[opendtv] Re: FCC on HD Radio
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 11:12:50 -0400
At 7:12 PM -0400 5/29/11, Albert Manfredi wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
Piracy was and IS nothing more than an attempt by consumers to
say they have had enough!
That is the excuse thieves always use, when they try to rationalize
their actions.
Yup. And in this case the music industry oligopoly is the thieves.
Apple provided a period of exclusivity for what was to become a
ground breaking device, in return for the freedom to create a REAL
marketplace for services that could operate on the device. AT&T
benefited via MUCH higher monthly average revenues per subscriber,
Wow. You have spent all this time to explain why collusion may be
beneficial to the industries involved, without even realizing it.
Like the Wikipedia article explains, Craig, collusion is sometimes
legal. It's up to consumers to figure it out and to resist it, in
those cases. Or to pay the price, and stop whining about it (e.g.
complaining about retrans consent fees).
So every time two companies cut a deal we must call it collusion?
Perhaps if the deal is completely monopolistic you might be right.
But if others are free to develop similar products and services and
cut similar deals I call it capitalism.
If not for the iPhone and the exclusive deal with AT&T, do you think
Android - and the Smartphone manufacturers who use it - would have
grown as quickly to become a competitor?
And without the exclusive deal, do you think AT&T would have opened
up their data networks to application they do not control?
Sorry Bert, but this is just good old unbridled capitalism at work.
Who knows why you didn't see the parallel with a hypothetical GM
buying up toll roads.
Because it was an absurd example that even the politicians could not
sell to their constituents.
Wake up to the real world, Craig. The anti-competitive distribution
models, that you insist on championing, raised and raised and raised
their rates, using conglom content as leverage. And you fail to
understand why the congloms said enough? When did these congloms
start demanding subscription fee kickbacks, Craig? Give me the year.
Then compare that year with the time when MVPD rates started to
climb.
Sorry Bert, they raised their rates to build a newer, more capable
infrastructure and to develop content to COMPETE with the
broadcast/content oligopoly. All along the way broadcasters benefited
from the additional reach they obtained; and consumer benefited from
much higher quality video than they could receive via an antenna.
And somewhere along the way people actually decided they liked the
new content more than the stuff the broadcasters were offering. And
the politicians benefited from the additional revenues they collected
from the MVPDs. Even consumers were happy initially.
But then the broadcasters used the perception of uncontrolled rate
increases to...
convince the politicians to give them a cut of the action.
The 1992 Cable Act allowed the media congloms to first take control
of the content on the MVPDs - please note that as of late '90s about
90% of the content on the MVPDs is now controlled by five companies
(four of them broadcast conglomerates). And NOW that they have
control, it's time to keep pushing up rates to generate those
lucrative second revenue streams that go straight to the bottom line.*
*Please note that the content franchise with the highest subscriber
fees (The ESPN Networks) is viewed as the golden goose. Despite being
owned by Disney (one of the four broadcast conglomerates, the main
reason for this high subscriber fee is that a huge percentage of the
money goes to paying other oligopolies - college and professional
sports - for the content.
** Also note that the head of NBC sports, and several subordinates,
just got canned because he bid too much for the Olympics.
There is only one word to describe all of this...
GREED
No you aren't. All I hear from you is ideas about more walled
gardens, or knee-jerk opposition to insuring that the Internet
remain unwalled.
You don't know what a walled garden is Bert. Or to be more accurate,
you don't know the difference between competition and politically
motivated oligopolies.
The point I had tried to make, and you seem to have missed, was
that the whole retrans consent increase argument WOULD NOT EXIST
except for the existence of walled gardens. Let me spell it out for
you.
Take a cable company broadband service. If the cable company sees
people bailing out of its TV walled garden, in favor of Internet
distribution model, what will its next step be? It's so obvious.
The next step will be, the cable system broadband service will block
access to Hulu, to Netflix, to the abc.com and fox.com sites. Telco
broadband services can do likewise. Then they will create their own
TV server network, and will sell people PKI certificates for access.
For the more premium material, these ISPs will require more
expensive certificates.
In effect, the walled garden that is an ISP network will behave very
much the same as the traditional MVPD, including tiered
subscrtiption rates, including the retrans consent issues from the
congloms. For the same reasons as today's MVPDs.
Now contrast this with having a totally neutral broadband network.
The congloms have their own sites. Even if the congloms decide to
have a combined site like Hulu, it's all in-house for them. No
retrans consent questions can possibly arise. How could they? The TV
content owners do their own thing. They have no leverage to demand
anything more. But you have to have a neutral medium first.
You seem to have this idea that Internet distribution alone solves
the problem. It does not. No one can be naive enough to think that
ISP networks will forever be "neutral," unless something stronger
than the traditionally complacent consumers makes them that way.
We shall see how much of this comes to pass. You may be right, but I
believe that we are on the cusp of real competition in the media
business...
We're just living through the inevitable slow erosion of the power
now vested in the conglomerates.
What I DO NOT want is the government stepping it to make sure that
the Internet is open for competition.
Network Neutrality is just a code word for regulation, which will
eventually become the next big government regulated oligopoly.
Regards
Craig
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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:
