Here's how things currently work:
- Broadcaster sets rates.
- Cable company negotiates and eventually settles (with or without blackouts).
- Cable company bundles these rates with other rates from other channels and passes it on to the consumer.
- Cable company gets the backlash from the consumer as a result of rate hikes.
So as you can likely tell, broadcasters have too much power, because cable companies will ultimately be blamed either for blackouts (failed negotiations) OR for rate hikes. So it puts them in a lose/lose situation.
Instead what cable should be doing is:
- Unbundle channels entirely.
- Pass on rate increases to the consumer for that specific channel.
- Itemise how much of what you pay goes to the broadcaster Vs. the cable company
- Alternatively the cable company could charge $0 on the channels themselves (100% broadcaster) and charge a "delivery fee" or "service fee" on the entire account.
This way the broadcaster gets blamed for the rate hikes directly from consumers, and consumers now have more power to drop certain channels if they feel the value they receive is lower than the cost they pay (e.g. $5/month for Trutv).
That's what the FCC should be doing.
I also don't understand how the FCC will determine whether someone is negotiating in 'good faith', as each party to a negotiation has only two options: give the other party more, or walk away (at least temporarily). Is there another option that I am not aware of that is indicative of 'bad faith'?
I'm not even sure whether someone can negotiate in 'bad faith', because if the party that walks away is losing less money from walking away than they would lose by giving more the the counter-party, walking away is the rational choice; if they lose more by walking than by giving in, they are the ones being hurt the most.
Regardless of what happens with "cable", it seems to me that 'channels' are gradually unbundling themselves by providing access over the internet, and shows may soon unbundle from channels in a similar fashion. Both of these moves provide content providers more feedback with respect to what the consumers demand, which will benefit the consumers most. Personally, I hope consumers demand space operas.
That doesn't actually follow. Consider the case of Alice (who owns 1 cow) and Bob (who owns 9 cows). Charlie wants to buy cows, but only if he can get exactly 10 of them. Alice and Bob might negotiate a deal whereby Alice gets 25% of the proceeds and Bob gets 75% despite the fact that Bob is providing 90% of the goods. This is because Bob has significantly more to lose by the deal falling through.
That’s what regulation is for: The only thing we should be concerned about is the consumer, the employee, the normal person.
This includes job security, but it also includes allowing a free market in the terms that is necessary.
For TV channels, a free market is obviously an advantage, where the user can choose which channels to pay for and which not.
(Btw, this is one of the types of business where TTIP will not influence existing EU legislation at all, but only bring today’s EU laws to the US)
Personally, the add-on fees and mandatory equipment rental accounted for 50% of the nominal price of my FiOS TV bill. Packages would have barely dented this. Therefore I canceled FiOS TV earlier this year.
By the time the cable providers actually implement a-la-carte, no one under the age of 40 will be subscribing.
Netflix and Amazon have shown that you can manage a single brand with many genres beneath. There's no need to have channels; we can just have "ABC", "NBC", "Fox", "Scripps", etc. ABC would include ESPN, Disney, and all their other channels; Fox would include FX and whatever else Fox has, etc.
It won't happen overnight, but I would expect channels to go away gradually over the next decade.
What am I missing?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retransmission_consent
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Television_Consumer_Prot...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Television_Consumer_Prot...
Making the cost per channel exactly what they are charged by the network would be a great way to pass consumer pressure back upstream.
Also if you look at the graph in the article, the broadcasting portion of the cable bill is relatively small.
My mother-in-law lives in a small city where she can pick up the big networks + PBS and some minor networks (CW, ion) with just rabbit ears.
With an $80 antenna, I get 11 channels from a city that is 50 miles away. All I had to do is nail a bracket onto the edge of my roof.
I am missing CBS and ABC, but I am planning to fill those in with a VHF antenna that points to another city.
The difference in picture quality between the HD broadcast vs the compressed "HD" offered by TWC is night and day.
It seems to me there is no value in getting a degraded copy of local broadcast TV on cable, so you should be able to opt out of it, or maybe just get broadcast stations that don't come in with your antenna.
> I am missing CBS and ABC, but I am planning to fill those in with a VHF antenna that points to another city.
> It seems to me there is no value in getting a degraded copy of local broadcast TV on cable
So, you spent $80 and had to climb onto the roof to install it. You have existing knowledge about what antenna to purchase. You know you need a VHF antenna to get other channels. You know where to purchase this stuff.
All of that isn't existing knowledge to the general public and climbing onto a room isn't a general skill-set. There is definite value in a cable guy coming in and setting everything up for you.
So, it's not that far-fetched.
My understanding is that the cable companies want to do this, but a tangled web of long-term agreements to carry channels have painted them into a corner.
Do people think there is something ritually unclean about getting OTA television? I know that a lot of people that I talk to about my OTA setup seem to think I am doing something illegal.
I sometimes think it was a mistake to let cable companies put their cables up, with these long term agreements? Agreements that always seem to favor cable companies?
I've never understood these franchise agreements. I always thought if you allow one company put up their wires, you should allow multiple companies the right to use the same utility pole to put up their equipment. If said company goes bankrupt--the municipality/county would own those wires/fibers, and could sell, or lease to the next company? Or, just rip them off the poles?
I'm kinda at the point where if I chief; I would rip out all the cable companies wires? I would let any company come in and put up new cables, but the service would need to be completely free. They would make money on advertising? The advertising couldn't get much worse?
(The only good thing I heard about cable companies is in CA; there is a bill up for consideration requiring all monthly fees for cable boxes, and modems be eliminated. Or, something along those lines?)
(A lot of the consideration in the affiliate agreements is in the form of local advertising slots in national programming; the national stream can't compete with the local affiliates)
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/nbc-will-live-stream-the-su...
No, you don't. I don't have cable. Watched the Super Bowl online this year.
Edit to say I watched it legally. Not some illegal stream.
I'm done with instant broadcast by any method if it's supported with commercials. I have little time free to watch TV. It's too valuable to waste 15-20 minutes out of every hour on commercials.
My wife likes to watch soccer when it's on. We have basic cable, so we don't have ESPN. It's either watch using an antenna attached to our TV, watch using low def blurry crap the cable company shows or use some virus-laden app to watch it with a computer.
This drives me nuts. They strip program information, they downgrade the signal, they include a hundred or so music channels that nobody wants, they broadcast blank channels, and the periodically re-arrange the channels (or change/upgrade/downgrade the basic plan). I can't go to my grandmother's house without having to spend an hour or so to re-do all of her channels on her TV sets; and then try to explain to a 90-yr old why the channels are different.
You can use OpenVPN (with a config file from the service) to connect to a VPN, or use a DNS spoofing services and simply change your DNS settings to those of the service.
Either route allows you to appear to be located in a country where a particular broadcast can be streamed.
Go to a reputable VPN service and check it for yourself.
Any app you already use that can handle streaming video will work. Your Browser, VLC, the Windows movie player thing, and many other vid programs. Your choice of which video app.
Take care.
But Basic Cable net fees have gone from 16.2 to 46.9bn. Fees paid to RSNs (sports?) have (will have?) gone from 2.7 to 7.8bn.
$35.8bn change for "cable stuff" vs $8.4bn change for "local stuff".
So, yeah, local broadcasters are rolling in it, but the dollar impact on your bill is from cable+sports programming. (albeit likely on a smaller per-channel basis).
On the other hand, the amount of original programming on broadcast has been shrinking. And, it's stuff that is broadcast for free anyway. It's supposed to be entirely add supported.
So broadcast fees explode while their quality and viewership implode.
* Comcast makes millions, if not billions a year off of equipment rental fees. $8/mo for a gateway and $12/mo for an HD box (at minimum) for cheap, crappy equipment.
* Streaming video has gotten good, but streaming live video is still a tough nut to crack. You can't pre-buffer things that haven't happened yet (said by someone who's used the NHL's offering for the past few years).
* Sports are keeping cable TV alive. NBCSN prints money for Comcast, and they pay the NHL a ton of money for that content, and the NHL has one of the smaller North American TV deals (due to demographics, regional popularity, and the weak Canadian dollar).
And the FCC very well should give more power to cable companies, because the cable companies are at a huge disadvantage relative to the big national telcos (aka AT&T and Verizon). AT&T and Verizon are working together to ensure none of the cable companies becomes a national player capable of threatening them. The old Bells are still much, much larger than any of the cable providers, so they can throw their weight around.
If that was the case, cable companies would stop selling me the TV package when I already pay the maximum amount for internet they offer in my area.
Yet, somehow, they are always willing to sell me cable TV with free HBO for 12 months and a $50 gift card for $19.99/month.
But long-term, video is a non-issue. If prices don't come down, the cable providers will move to a la carte. There's just too much content available online via YouTube, Netflix, etc. It will still be a product, but it will be IP-only, cheaper, and offer more granular video packages.
What cable companies should be doing is acquiring the rights to broadcast CONTENT. Cable really should just become a massive collection of on-demand content plus live events (think sports).
The whole idea of television by timeslot is archaic.
OTOH there is some damage done by bundling local channels onto cable - they now have to compete with non-local stuff so the viewership will be lower.
Net, the OP is about a big battle over something next to worthless.
My ISP in effect pays me to accept their "basic* TV service -- I get Internet access and phone with TV for less than without TV.
Well, I hadn't watched any TV for years. I tried a few months ago to watch the NBA playoffs, but my basic service didn't offer that.
But for the 2016 elections, I just signed up for an upgrade. But, I'm not very happy with the upgrade -- it's a waste of time and money. Even for the elections, I can get what I want, e.g., transcripts, off the Internet.
So, I suspect in another week or so I will cancel the upgrade.
Movies? Okay, DVDs or YouTube.
How anything could be as bad as TV is a bit beyond me.
