Alternet Gets it Wrong on Cable TV

Alternet is one of my most beloved news sites – has been for many years – and a frequent go-to, especially as an excellent alternative to “business news” sources.

But on this subject, I’ve got to disagree, and I hope they see it my way:

Sucker: How Cable Companies Make You Pay For Channels You’ll Never Watch | | AlterNet

An excerpt:

Since I still only consume 1% of what Comcast provides, my bill should not be $1500 a year but $15. Oh, I know the cable companies could not afford to provide service for that, so I’d happily raise it to $150 a year for my five channels of free market choice.

But you can’t get A La Carte service from cable/satellite providers. Even though anti-trust laws say these companies can’t coordinate their business plans, they do. None of them offer an A La Carte menu allowing their “customers”to pick and choose what programs they like and want to purchase, as in that old fashioned notion of “supply and demand,” and letting the market place decide which products move to the top and which fail because not enough people want or like them. That’s capitalism, and the cable/satellite companies want no part of it. And they’ve spent lavishly on politicians, federal, state and – most importantly, local, to assure they never will have to be subject to the efficiencies of a true free market.

I get the anti-trust, they’re-lobbying-against-consumers spirit of the piece, truly I do, but in this case, I have to caution against the notion of A La Carte service as a solution, as I did years ago when I wrote the following:

Cable TV: Buffet vs. Al A Carte « Jaundice James

An excerpt:

The knee-jerk reaction of most people, I think, would be to push for having the option of selecting (and paying for) only the channels they would watch, while opting out of the ones they wouldn’t. It is, really, a reasonable thing to want — in a perfect world. However, I think what most people fail to realize is that if we were to take this route, we would end up with fewer available options, and the ones we would be left with would be largely driven by ratings and popular demand.

What Pizzo defines as a benefit, citing “letting the marketplace decide” would clearly not be benficial when you consider the decisions the marketplace makes when it comes to our TV watching choices.

I prescribe a refresher on my piece, stated above. It’s always been a “Best of” on this site. I promise it’s a good read.