Cable Unbundling Illogic

There is a piece today in the NY Times which rambles about why unbundling cable channels will cost us all more. Stop right there. It will cost everyone more, more than the extortion already in place. Again, I have never seen a football game, one baseball game, one basketball game, one hockey game, really just half, and that was almost fifty years ago. Yet I pay almost $20 a month in cable charges for all the stuff I have no interest in. $70 a month for basic cable! If I get less then I pay more? Huh?

The article starts:

If you have cable TV, you probably don’t watch most of the channels you get. The average American television household receives 189 channels, up from 123 in 2003. But we’re watching only 17.5 of those channels — nearly unchanged from 11 years ago, according to a new report from Nielsen.

I do not know what those  channels are but I damn well pay for them. Now try this on for size:

Think of it this way: If I put my bag in an overhead luggage bin, you can’t put your bag in the same spot, so it makes sense to charge me personally for my use. But if I watch Bravo, that doesn’t stop anyone else from watching the same show. When a good is “nonrivalrous” like a cable signal, giving it to me doesn’t stop anyone else from using it or add production costs at the margin. In those cases, it can make sense to throw lots of stuff into one package, whether or not I’ll actually use it.

 The fact is that they make money from advertising and for the forcible fees I pay whether I watch Duck Dynasty or not. Advertising is based on reach, measures of real customers watching. So if it were all advertising then there is no need for me to watch unless I find it of some value. No value, then I do not watch and do not buy. However the cable guys contort all logic. What is the guy saying in the above. I only speak six languages and the words above are unrecognizable.

The author also uses the argument that one bundles a newspaper. But simply one can readily unbundle the electronic content over a cable. One has more difficulty in doing so in print! In fact, if one priced cable as access plus content then content would become truly market based. It would engender true competition. As it stands now one can bundle absolute nonsense and get paid for it.

 We do not argue about some bundling. It is the sports bundling that pays exorbitant salaries to athletes many of whom often get themselves into legal messes. No extortionary charges, unbundle the sports channels and reduce the salaries. Try Income Inequality on those folks for a change, Piketty, where are you when we really need you?