[Rumor]

I was looking at this and it once again made me realize that I pay for a ton of channels that I do not watch. Many channels that are included in my specific line up are never watched, not by anyone in my house. Yet, we still pay for them, and the bill isn't cheap.

As a consumer, is there anything we can do to convince the cable/satellite companies that we would much rather pay for channels we are actually interested in?

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Convince the distributers to let them.

[macaddict0001]

Wouldn't they just charge more per channel in that case?

[olePigeon]

An act of God.

[Rumor]

Originally Posted by BLAZE_MkIV 

Convince the distributers to let them.

So the companies that provide content is to blame? It isn't one giant company, so I find that a tad hard to believe (not saying it isn't).

Originally Posted by macaddict0001 

Wouldn't they just charge more per channel in that case?

Most likely. However, I would gladly pay $20 for 15 channels that I like versus the $70 or so for channels that I never watch.

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

An act of God.

Sadly, this is probably the truth.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Ex: In order to get ESPN you have to cary their other channels. Advertising dollars are inconsistent, a cut of the subscription money isn't.

[mduell]

The content owners have the leverage over the cable companies to bundle the channels.
Want ESPN? You've got to carry ABC Family, our minority channel, and our womens channel too.

Even if you did get them unbundled, the pricing wouldn't be flat. Instead of paying $40 for 300 channels you'd pay $39 for 20 because while you have access to all 300, you're only watching 20 anyway and you've established $40 as a fair price for channels you care about.

[milhous]

EXCELLENT find.

Gotta love subsidizing crap programming just like ineffective government programs.

I wouldn't mind the cable providers continuing to add channels that underperform and nobody watches. That would get consumers to actually consider canceling their service. Once that starts to happen in scale, it's only then that they would consider a la carte programming to partly recover lost revenue.

I haven't had cable for years for this reason, and I also don't watch enough TV to justify its cost. Hulu and Netflix is more than sufficient.

IPTV could be the answer if content creators distributed direct to viewers. Otherwise the service model would be similar to traditional cable service.

But if we had a la carte programming now, I'd probably get all the arts/music/nature/science programming in HD available, maybe HBO/movie channels, and some public affairs stuff like C-SPAN.

That's about it.

[SSharon]

The first channel I actually watch sometimes is 24th down on the list. I am considering not buying TV service for my new apartment and getting a netflix subscription instead.

[SpaceMonkey]

I've seen some persuasive arguments that make me question whether an "à la carte" system would actually save customers any money. Here's a a 2007 article for example:

For backers of à la carte, their big moment came in 2004, when Michael K. Powell, a champion of deregulation, was still F.C.C. chairman. Asked by Congress to look into the feasibility of à la carte pricing Mr. Powell had the F.C.C.’s economists work up a study. To the surprise of many — including, I’m told, Mr. Powell himself — the study concluded that à la carte would have the exact opposite effect from what its backers claimed. Instead of reducing prices, à la carte would cause cable bills to rise for most people. And it would cause many channels to go out of business. Mr. Powell turned the study over the Congress, and that was that.

Except it wasn’t. Soon afterward, Mr. Martin was named chairman of the commission — and one of his first acts was to “redo” the F.C.C. study. Sure enough, the new study attacked the old one, and claimed that à la carte would, indeed, be good for consumers. That, in turn, led to a flurry of condemnations and yet more studies that picked apart Mr. Martin’s study. The F.C.C. chairman was accused of doctoring the numbers to get the result he wanted. The study fiasco so hurt Mr. Martin’s credibility that when an à la carte bill came up in the Senate Commerce Committee last year — a bill Mr. Martin backed — it lost 20-to-2.

But wait: how can it be that à la carte will cause cable prices to rise? If you are subscribing to far fewer channels, doesn’t it therefore follow that your bill will be lower? Strange as this may seem, the answer for most people is no.

True, if you decide to take only one or two channels, à la carte pricing will save you money. But how many people are going to limit themselves to one or two channels? In fact, even if you pick as few as a dozen channels, à la carte will almost surely cost more than your current “exorbitant” cable bill.

The reason is that unmoored from the cable bundle, individual networks would have to charge vastly more money per subscriber. Under the current system, in which cable companies like Comcast pay the networks for carriage — and then pass on the cost to their customers — networks get to charge on the basis of everyone who subscribes to cable television, whether they watch the network or not. The system has the effect of generating more money than a network “deserves” based purely on viewership. Networks also get to charge more for advertising than they would if they were not part of the bundle.

Take, for instance, ESPN, which charges the highest amount of any cable network: $3 per subscriber per month. (I’m borrowing this example from a recent research note by Craig Moffett, the Sanford C. Bernstein cable analyst.) Suppose in an à la carte world, 25 percent of the nation’s cable subscribers take ESPN. If that were the case, the network would have to charge each subscriber not $3, but $12 a month to keep its revenue the same. (And don’t forget: with its $1.1 billion annual bill to the National Football League alone, ESPN is hardly in a position to tolerate declining revenues.)

And that’s one of the most popular channels on cable. What percentage of cable subscribers would take Discovery, or the Food Network, or Oxygen, or Hallmark — or the many, many more obscure networks that you can now find up and down your cable box? Five percent? Ten percent? According to Mr. Moffett’s analysis, if every African- American family in the country subscribed to the Black Entertainment Network, it would still have to raise its fees by 588 percent. He adds, “If just half opted in — still a wildly optimistic scenario — the price would rise by 1,200 percent.”

And that’s just the effect on fees. Networks would have to charge less for advertising because they would lose the casual viewer — a k a the channel flipper. Marketing budgets, on the other hand, would skyrocket, because the channels would have to pay huge sums to persuade people to subscribe. “Identifying everybody who likes the Food Network and getting them to pay for it is hard to do,” says Christopher Yoo, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied cable bundling. One of the nice things about the current system is that once a station gets on extended basic, it can be discovered by viewers — and that wouldn’t happen in an à la carte world.

[Laminar]

According to Mr. Moffett’s analysis, if every African- American family in the country subscribed to the Black Entertainment Network, it would still have to raise its fees by 588 percent. He adds, “If just half opted in — still a wildly optimistic scenario — the price would rise by 1,200 percent.”

How dare they suggest I don't want to watch reruns of Steve Harvey TV specials! And Soul Train.

[The Final Dakar]

Why do we continue to support television when it so obviously runs on socialism?

[cjrivera]

[Laminar]

[BLAZE_MkIV]

They couldn't raise the prices per channel 600%. A. No one would subscribe to it at that price. B. Someone else would come up with a channel that offers the same content at a lower price. Thats how capitalism works.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by BLAZE_MkIV 

They couldn't raise the prices per channel 600%. A. No one would subscribe to it at that price. B. Someone else would come up with a channel that offers the same content at a lower price. Thats how capitalism works.

Yes, obviously BET would not be able to sustain itself in that scenario. I think that was the point. If someone wants à la carte pricing because the only thing they care about is BET, or ESPN, or whatever, they may in fact be SOL if cable pricing were unbundled.

[The Final Dakar]

Niche channels would die. It's that simple. There's a reason TechTV doesnt exist anymore. They couldn't deliver the same content cheaper.

[Laminar]

I'd subscribe to all of the Home Shopping and religious channels.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by Laminar 

I'd subscribe to all of the Home Shopping and religious channels.

Who are you, Jawbone?

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey 

Who are you, Jawbone?

Do they sell video game systems on the HSN?

[The Final Dakar]

All the Wii bundles you flail your arm uselessly at.

[ort888]

The entire TV industry is about to change anyway. A mere 10 years from now I bet we'll be downloading/streaming everything.

[macaddict0001]

Yeah, on demand is the wave of the future.

[Trygve]

When I lived in the US, I asked about getting BBC World and Al Jazeera... the cable company had never heard of either one. So for more than 5 years, I simply didn't have TV... no loss as far as I am concerned.

[nonhuman]

Originally Posted by Trygve 

When I lived in the US, I asked about getting BBC World and Al Jazeera... the cable company had never heard of either one. So for more than 5 years, I simply didn't have TV... no loss as far as I am concerned.

I actually get Al Jazeera with nothing but rabbit ears in DC...

[Phileas]

We cut cable over a year ago and haven't missed it once. Almost everything we watch is either available streamed, or we get it over the air with an antenna. Here in downtown Toronto we get over a dozen HD channels for free that way.

Cable can go and die, as far as I am concerned.

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by Phileas 

We cut cable over a year ago and haven't missed it once. Almost everything we watch is either available streamed, or we get it over the air with an antenna. Here in downtown Toronto we get over a dozen HD channels for free that way.

Cable can go and die, as far as I am concerned.

Ditto. We get internet through the cable company and they accidentally left the cable service on even though we're not paying for it. I think we've watched it twice in a year.

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by mduell 

The content owners have the leverage over the cable companies to bundle the channels.
Want ESPN? You've got to carry ABC Family, our minority channel, and our womens channel too.

So, basically, it's the same model used by the music labels? Use one good song to sell an album full of crappy ones?

[BLAZE_MkIV]

And then they act surprised and offended when their customers are angry.
If the channel can't pull its own weight in the market place it's a waste of resources. You don't need BET there's plenty of airtime one the other channels filled with reruns. Yesterday I was watching The A-Team on Retro TV for background noise because there wasn't anything better on. At 8pm, thats primetime.