[opendtv] Re: 'Cable A La Carte' TV Picks Up Steam
- From: <menright1@xxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 3:01:08 -0400
>>>
With studies saying most U.S. households watch less than 20 of the sometimes
hundreds of available channels,
<<<
I believe this figure would prove wrong [low] in a world with high PVR usage.
Also, Cable can today implement a la carte on the digital tier easily, and
should do so to avoid having it forced on them in the analog tier. People are
not really that upset about bundling, they just want to be able to can CBS when
JJ's dress can't stay attached.
I have over 50 regular repeating recordings ("season passes") scheduled on my
TiVo. There are several of those that are the only thing I watch on the
respective channel. I can't inspect my list of scheduled recordings at the
moment but I think overall it skews towards channels that have one or two
programs that I record.
A mature-design PVR with multiple recordable tuners and sufficient disk space
(mine only holds 40 hours as built and as configured by me) on the one side
and multiple family members to serve on the other side would seem to indicate
that the useful channel selection could easily be more than 20 per household in
a not-too-distant future.
Is it really so hard to do a la carte? The digital "tier" on Cox in San Diego
consists of 5 or 6 separately orderable tiers of 5 to 10 channels, and the
pricing and organization of the digital tier is a better indication of what
cable systems will end up delivering after they go digital with their entire
line-ups. The pricing and organization of the analog "tier" reflects real
delivery issues today, but the digital side shows what the systems are capable
of.
When all is said and done, I think a la carte would be good, and I think that
at the approximate time that a regulatory/legislative deal could be made, most
cable subs will be looking at all-digital cable anyway (meaning I think it will
take a long time to legislate it). So the problem solves itself.
The *driving* problem however, is not one of being able pay for channels one by
one. The driving problem is that when the CBS eye offends me, I cannot pluck it
out. Being able to cancel an individual station when it suits would allow
consumers to exercise an after-the-fact censorship power. I believe then the
cable systems would push back against the program providers with contract terms
that insist on standards that the program providers have to follow, unless the
cable systems' costs for unbundling are really low. These costs would be for
billing and keeping boxes in sync with requests and for all the phone-call
handling that would go with those things. I imagine that the terms of carriage
would envision certain balances of cancelations and of orders of bundled tiers
and of people requesting an individual channel instead of its tier.
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