The Big Picture: Cable Television (Mar 10, 2011)

As for entertainment, I don't spend $60 a month on entertainment, and the cost of cable TV has put a severe crimp on my ability to add a converter box rental (which costs about $7 to rent the unit, but costs some $20-$30 more a month to run it) to get HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, or Starz. Back in 1993, I could rent a converter box and get HBO, and my monthly cable bill would still be under $40 a month.

Also adding to the cost of the analog cable bill are exhorborant carriage fees cable channels charge for cable carriage as if their advertising dollars aren't helping enough to support the channels in the first place. It used to be that broadcast and cable channels pulled their own weight without demanding carriage fees that are passed on to the cable bill payers. With so many broadcast and cable channels on the cable sytstem, it's nearly impossible for any channel to stand on its own without demanding carriage fees from the cable companies (which pass the fees on to the customers in the form of higher bills) in order to survive.

In the capitalist world, the one where government doesn't bail out a struggling business, the strong ones survive, and the weak ones go out of business, with its workers eventually hopefully finding work with the strong ones.

With cable channels, it's literally a socialist model. Cable fees are taken from the customers by the cable customers, and given to the cable channels demanding carriage fees to support their business. The problem with this model is that the customers are beginning to wise up and put a stop to it.

For one thing, you can watch thousands of TV shows on the Internet through many outlets with high speed cable. Not everything offered by the TV show producers are legally streamed on-demand (some are pirated illegally on youtube until lawyers representing the TV show have youtube take it down.) Live sports may be offered only through their respective league websites or authorized affilliate websites. Most network shows are offered by the networks airing the shows. Many syndicated shows that are offered legally and that you can watch are hard to find but possible.

So it may be a no-brainer to some people to pull the plug on cable TV's expanded analog offerings and just go with the basic starter lineup with just the local broadcast stations, plus some cable only public service channels. That costs around $20 a month nowadays. The expanded analog offerings are $40 a month.

Add in a converter box rental for some $7 a month depending on the model and system. Add in some digital tiers for something like $3-$5 a month. Add in a pay channel like HBO for around $14 a month. All those costs eventually add up and before you know it, you got a $300 a month cable bill full of channels that, unless you're a rich white collar worker who can work 20 hour weeks and have a middle six-figure salary, it's just a waste of money for everybody else.

Back in the 60s and 70s, it used to be about the TV viewer. Offer some 12 channels for $10 a month. In the 80s, offer 36 channels for $16 a month. That was once fair. Nowadys, cable channels like Fox News Channel, ESPN, TBS, and other big majors just want more money a month from consumers to feed their hungry habit of overpaying rights fees for major sports properties and spreading one-sided propaganda.

Consumers are going to have to make some tough choices between paying $60 a month for a cable channel lineup that's basically full of greedy cable channels offering less than stellar lineups of programming or using the $60 to help pay for food and health insurance that's costing more and more each year.

Even the cost of Internet is going up. Used to get a medium speed cable Internet service for $35 a month. Today, for $35, Cox is offering a slower-speed Internet service, while the medium speed service now costs $45. Also compounding to the cost are the high costs of delivering Internet service due to heavier use than ever, thanks to streaming video, streaming radio, Facebook, Twitter, News, and other bandwidth-hogging activities.

I'm also having some problems getting on Cox Internet, sometimes for hours at a time in the early morning when I have to do my morning news reading and e-mail screening. Looks like Cox will have to add more cable bandwidth (and just as I wrote that sentence, I lost my Cox Internet connection!)

We have broadcast and cable channels that believe that their businesses will continue to be supported by carriage fees, but once their collective fees get too high and an exodus of cable subscribers results, what will they do then? Move some of them as pay channels? Move their channels to the Internet? I would like to see Disney Channel back as a pay channel and taken off the analog basic tier. We could see clusters of news and talk TV channels move to a digital tier. ESPN, Fox Sports, and other sports networks could move to digital. Some could try offering solo channels as pay channels; turn ESPN into a real pay channel like HBO and charge $10 a month. That would be fair. Pay for what you want to get. The lower-cost broadcast and cable channels could fill up the analog tier, while the high cost cable channels would move to pay tiers and pay solo channels.

The problem with broadcast channels is that when they have a spat with a cable operator over carriage fees, and the cable company balks, the broadcast channels like to tell their viewers to patronize other cable companies that offer their channel and screw the one you're with that's not carrying their channel as the broadcast channel by then has pulled their signal off of the cable system in dispute. The broadcast channels also tell their viewers to put up an antenna to watch their channel for free. Problem is with terrestrial digital channels, many of their signals just don't reach their homes like their analog systems once did back in the days. So if the broadcast channels tell their viewers they can watch their signal for free without complaining about it, then why do they demand carriage fees indirectly from the same viewers when they watch it on cable? Hey broadcast channels, stop the hyprocricy. Offer your channels for free for cable companies to carry like you tell viewers they can watch their over-the-air signals for free, or scramble them and make them pay channels like SelecTV and ONTV used to be in the 80s.

So what do we have as of 2011? Cable systems charging higher amounts of money for basically the same number of channels as they had in 1993. The cost of broadband Internet is going up instead of down. The cost of cable channels is going up despite being available in more homes than they ever were in the 90s. Local broadcast channels thinking of their TV viewers as cash cows instead of people. Cable companies pushing their dreaded cable box rentals that do not do much besides cause your electric bills to go up some $30 a month per box. Having the cable subscribers subsidize overpriced and unpopular cable channels that are better off either as pay channels or out of business.

And on top of that, a dilution of scripted quality progrmaming over not some four networks, but over some 100 channels, most of which you can't get unless you pay to get every freaking channel offered at exhorborant prices. Fortunately, if you try hard enough, you could find them for free on the Internet.

Will cable and the cable/broadcast networks shape up or will they let their high costs of their channels lead to their own demise?