Yep, if you have a cable or satellite subscription, whether you watch ESPN or not, you're paying ESPN over $80 a year.
At some point, the decline will be enough to kill these deals.
And that right there is one of the main reasons why I don't have a cable or satellite subscription anymore. Very tired of subsidizing channels I never watched. Most especially ESPN. That and the trend of, "oh you want AMC? Well you'd better buy the super premium $140 a month 200+ channel package! You can't get it with just the $80 a month 120 channel package." And, of course, the ads. My money or advertisements: pick one.
TV has a lot of weaknesses, but I don't think its bundle economics are one of them.
The most successful alternatives to TV are also bundles, and the bundling is a critical part of their success. Imagine instead of paying $10/month for Netflix, you had to pay for each show a la carte (like iTunes). That would be worse for consumers - and creators.
Except sport and other tv rights are an oligopolistic market (not a free competitive market): this allows cable companies to select bundles not in a way to minimize the cost to the consumer (which would result in you finding the perfect bundle for what you want to watch at the cheapest price), instead they can create bundles to maximize profit for themselves (which results in you having to pay for several bundles in order to get all the content you want).
Remember copyright creates monopolies and monopolies are not free markets.
Is there nothing free about the market for software because only Adobe can sell Photoshop? Presumably then there are also no free markets for, well, any type of cultural product. In a sense that's true and Disney is the only game in town for Rogue One, but I'm not sure it's a terribly useful analytical framework.
"Monopolies are not free markets" is also an interesting claim on its own.
"A free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
The idea is Monopolies can extract "Monopoly Rent/Economic Rent" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent at a higher price than normal because competitors don't enter the market and lower prices.
Rather than a binary it's probably best to think about the extent to which one thing is a substitute for another. Photoshop is a tool, and there's no fundamental reason a competitor couldn't make a program that does the same things; to that extent, there's a free market in image editors. To the extent that there are things that you can't substitute (e.g. plugins that use a photoshop-specific API), there isn't a free market there - it's not black and white, rather there's an extent to which the market approximates a free one. Is Star Trek a substitute for Firefly? To a certain extent yes, but probably less than the Photoshop alternatives.
> "Monopolies are not free markets" is also an interesting claim on its own.
Huh? That's completely standard, established economics. ("Free market" is an economic term of art that doesn't always mean what it sounds like).
I can't name a single TV provider in my area that doesn't make you sign a contract for several years. So if you need to move apartments you're now paying that hefty cable cancellation fee. It's even worse if they make you sign a 2 year contract since I've yet to find an apartment in Seattle that will even let you sign a 2 year lease.
Right now, I have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime (mostly for the shipping but it also has some shows I like), Crunchyroll. And I'm still missing things I want, which would require: Funimation, HBO Now, CBS. At that point, I'd be close to my old cable bill again, and still wouldn't have new content from AMC or Showtime. Would also love to have TV Japan, but if you think ESPN gouges you ... that requires satellite TV, the more expensive dish/receiver, and costs $25 a month for just that one channel!
I would welcome an ala carte system for shows, but only if they were reasonably priced. Definitely not paying $1 for a completely predictable episode of Modern Family or a "why is this still on the air?" Simpsons episode. But Real Time? Sure. Game of Thrones? I'd happily pay double. I may just start waiting until seasons end, sign up, binge watch a whole season in a month, and cancel.
I don't even think music has become reasonably priced yet. Sure it's $1 a song, but you're still paying $15 if you want the album. Even though they no longer have to make a CD, ship it to stores, and give a large markup to the retailer. And the MP3 is way lower quality than the lossless CD. Yet they still want the same price.
> That would be worse for consumers - and creators.
that would be sad if "creators" had to try harder to make better content that made me want to pay for it, you know, like Game of Thrones did.
When my ISP did it, I called them up and canceled the TV portion entirely: who wants to sit there and watch a particular show at a particular time?
A channel is just a curated selection of content no different than a bundle is a curated selection of channels. Just because you like one program on a channel doesn't mean you like any of its others.
Of course, the HDCP master key is leaked, but I'm not sure you can reliably buy something that reliably includes one (random batches of "HDMI repeaters" on Amazon seem to strip HDCP, but it's hit-or-miss because it's like totally omg super illegal; better to get the criminality out of your system with murder or arson.)
http://www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre/remove-hdcp-hdmi-si...
the main thing keeping me from doing this is that there are just too many moving parts for it to be a stable replacement for a cable box.
Torrenting can't really handle sports. This solution might allow me to "rebroadcast" a live game straight out of my apartment.