Then what happens. This massive charge is some $20 per month per HH, or about $2B per month, goes to the teams, most to football teams. Then the money flows to players who it appears then go out and beat their female associates. Thus we poor folks who are forced to fund this assault on women have no voice in denying it.
Along comes some writer for the NY Times and takes the content providers position and argues:
It
would be great if you could pay just for the channels you actually use,
right? That’s the idea behind “unbundling,” which some consumer groups
have advocated. Cable companies would sell you individual channels
rather than vast packages of them. It’s an easy idea to get behind when
cable companies, never the most lovable of service providers, are
raising prices and merging. But
surprisingly, unbundling cable channels wouldn’t make consumers
materially better off. The most likely result would be people paying
about the same amount for fewer channels.
He seems not to understand the fundamental law of content. It goes where the money is. Just look at CBS going rogue on the Internet with a subscription service. Even the Times is subscription. The author continues:
And
consider how the cable channels would react to losing so many
subscribers. The networks make money in two main ways: They get
per-subscriber carriage fees from the cable companies that distribute
them, and they sell advertising. Ad revenue would fall a little, as some
viewers would drop channels they used to watch occasionally. The number
of customers subject to carriage fees would plummet as consumers chose
to order fewer channels. Meanwhile,
each cable channel would know its remaining subscribers are mostly
people who actually watch the channel, meaning they have a high
willingness to pay. Knowing this, they would raise carriage fees — a
lot.
Sorry, but perhaps he has not heard of the free market. It does work if compulsion is removed. If people get to choose and if the channels do raise the price then there is a clearing of the market. People will stay until the price exceeds the value. It works in every other market, so why not content. It works in something we call "the movies". People go and pay to see a film, been doing so for over a hundred years. Forces better content, perhaps. But the above argument in my opinion is worthless, has no merit, and fails both on fact and on logic.
Unfortunately I have the distinct disadvantage of experience. I spent five years in Cable, the early years, 80-84. I still have close friends there and in a manner the rule that "content follow the money" most likely change cable as well. Namely other distribution channels will evolve, the most challenging is 5G wireless, a Gbps distribution network. That will upset the apple cart. Unfortunately the author of the Times piece seem to be a Psychology major turned business analyst, should have stayed with the rat experiments. "Content follow the money".
Posts
