable compaines have three revenue streams: TV, phone, and internet. Two of those revenue streams are shrinking—TV and phone. Eventually (pretty quickly, imho) those will disappear, leaving companies like Comcast as pure internet providers (and much smaller compaines than they are today).
Satellite providers like Dish are up the creek.
That’s what expansion is all about. Not that long ago none of the cable companies were in phone or internet. Now as things transition to the internet they’ve got the prime position on that. And as the internet becomes a larger focus they’ll be able to charge more. And they’ll still be in a position to “organize” the internet, providing an easy interface for all those various video streams. Plus the DVR part of the business. And of course they’re already providing a stream of their own (Cox has MyPrimetime, others have their own version).
In many ways cable companies are hoping for this change. It frees them from the odious deals Disney and Discovery are currently forcing on them. If they no longer have the “old style” cable product to charge people for then they also no longer have the “old style” cable product to be charged for. You don’t think Time Warner would love to be able to be the “last mile” for people getting ESPN without having to pay 20 dollars per subscriber AND pay for Disney Jr? Their revenue might drop some but their costs will drop more.
Given the kinds of contracts that Disney and Discovery and Viacom and pushing on them I bet most cable companies are actually losing money on the cable portion of the business. That’s a big part of why they expanded to phone and internet in the first place, those contracts were getting ugly in the mid 90s. Back then they were just looking for a way to make money that wasn’t beholden to the cable networks that were consolidating and gaining negotiating power. Now there’s the potential for them to never have to those channels again.
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