The cable tv model is similar to a more sane health insurance system whereby 1 group of citizens subsidizes another . ( ie, more healthy vs. less healthy). But with cable, you don’t have to play. Actually, I do. Neither I nor my teenaged son can convince my wife to abandon cable. - and she never watches ESPN save for the occasional Figure Skating Championships.
This sort of thing burns my butt. I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve watched ESPN in the last 20 years and still not use all my fingers. Add in all the other sports packages and probably close to half my bill is spent subsidizing other people’s sports habits. If people had to pay their own sports bill, sports would be a damn sight cheaper.
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You don’t get real-time sports on iTunes or DVDs. That’s the market we’re talking about here. It’s fine if you’re not interested, just as it’s fine that I haven’t watched any network TV since about 1990, but my wife consumes nothing but sports programming out of the satellite box. I watch only stuff off Amazon Prime (documentaries and such). If we could stream ESPN and Fox Sports, we’d kick Dish out of the house immediately.
You are leaving out the part where they have to pay the teams and leagues for the right to “record and transmit” their activities. It’s not like they just show up with their cameras at the stadium or arena and the team lets them broadcast. A good chunk of that $5 per month per cable subscriber is going to paying for the rights to broadcast various events.
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If they had it their way, you’d buy a CD to listen to an album on your CD player, the same album separately as MP3s to listen on your digital player and yet a third time in some format or another to listen to it on, idk, your car.
Be fair, broadcast networks can and occasionally do produce compelling shows without a cable-like model. Think the first couple seasons of “Lost”: ABC let people watch for free over the air and online (with commercials) and they also had episodes available for immediate purchase via iTunes. Plenty of revenues and very little motive for piracy. Why not let non-HBO subscribers download “Game of Thrones” episodes for a few bucks a pop?
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Gee, where I live is considered rural area in British Columbia. My wife and I have cell phone service that we both have to pay roaming charges even if we are calling our neighbors. TV service is delivered through satellite (neither Shaw nor Telus nor Rogers will consider fiber to our small town). Internet is really about 1/2 step up from dial-up (we have an antenna that delivers a signal to a relay which connects to our provider in a town 80 kilometers away which connects with Shaw via satellite to the closest city 40 kilometers away!
When all of my neighbors are using the internet it slows down to a crawl. Streaming videos just doesn’t happen. I’m considering dropping our dish as much of the programming is crap and really laden with ads. I used to enjoy sitcoms, but now sitting down to a 30 minute program seems to yield only 18 minutes of actual show. The rest seems to be mindless ads for cable and internet services.
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but if I were paying for a cable package (I’ve watched free antenna-only TV for years), I’d be happy to pay a small monthly charge for a sports-only network I never plan on watching… IF AND ONLY IF doing so would guarantee that sports never appears on any of the other networks I might watch.
Consarnit, how much airtime do you sports freaks need?
(This rule would include wrestling, even if it’s nature as a sport is arguable, it belongs on sports channels, not sci-fi channels!)
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Yes, now the show makes money for them, lots of it, but only after 1) a comprehensive cable system fostered AMC’s existence, 2) the channel’s price per subscriber kept the channel afloat, 3) following the success of other dramatic, “quality” shows, the channel was then able to take a comparative chance on these shows themselves (Broken Trail, Mad Men), then able because of their large subscribers base, cultivate and promote these shows until they had the success they did.
None of this would have been possible with an ala carte system.
NPR’s On The Media did a recent show that talked about some of this called “WHO’S GONNA PAY FOR THIS STUFF?”
Flat out, the kind of high-end produced, “literary” television now seen as a sort of Golden Age of cable television, would be very unlikely to exist in a pure ala carte system. So, if an ala carte system is so important to some, at the cost of the quality of programming and (certainly) the number of channels (many, many niche channels would disappear with an ala carte system), then I guess you’re on that side.
The channels that would survive would be the ones with the deepest pockets and/or had the safest, most obvious programming, because only those channels would have enough “pre-subscribers” choose them ala carte to survive. ESPN would still be around, no problem; TLC, with Toddlers and Tiaras and Honey Boo Boo, would still be around. Science, NatGeo, CSPAN, IFC, BET, Sundance… this may have never existed or have significantly reduced revenue models.
Just as for a long long time, the publishing industry effectively “subsidized” (dislike that word, very inaccurate, but that’s the vernacular in this argument) the most artistically ambitious / highest quality literary fiction, the most popular cable / satellite channels do foster experimentation and creation effectively. This does lead to higher prices for your cable or satellite system, absolutely, but if cost is your primary motivator, your price sensitivity means there’s going to be a lot more Honey Boo Boo on cable and a lot less Breaking Bad on that cheap cable network.
Doesn’t ESPN show commercials and is wildly popular? I smell a rat.
Exactly! They should be making money from their commercials. HBO charges around $15/mo. You get multiple channels and no commercials during the show.
Because this is a business being discussed and not a government?
Except of course, that even as a sports fan, I don’t watch all (or most) sports - I’d like to drop the basketball, college football, UFC stuff, all the children’s sports, NASCAR, most tennis, most golf etc that I never watch. Also, the idiotic salaries demanded by players lead to enormous TV contracts, which leads to enormous costs for people to watch sports on TV.
Ideally I’d pay a charge for each actual match that I watch, and that’s it. I have no desire to watch any of the stupid talking head or news programmes that actually fill 90% of what seems to be on ESPN.
Same for other TV programmes. I like individual shows and I’d subscribe to them, but I have no desire to pay for every program on a channel. The problem is that once everyone only pays for exactly what they watch, nothing gets made except the ones with the highest returns - i.e. dirt cheap exploitative “reality” TV and crappy quiz shows. Without some kind of subsidy nothing ambitious would ever be tried.
To be honest, if I could just pay the licence fee and get legal access to the BBC iPlayer I’d be pretty much sorted. Yeah, I could get tunnelbear, or whatever, but I’d rather give money to Auntie. I don’t like BBC America, I want the real deal.
yes.
$5.54 for espn, 0.70 for espn2. The additional fee for espn2 is pretty high as well, as fees go
nytimes article on espn’s empire
Of course - if you live in just about any major metropolitan area, you can get an HD antenna for MUCHO cheap (I got a pretty decent one, mounted in my attic, for about $100 or so) and get all your sportsball (at least, the games broadcast on the major networks) for free-ola.
Espn uses much of its revenue stream to buy exclusive rights, taking sporting events off of broadcast TV. Recently Espn made a bid for the Olympics.–they lost to NBC. (I’m not sure how to feel about this-- espn might have concentrated on the events instead of the human interest stories. On the other hand, I don’t have cable)
Us too - haven’t had cable for 12 years. Two things I notice when I am at a hotel - 1) amazing how many of the shows I have already seen - so many reruns - despite the fact I watch cable tv maybe 3 times a year 2) wow, sure don’t miss those commercials.
Yeah, I remember that article too. Unfortunately for you, just because the Onion makes a joke about something doesn’t automatically render anything on the subject irrelevant. Guess what- this is a post bitching about cable prices. When the answer is “don’t watch tv, moron” Area Man’s economic habits all of a sudden make a lot of sense.
What is this service? Because I’m in NYC and I would be happy with “good-enough-for-me” internet service. The best I can find is Clear Wireless for $50 a month. The only thing I find that’s cheaper requires me to also buy phone, cable, etc. bundles.
USI Wireless. Unfortunately, in order to get the service I get, you’d have to move to Minneapolis.
I don’t know about that. The movie industry manages to make a few quality shows without anyone being forced to pay them in advance.
