[opendtv] Re: Electric power as a natural monopoly
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2014 00:30:54 +0000
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
> All I am saying is that the notion that utilities are natural
> monopolies has its roots in the electric power industry during
> the first decade of the 20th Century.
No matter how you keep harping on this, natural monopolies are still a fact of
life.
Even your example of locally-competing electric utilities is only a partial
solution. Even if you can have two dozen different electric power generation
plants in one city, competing to sell you power, you're still going to have
that same local shared grid. So in fact, the company that installs and
maintains that grid is a natural monopoly.
> The next likely move is for the FCC to require the content congloms
> to sell their programs to OTT services as they did when they opened
> up the market to the DBS services. And the likely result will be
> yet another MVPD service that charges the same (or slightly higher)
> oligopoly rents as the existing MVPD services.
Actually, no. The difference is that your location will not force you to use
that one source of TV content any longer. If you don't like Hulu, you can look
elsewhere. That's a huge difference. The different OTT sites will be able to
compete on what tiers they will offer, what content to pass up entirely, how
much a la carte, what have you. The different content owners can equally decide
to bypass aggregation sites completely (as they already do), for any or all of
their content.
A completely different landscape.
Bert
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at
FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.
Other related posts:
