Cable TV greatly improved access to television content compared to over-the-air broadcast, with more and more channels and packages available year after year. The FCC used a light touch, requiring a "basic tier" of local channels and a few extras, but otherwise practicing literal neutrality: leaving decisions about pricing and packaging of additional content between the providers and their customers. Cable TV companies created a smorgasbord of options to try and appeal to a broad cross-section of customers. Big content creators like Disney negotiated to get less-popular channels bundled together with popular channels like ESPN. Customers always complain, but wired cable penetration passed 70% by 2000. Canadians objected to the bundling, so the CRTC required "skinny" TV capped at $25 per month, with additional channels available individually. Customers were not impressed with the results. ...some industry experts are not surprised by the pick and pay prices. That's because, they say, TV providers are for-profit companies, and their main objective is to protect the bottom line. "What did you really expect?" says telecom expert Gerry Wall. Today, only half of U.S. homes are wired for cable, as more and more households opt to cut the cable and stream online. We have pay-per-view, "catch-up" TV, monthly subscription models, near video on demand, push VOD, and all kinds of telecom bundles and tie-ins with mobile and home telephone service. Even if you only pay for broadband internet, it is impossible to run out of free stuff to watch. Is this the kind of "nightmare" scenario you are worried about?what if internet is going to go the way of cable tv?
"Am I allowed to laugh?" said Gilda Spitz when asked for her reaction to the prices for the new line-up of stand-alone channels offered by Rogers. Most cost $4 or $7 each.
More and more packages - for more and more money, with the good ones of course spread over multiple packages. Check out that graph! It rises 3 times faster than inflation since 1998. My argument is that the same cost hiking is bound to happen with internet if the FCC is gonna do this. The airline industry might serve as a good corollary to this. Airline seat pricing is time-dependent and, if the airlines had their way, customer-dependent. Do you know the concept of willingness to pay? It's the bread and butter of airline pricing: each person has a dollar value in their head that represents what they are willing to pay for a service: anything above and they won't buy a ticket. The only goal that shareholders want an airline to pursue is to get every person in every single seat to pay as close to that price as possible. The most lucrative passengers are people who fly for business reasons, since the cost/benefit calculation is nearly always positive. If airlines could charge you more for traveling as a business-passenger they would, but they're not allowed to directly discriminate like that. But pretty much all business passengers want to be home on Friday or Saturday, so one of the best ways for airlines to figure out if you are a tourist or a businessman is to offer a cheap ticket that has your outbound flight before Saturday night and the inbound after. This is called the saturday-night stay, and while good competition can destroy it, the airline industry in the US has consolidated so much that it is pretty much standard now. My "nightmare" scenario is that price-practices like this will also be adopted by ISPs. They have your internet history anyways, so they can totally figure out how rich you approximately are. Net neutrality also prevents discrimination between customers, if I understand it correctly. Infrastructure costs are important, but it's not like cable companies aren't making plenty of money - the problem is that they let the customer pay for that kind of stuff, because capitalism. Also, wouldn't it be an argument for net neutrality if internet penetration is larger than TV cable penetration?Cable TV greatly improved access to television content compared to over-the-air broadcast, with more and more channels and packages available year after year.