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Why don't cable companies let us pick and choose channels?
I think this would be great for the consumer. Pick and pay for the channels you want instead of being forced to get 50 channels of crap that you'll never watch. Why don't cable companies do this? I guess the obvious answer would be they probably would lose money, but people have so many tastes. What do you think?
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When I lived in Mansfield, Ohio and we had Adelphia (before they sold the area to Time Warner) Adelphia gave us a choice and said it was a law. We could take one of their "option" packages or we could pay for each channel individually and pick and choose what we wanted.
In the long run it was cheaper to just take the package and delete the channels you didn't watch from your tv. I don't see that it would change much because cable companies make a lot of money on selling the cable company commercial time, and the more channels they can show those ads on the more they can charge, regardless if anyone watches them. |
i have suggested to my cable company channels that they need to add...cause they are just a local company they havent had many "good" channels...2 years ago i only watched techtv and tbs for the most part....espn on occasion but they added lots of channels such as foxnews and the like, hgtv :(, but about the picking ur channels i would have to agree with pan cause cable companies have enough problems imo with sateilite...cause at least in my area dishes are popping up everywhere even in the city and such where comcast is...they also took over alot of local cable companies.
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I'm dumping comcast.
channel after channel of pre-digested pap. DirecTV may have similar crap, but I'll be charged only half as much for it. |
Actually, I think if people were able to pick their own channels, the weirder fringe channels would fold up because not as many people would select them. Having an a la carte selection process would limit the diversity of channels, as each channel would strive to be a carbon-copy of the more successful channels.
For example, I watch C-Span maybe twice a year. If I were given a choice, I wouldn't pay for it. But then I would lose the opportunity to catch those two rare shows a year that snag my attention. |
I think I would get 3 channels other than the locals. Here is your problem with the dishes. I was tracking Hurricane Francis, and as soon as the stuff got important, the Dish-Network dish in my backyard would not get a signal. Add that to the fact that unless you get premium channels they charge you for changes and nickel and dime you for the rest.
I guess what I am trying to say is that I am paying bungloads of money for three channels that I get most of the time, unless it is important that I get them, in which case they are not reliable. The big question is: Where do we go from here? I am not really happy with what I have, but it is like picking the president, what is the best choice of the crappy options that we have? |
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But, it is true most niche channels would fold. HGTV for example... |
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two articles from July as this was recently being discussed by the FCC:
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In short, the smaller companies like Oxygen would be squeezed out of existence because they would have to charge more in the ala carte world.
Disney and Viacom create pretty attractive deals to bundle all of thier programming together. It makes it very easy for MTV to launch LOGO whereas if someone was to start up on their own it would be cost prohibitive to even start. Something the reality channel is having problems currently making sure that it's got enough financial backing to stick around longer than just a few months. |
What if they made smaller bundles, the way that they do with the movie channels. There can be the viacom bundle of their couple of channels. (these are the ones I watch) but you can bundle between 3 and 10 channels together and even charge a little bit more than you would for all 50 or 120 or 180 channels. I would not need to buy the H&G channel unless it was bundled with SciFi.
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With a digital box, it is possible to feed or block any channel as desired. It would create more, not less, opportunity for new shows and material. It would foster "public access" on a tremendous scale. It is incredibly hard to get a new show onto an existing "specialty channel" (e.g., Outdoor Life). The exiting networks have too much invested in advertising and "market" identity to risk straying beyond their current offering. Newcomers with good ideas are prevented from airing what could become a popular show simply because the network is afraid to take a chance. A couple hundred channels showing new, possibly wonderfully innovative programming could introduce programs worth watching instead of the same tired shit that we're currently being subjected to: 1. reality shows 2. team competition shows 3. sitcoms of old situations with ethnic twists 4. talk and advice shows edit: 5. Makeover shows Also, I think that the networks are afraid to lose the few viewers they still hold to some show that doesn't owe their existance to the network. |
For the most part cable has been shit for the past ten years.
Until this whole Comcast On Demand thing. It's like TiVo but not as annoying. |
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One must also understand the lineups... when channels move from the top of the dial to the bottom, the channels on the bottom tend to lose viewers. Viacom tries to bundle their channels all together and to be close together on the dial. Someone in the thread mentioned that digital cable boxes would be able to handle it.. yes the boxes would, the backend infrastructure could not. It would have to be reprogrammed and recoded, which after the cable ISP infrasctructure upgrads of the last 8 years, are finally seeing profitabilty. Will they see profits go up from doing that reprogramming? Nope... |
everyone I know says the same thing "I want cable just so I can have Comedy Central, Discovery/NationalGeographic/etc, and the Food Network" plus maybe one or two other stations, like SciFi or MTV2. If cable companies offered these small bundles, I think the number of new subscribers they would get would counter balance the amount of advertising they lost on the crap channels.
Maybe they could offer a month-to-month extra channel of your choice option. So you could try out that new station all about under water basket weaving, then try out the channel all about trains and planes. yup. |
I believe I can answer this question quickly and concisely. The cable companies won't let you do a la carte programming because they won't make any money like that. What moron wouldn't realize that it would be a great thing for consumers to be able to pick and choose their programming? But you must understand that cable companies aren't in the business for the consumers, but rather to make money off them. If you could just pick and choose from the drivel available, you could pay drastically less per month, and therefore less in the cable co's pocket. I have over 120 channels available to me, but I watch (literally) less than 10 of them. Those 10 channels have the stuff on that I want to watch, and the channels are scattered throughout the various programming packages.
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This is similar to sky in britain. They say it would be more costly to do this. Individual channels would mean less choice etc. I say you wouldnt get so much crap. Although in a way they do have a point specialist channels such as sport would get costly .
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How do you figure that? The cable companies would just charge the most for the most popular channels and give you the less watched one's for cheap (In actuality, isn't this what they do now). You: Ok, I just want my local news, ESPN, and the Outdoor Life Network. Comcast: That will be $34.78. You: How much if I get the other 37 channels? Comcast: That will be $42.19. You: OK, OK, just ESPN. Comcast: That will be the minimum $29.95. You: That's highway robbery. Comcast: Tuff The real issue I think is advertisers. One of the real advantages to advertising on cable as opposed to local broadcast stations is the ability to target your customers. If I was advertising my product I would want to be able to 'rifle shot' my message. This is what cable does well. This is why advertisers pay what they do. When I wanted to advertise on ESPN only, the sales guy told me 'We can't do that'.. I said 'Why not'. He says cause that is what everybody wants. ESPN would be nothing but commercials and the other channels would have no commercials. Anyway, this is a complex issue but it is mainly a business decision. |
FWIW ESPN is about $2.50 / household sub. It's the highest amount per subscription, YES Network is about $1.50 in comparison. I don't care for either of them, yet there's $4.00 of my cable bill that goes to something that I will never watch nor ever use.
Back in the 70's people said,"Pay for TV??? Why would I ever want to do that..." yet we got what we wanted and we're not happy that it's not as cheap as we want it to be. Be grateful that we don't have to pay for television and radio licenses like they do in other countries. Every year, a TV tax just to own it, some countries have a government channel, and you have to subscribe to that, and it's very expensive. Like gasoline, I think that we get a bargain and should just be happy that it's not that expensive and not controlled by the government. |
DDDDave: what my statement was trying to show is that people don't realize how much particular channels cost. The mentality I ran into the most when I was in the satellite business is people thinking that
number of channels / price per month = price per channel We obviously know this is not true. If consumers were given the option of picking their programming, they would first assume that they could get a significantly lower bill per month. As your little mock up showed, this will not be the case. The closest thing I have ever seen to this is with big dish satellite systems, in which they let you get as close to "picking and choosing" as you will get. But then again, they are down to less than 800,000 customers nationwide, probably because the programming is so cheap... |
I do not have cable- have not for 9 years (since being on my own)
I might if they had ala carte, and it was affordable been pushing for that for years- big thing is, with the ever increasing flood of series on DVD, and the net, I simply do not need them anymore so the affordable part is a biggie - it would be nice to get the history channel, discovery, ect- but I just do not feel much loss these past years- so if they cannot bring themselves to offer just what I want, then fuck em- (and I hope lots of other people agree with me, and remember they do not need to be force fed their entertainment) |
I thought about that. If they offer digital cable, why not pick & choose? I'd love to have digital, but I would NEVER watch 700 channels! MY GOD who would? Even if you had all the time on your hands, how could you afford it?
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I have had cable for the first time ever for just over a month now and dropping the whole bloody thing has been crossing my mind increasingly often now. There was no TV in my apartment for over a year until two months back and I was fine with that. Forgot to add there is ZERO reception with an antenna in this area and you must have cable or the Dish to get more than PBS.
Many of the worthless channels like all of the news channels, and a good portion of the others are never on the onscreen for me. All I watch typically is CourtTV, Scifi Channel, CMT, and a few others. |
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