McCain working on bill to allow for 'a la carte' cable TV packages

The counter-argument would be something along the lines of "technology service cannot be commoditized -- it requires innovation and a return on investment!". To which I reply: cable companies.

I would phrase it as "it will eliminate the monopoly of the cable companies". Which is a good thing. Sick and tired of the limited options we have with cable companies and the "bundles" they provide. I don't want bundles. I want to watch what I want to watch.

The idea that unbundling is going to save consumers a lot of money is strange. Cable companies sell these bundles knowing you don't watch most of what you get. We'll just switch from a scenario where the sports guy subsidizes the movies guy and the movies guy subsidizes the sports guy to a situation where everybody pays full freight.

For lots of reasons, cable is effectively a monopoly. They made big capital investments, and the benefit of those investments is that every human living in a particular geography (in most places) is a captive customer.

There are a few options here.

With telephones, the government forced AT&T to divest itself from operating inter-state and intra-state networks and cede control of customer premise equipment (ie. it was illegal to own a telephone pre-1984), and eventually required the regional bell operating entities to provide access to other providers.

With electrical companies, for the most part they are able to function as monopolies for electricity delivery in a particular geography, and in exchange for that privilege their rates are tightly regulated by the State.

The problem with these options is that they are solutions driven by the states, not the federal government. The states, for various reasons (Ars Technica did some good stories about this) aren't doing much. Ala carte TV is an effort for the Feds to get involved, which I think is a bad idea. There needs to be a compromise between forcing consumers to pay $20/mo for sports content that they don't watch and getting nickle and dimed for each channel.

IMO, I'm only concerned about this as it affects universal access to internet. Cable companies are much more effective at delivering broadband than the traditional telcos, and those big TV subscriber bases almost certainly lower the cost of broadband delivery.

No one said it would be easy. But is it long overdue ? hell yea.

Personally I'm quite fine with that.

Nearly every regulatory issue in telecom (and likely most other industries, but I'll just stick with what I know) is lobbied extensively by someone. Most issues will, whatever the underlying intent, benefit certain sub-industries over others. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's virtually impossible to propose a regulation that won't affect the market. By definition, regulations are supposed to to affect the market.

To assume that "cable" will outright oppose this is false, and overly simplistic. Cable is hardly a monolith, and there are things in this proposal that different types of cable companies could conceivably support. NCTA, the larger cable trade org opposes the measure, while ACA (representing relatively smaller cable companies) supports at least many of the principles behind the proposal[1].

There's a big difference in policy goals between vertically-integrated and non-vertically-integrated cable companies. Comcast, as both a cable company and a content producer, probably does enjoy policies that allow for bundling and would oppose that certain part of the proposal. However, competing cable companies who are not vertically integrated would probably support such a measure. It's not a crazy thought that Independent Cable Co. X would like to pick and choose which channels to buy for its subscribers without being forced into a bundle. In other words, for the same reason that consumers might want this choice, many cable companies could want this as well.

The part of the bill that penalizes broadcasters who switch to pay TV is something that probably all cable companies, even the big ones like Comcast, could support. Retransmission consent fees paid by cable companies to broadcasters are increasingly high and a court-blessed Aereo would provide an avenue for cable companies to simply stop paying those fees (or at least give them a good bargaining chip in retrans fee negotiations).

Oddly enough, wireless companies (e.g. Verizon) might oppose this part of the proposal. They badly want spectrum, and if FOX and others leave the airwaves, this could help get that spectrum into their hands. As an aside, I think the threats from FOX are hollow for a number of reasons.

Anyways, getting a little bit meta here, but the telecom industry is where I've been interning (various places) and would like to work in at some point. There's no reason to expect the average HNer to know these intricacies. However, from what I've learned about telecom, I can at least have a better idea of knowing what I don't know about other policy arenas. Thankfully, this will prevent me from reaching super simple (and often flat out wrong observations) such as "[t]his will be lobbied into oblivion." Obviously lots of money will be spent opposing this, but that's true for nearly any regulatory proposal, and is far from dispositive of any outcome.

[1] http://www.fiercecable.com/story/mccain-bill-sparks-conflict...

I'm just curious what lobby is pushing McCain? He's not a guy known for his principles.

This is exactly the sort of regulation Republicans should care about.

Not that this excuses Republicans from being hypocrites. But on this issue, there's no conflict with their core philosophy.

And frankly, even deregulating the financial industry was consistent with their philosophy. It was their support for socializing what should have been private losses that was the philosophical problem.

In my largish apartment complex, there is one cable provider: Cox. I can't use a sat dish, my apartment faces the wrong direction and I'm on the second floor. FIOS isn't available. CenturyLink agrees no "prism tv" whatever that is for me, and directtv is out because I am on the second floor and face the wrong direction.

So there's really no free market in cable providers for me, it's a monopoly situation.

The free market solution would be to require Cox to allow other cable providers to use their cable to get last mile to me and then let Cox, et. al., charge me however they wish.

I would be curious to know which situation Cox would prefer: mandatory unbundling, or force them to share the cable.

EDIT: I do wonder what keeps Verizon from offering FIOS if they wanted to. Is it too expensive to rewire a huge sprawling multi-floor apartment complex?

But if you never watch ESPN then even saving $5 is worth it. There are plenty of people who pay for cable exclusively for HBO, and since HBO and ESPN don't share a parent company they're not going to want their networks to be bundled together.

And it also allows you to make sensible decisions like specifically refusing to pay for HLN because it puts Nancy Grace on the air.

I just downgraded my U-verse account. The channels I used to have are now just a blue screen with the image of a TV and a message either saying "you are not subscribed to this channel" or "call <number> to order this channel".