Until earlier this summer, I had been living with less than 30 cable television channels, one third in a language not spoken by me. I reduced my cable subscription a few years ago in an effort to save some money. When I moved into my new apartment, I was offered free cable for a year, so I took the offer. Now I have several hundred channels, including some programming I am interested in and a lot of programming I don’t find particularly interesting.
The reason all the unwanted channels are included is because the cable company can’t get the better channels without them. They call it “bundling.” For example, content providers like ESPN (owned by Disney) make it less expensive for the cable companies to receive ESPN only when it’s bundled with ESPN2, ESPN News, The Disney Channel, and perhaps even The Ocho.
The FCC is considering making it “against the rules” for content providers to bundle channels; soon, each channel must be sold separately, so the cable companies have more flexibility to decide which channels to buy and offer to customers. When I heard about “cable a la Carte” in the past, it was more along the lines of offering customers more choice in the channels they buy, to avoid useless programming and to focus on only the channels of interest. This possible ban of bundling by the FCC doesn’t address this issue at all.
Cable companies could sell channels individually at any time, but for the most part, the sell only bundled packages — just like the content providers they are fighting. This ban will do nothing for the end consumer. The idea that cable companies will pass their savings onto their customers is laughable.
FCC puts “a la carte” cable on the menu [USA Today]
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