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| WNET |
IT’S BEEN A little over three years now since I cut the cord and gave up pay TV for good. I don’t miss it, and I don’t regret that decision in the slightest.
It is terribly ironic that, considering I make my living in an industry that depends almost entirely upon cable and satellite subscription fees, that I would have minimal interest in being a subscriber myself. I do miss having CNN at home, and watching Cowboys games is now nigh impossible (though that may not be such a bad thing). I am also left out of communal TV watching events, particularly Game of Thrones and other things my friends seem to discuss a lot, particularly online; and I have a more difficult time accessing the few series I do enjoy.
But it’s not just about saving money for me. It’s about the principle of paying a LOT to watch only a little, and effectively subsidizing garbage I’ll never watch.
Industry analyst NPD Group estimates the average American’s monthly cable or satellite bill is about $86. It’s easy to blame “cable company greed”, especially considering the poor reputation many providers have when it comes to customer service, but the real reason is the individual content providers. ESPN, for example, is among the most-expensive of all cable channels, demanding about $4 per subscriber. I’d have no problem paying $4 a month for ESPN, even though I wouldn’t watch it much, because they often have live sports programming I want to see. I do NOT, however, want to pay anything to Fox News Channel, Lifetime, TLC, Food Network, OWN, Galavision, Nick Jr. or any of the other networks I will never watch under any circumstances.
So, you might ask, why are telcos so resistant to a-la-carte pricing models, allowing us to pay only for the channels we watch? The answer is pretty straightforward: the entire business model of cable / satellite TV is built on this sort of “crowdfunding”. If we only paid for channels we wanted, the big, popular networks like ESPN, Fox News Channel, USA, TBS, TNT, History and Food Network would all probably be just fine. Smaller networks -- especially those with niche audiences -- would quickly go off the air.
Fine, you say; if a network isn’t popular enough to stay, why should I have to pay for it?
I think in this case, it all comes down to choice, both perceived and real. The current “subsidy” model costs consumers a lot more, but also gives them a lot of options. It’s really quite similar to how Netflix works; obviously you’re not watching every single movie and TV series Netflix offers, but your $8 a month combined with the same amount from millions of other subscribers allows everyone to have a huge Netflix virtual library. A buy-what-you-watch model would probably leave cable / satellite with just one news channel (Fox News); one sports channel (ESPN); and a handful of general-interest channels.
While I support the idea of diversity and choice in programming, I just don’t like paying for it myself. And for that, you can blame the fact that SO MANY once-great cable networks have fallen into the death-spiral of reality show trash TV, started by MTV. Just as MTV no longer does music videos and instead offers low-cost, high-ratings visual sewage like “Jersey Shore” and “Buckwild”, Discovery has abandoned its original mission of quality science and educational programming for tripe like “Deadliest Catch” and “Property Wars” and “Moonshiners”. Whatever happened to programs about history on History? Why is TLC, nee The Learning Channel, the most anti-educational network ever created? Why was CourtTV repurposed into a low-rent TLC / Discovery / A&E knockoff as truTV?
I guess I sound like an old man here. But when the fake reality show campaign launched by New York’s PBS affiliate WNET can actually seem totally plausible, you know we really have reached the point of the vast wasteland.
