Posted on 08/12/2013 6:47:57 PM PDT by upbeat5
With streaming television becoming more and more popular, and providers like Aereo making an end-run around cable and satellite providers, a lot of attention is being paid to the future of bundled cable. In a world of growing choices and a weak, jobless economy, how long can something last that charges customers a ton of money for dozens of channels they never watch? Bundled cable is, in my opinion, one of the greatest hustles ever perpetuated against the American people. The worst part is how it works as a kind of affirmative-action program for left-wing programming that likely wouldn’t survive in a world where we weren't forced to pay for channels we never watch. Chief among them, CNN, and MSNBC. As this discussion heats up, analysts and experts are fessing up that in a world without bundled cable, only 20 television networks would survive (that means that around 80 would not). Presumably, the survivors would be the twenty most-watched channels throughout the cable world. This would be terrible news for CNN, MSNBC, and HLN -- networks that usually rank in the thirties and forties. Fox News is usually in the top 5.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
haha
Go buy a Roku player. You can watch most of Fox news, Fox business, etc.
And get an antenna and you can get over the air local channels. $150 one time vs 100+ a month.
That of course assumes you already have an internet provider.
Most could disappear and I wouldn’t notice anymore. Use the computer to watch most stuff now. Just got back from a week on our boat, no cable, and never actually turned the tv channels on. Have a computer hookup that feeds into the tv........much better and it’s free.
Love it! Buh-bye...
Well they are but they are talking about internet connections and phone service also. I think that figure is too high.:)((((Hugs))))
Exactly.
Believe it or not, I haven’t seen Dawn of the Dead and it’s available on Youtube for free. Even Armaggedon, Black Hawk Down etc are on there. I even learned stuff about my F150 and MB on YT, and fixing common problems with the truck.
I’ll say it again, it will never happen because the ESPN “tax” you pay every month is what makes hundred-million-dollar salaries and multi-billion-dollar broadcast deals possible, and they won’t give that up.
She’s an excellent reporter.
On principle I don’t want to support liberal content on cable. It’s insulting to force that garbage on the culture - on my dime. No more bundling - they can offer any 10, 20, or 30 channels for a set price...
Liberals would NEVER support 80 channels of conservative propaganda in order to watch 5 channels they like... why should we?
Of Course she is.
Amen, in So Cal with Verizon Im paying for 15 or more Spanish / Chinese channels. Best thing that could ever happen is A La Cart
except there are not any conservative channels
That needs to be fixed
It wouldn’t be so bad if the channel from Taiwan had subtitles in English, but the commie CCTV4 needs to go
Liberals have dominated movies, music and all sorts of entertainment for years. I don’t let politics dictate what I watch or buy.
Um... Good. I don’t subscribe to cable now because most of the channels, like MTV and MSNBC, suck and i really don’t want to pay for them.
Discovery, History, ScyFy, Outdoor, FoxNews, Espn, a few for the kids...
If it were ala cart.... I could probably justify it. As it is, they apparently don’t need my money that badly...
Bundles and packages are sold all the time and are generally less expensive than buying a la carte.
How about “Build your own bundle?” The cable provider give you a list of channels categorized as 1, 2 or 3 “stars.” Top Movie channels might be 3 stars while history or discovery might be 2 each. You subscribe to a number of stars (i.e. 12, 15, 18, 20 etc). You “spend” stars to build your bundle. Once you set it up, it would be the same as the current system. You pay your monthly bill and there’s probably a fee you have to pay if you add, drop or change your choices.
I wonder which channels would be left hanging...
I wonder which would be
Fox Sports Channel debuts this Saturday...dump like the leftist, race-baiting scum at ESPN.
Funny.... I seldom start any project without checking youtube and other internet sources. I sure could have used these tools when I was young.
Yep. And that of course will spur growth. Just like goverment spending and raising the minimum wage.
I wonder which would be
I wonder which would be most popular.
For instance, certain venues were willing to pay YOU, the provider, to carry their channel(s) which would allow you to defray operating costs and offer lower prices to your potential customers. Religious programming and home-shopping being the most recognizeable of the options. Then the problems began.
First, locales began demanding a certain percentage of your channels be dedicated for "community" programs in order to get your permits to operate. Community college, local government, and public access channels were demanded along with local taxes. Not to mention utility-pole space rental fees and local transmission licensing requirements had to be met, which could vary substantially from city to city.
Plus power wiring had to be professionally installed by the official power company at standard union rates, and access fees as necessary if you wanted to maintain your equipment, all at the normal professional equipment rates. This along with regular equipment maintenance costs, maintenance technician pay that had to be met along with repair and replacement of faulty or damaged equipment, which sometimes meant bullet-holed writeoffs from time to time and the costs just kept on rising.
Then you get contacted by other agencies that want to have their stations provided at a small cost, such as the local abc-cbs-nbc-pbs affiliates that people would of course want. Too, there are indeed some people who like to watch The Golf Channel, Professional Bowling, The All Racing Channel, and Home and Garden options.
Then the minority people demanded equal time with the mainstream channels for equal opportunity viewing -and you were OF COURSE employing an equal ratio of minorities across all levels of your company, weren't you? Hate to have to picket your offices or your service vans as they go about their business if you were not. Black Media, Caza Mexicana, Spanish Soap Programs, Filipino Nation... you get the idea.
Then the Religious Equality Knowitalls butted in. First, Roman Catholic USA (I am changeing the names, of course). That was not so bad. Then Protestants Today, Lutheran Nation, Presbyterian Ministries of America, The Portugese Dioces of the World, Manila Christians Speak, Jewish Free Synagogues... it kept on growing.
THEN the real Pains-In-The-Rumps started demanding access as well. I started getting mesages that BET (they claimed) was starting to ask why we were discriminating against them by not contacting them and offering some channel space. It might have just been the local Black Power faction instead that had been stirring up so much trouble locally in recent years, but since they already had representatives in the City Council and SJPD (not their real initials) and positions in all the local unions, this was turning into a real headache. Then the Somos Raza officials started demanding lots of space (again, not their real title) and the Irish Irregulars were looking to branch out into a local channel so their message could be heard.
Finally, the New Black Muslims wanted channels, a group that started in the local and state prisons by black Muslim Converts, and wanted to have access so they could let the world know how the racist white slaveholder nation was still putting down the impoverished black man and they had proof and Islam was the only true religion... you get the idea. Of course back then I had no idea what a problem the muslims would turn out to be, September 11 being roughly a decade away. All I (we) knew was that this was becoming a major headache, so even though we had some bleeding-edge equipment that companies like HBO and Showtime could ditch their microwave antennas for quite easily... the decision was made to just drop it.
Everybody lost.
I kicked DirecTV out of my house last August when they upped my bill from $75 to $99/mo. Haven't looked back. I have a small, over-the-air antenna on top of my gazebo behind the house and receive over 40 over-the-air channels (of which perhaps 6 are "watchable" meaning they're not some foreign language, lifestyle or "shopping" channel crap.)
For movies I have Netflix and Hulu, when I want to watch something newer that's not on either of those, I use Vudu.
I'm never going back to cable/satellite. They can KMA.
Haven’t had any subscription TV for 5 years. We use Netflix (DVD and streaming), Hulu Free (on line) and YouTube(online). Internet is our main news source and Netflix provides clips from our local news channel (very boring).
There are 4 gay channels? Seriously?
I like that myself but I suspect cable companies would use it as an excuse to jack up the prices. Long tail content over the internet seems to be the future. Find what you want and watch when you want via portals like netflix that offer huge assortments of content for a fixed price ... or pay per watch. Pricing is not a la carte per se but the experience is sort of like a la carte in that I watch what I want whenever I want.
Roku already carries a ton of Christian channels. I don’t think they’d have any problem w/conservatives.
good.
Now someone should start one.
Why can’t they do a la carte plus PPV for anything not on your favorites list?
I pay for 200 channels because it’s the only way to get the 15 or 20 I ever actually watch.
We pay extra on our phone bills for rural access and 0bamaphones. We pay a lot.
Who among us thinks they won’t come up with a TV/internet charge with a fancy name for paying for universal cable access for the “disadvantaged?” That keeps all those loser channels on?
I hope it happens but I’m betting CNN is not getting axed.
Death to all misplaced apostrophes!!
Usually, if you stop paying them they’re more than happy to cut it for you....
What is cable? Is that the TV thing that was big in the 80’s and 90’s and is now obsolete?
We have Roku, too. The only thing I miss is sports. I have MLB, but I’m going to miss a lot of college football this year. :-(
Al Jazeera is the only live streaming news we get on Roku, and we have been surprised at how good it is. It is much more honest than any of our networks, and covers world news so much better.
Today when reporting on the Palestinian prisoners about to be released, they told the side of those Israelis who had relatives killed by these men and their protest over the prisoner release. They have great coverage of what is going on in Syria and Eqypt, too.
So far the main bias we have spotted is their anti-fracking and anti-pipeline stories. Of course, the oil producers in the Middle East are scared that the US will no longer need them.
Agreed, I even find myself going to RT.com......yes there is the bias there, but they also report on things nobody here will report on.
I recall some attempts back in the 1990s. They sucked. Boring. The same crew of conservative pundits as talking heads.
The Blaze is on Roku and also, I think, on one of the sat nets. Their news group is not bad, but I unsubscribed because 1) my DSL cannot handle their HD broadcast and 2) I noticed that I just wasn’t watching regularly. After years of not being slaved to some programming schedule, I got out of the habit of living my life around show times. Never got a DVR. My schedule is erratic due to work requirements and I would likely be recording a ton of shows I never got around to watching. My Netflix queue alone is over 300+ long.
Not sure I would regularly watch anything anymore. I get news online and I obviously make time for FR.
My reading has similarly changed. I used to make a bookstore run every 4-6 weeks and I would spend a lot of time and money. Then, along came Amazon and I discovered the 4-for-3 paperbacks. Great if you are patient and can wait until a new book goes on sale. But those prices kept rising, too, and I am a fast reader. Now, I finally have a Kindle. I can wait until my Wish List picks are marked down and I can download free novels daily, if I want to. I am more of an addict than an elitist, so I like sampling indie writers, especially for free.
OTOH, I just spent $15 (w/shipping) for 2 DVDs for my dog! But, since I don’t have satellite TV and roughly 1/2 my recreational reading is free, I felt I could splurge!
Can you suggest any sites?
Call and cancel your service. They’ll offer you a $20 monthly rebate if you change your mind while on the phone with them and stay a subscriber.
Comcast is one big monopoly with every politician in their pocket.
Is this chart what Cable pays? Or what we would pay?
Oh, please God, let it be So!
I live in So Cal and am forced to pay for Asian-language, Spanish-language, Armenian-language channels that I will not now or ever watch.
I’d like to jettison BET, Univision and any other ethnic- or language-other-than-English based channels.
Menu only!!
this chart is how much channels got per subscriber per month in 2009
We get Al-Jazera for free (via air) in the DC area - go figure
“Private channel”... so if I was the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups we could all produce programs for a “private channel” and put it on ROKU? Would they be able to charge a few for monthly access to their “family”?
Bundling is, was and always will be a scam. Yes bundling makes it cheaper per channel, but given 90% of the channels you get are things you will never watch its a joke.
They say ala carte is too expensive, I say bull. I was just in jamaica where they have Ala Carte, I believe it was 10 or 20 channels and you get to pick them for like $20 a month or something like that. $20 to get a couple of handfuls of channels you’ll actually watch, or $100 a month for hundreds of channels you’ll never turn on.
All bundling does is subsidize channels, for example, nearly everywhere I have lived BET is on BASIC cable, yet well over 95% of all cable subscribers NEVER watch it. (Affirmative Action bundling)
Do you think any cable operator would carry ESPN 2, 3 or U? Nope, Disney forces them to take them if they want ESPN 1, well since they have to take them anyway, we’ll bundle them and pass off the cost of them to users who don’t want them either.
Its a scam, always has been always will be. There are a multitude of cable channels who could not exist if they had to stand on their own merits, but since they are packaged they stick around and make cable more expensive for everyone.
Not to mention, I have ZERO desire to subsidize Oprah for her network, or the LOGO network, or LIfetime, or MSNBC etc etc etc.. so why the hell are these channels getting money from me? Without bundling most of these channels would be defunct in under a year.
Sorry, Bunk.
If a Jamaican who on average has a household income of less than $1000 a month can pick 20 channels for $20 ala carte, don’t tell me that Americans have to take a bundle of crap and its cheaper.
NONSENSE.
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