NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Television's Money Complaints - 2009 and 1974
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I
remember the ads back in the 60’s if not earlier. What makes it strange,
aside from using pay-movie theaters as the venue is that Pay-TV was an
additional option and wasn’t taking away from broadcast. As I kid I
remember being puzzled about what they were complaining about but knew that
they did not have my best interests at heart. I note at the tail end of your video
it says “and cable TV”. What did a kid in Brooklyn know about this “cable”? Roll
ahead to the present and if Comcast owns NBC then will they continue to charge
TWC the same rates as NBC did before being owned by Comcast? What about the
reverse, TWC’s HBO et al over Comcast? As gamers, in the mathematical
sense, the best strategy is to both charge each other high prices. Sort of like
patents as trading cards among the large corporations. You
don’t need to control the market – a set of companies with similar
business models owning all the silos will achieve the same effect and the
prices you charge each other net out as if they were arbitrary transfer costs. The
question is whether the FCC can start to apply the 6” dish rule in the
sense that you must have the option of subscribing directly over IP for the
equivalent to a deal you can get by subscribing over cable. I don’t
believe in a la carte pricing for TV any more than being able to get a better
price at a restaurant by asking for 25% less peas. But
today’s vertical integration is something different – there is no
longer a necessary connection between the transport and the content. We needn’t
accept the bundling the cost of the infrastructure with the price of the
service. We should go back to the IBM consent decree that was used to limit IBM’s
bundling of hardware and software and to the lessons of the separation of TCP
and IP to the limit the ability to require such bundling for content/transport.
The economic benefits of such decoupling were high enough to have a major
impact on the economy and society. Imagine if we were still limited to IBM’s
software and the carriers’ content? We
should also apply the same idea to subsidizing cell phones but that’s a
different discussion. -----Original Message-----
Television's Money Complaints - 2009 and 1974
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000649.html Greetings. Comcast's plans to buy NBC Universal are
widely viewed as largely an effort to obtain a particular category of
assets -- NBC's cable networks. The battles between the massive dominant cable TV firms
(and the large satellite TV delivery systems) vs. the network and local
TV programming suppliers (both over-the-air broadcast and
not) has turned into a continuing war. On one hand, cable and satellite generally want as much
programming as possible at the lowest possible cost (ideally
free). Networks and local stations would prefer to be paid, and the use of
mandatory packages ("if you want this network, you have to
take all of these as well") has further complicated the issues. By the way, this is a different (though somewhat
analogous) situation from what cable and satellite subscribers face when
choosing among different programming packages. However, I am not
at this time a supporter of proposed rules to force a la carte
programming, since I fear it will undercut the subsidies that keep various
excellent niche networks alive, which generally don't have large
audiences relative to the big movie and sports networks. With the addition of Internet video viewing into the mix,
the concentration of power represented by -- for example --
Comcast owning cable networks that its competitors would also want to
distribute is an obvious problem. But for now, the cable big boys are complaining again
about the costs of programming, and Time Warner Cable in particular has
now deployed the increasingly common approach of trying to scare
subscribers into helping with TWC's negotiations. TWC has started running a spot urging subscribers to vote
on whether TWC should "roll over" or "get
tough" in their negotiations, and warns of threatened programming cutoffs. But amusingly, back at the dawn of cable TV, the roles
were reversed, with broadcast TV urging viewers -- even through ads
running in movie theaters -- to fight against pay TV and cable TV.
Deja vu all over again! So let's see how much has really changed over 35 years or
so. I've put together a short video including both the current TWC
spot and a classic anti-cable ad from around 1974. (Apologies
for the abrupt start and ending of the second clip -- time is not
generous to ancient videotapes.) By the way, I'm still trying to figure out which of the
most recent presidential candidates the voice-over artist for the TWC
spot was voicing ads for. Television's Money Complaints - 2009 and
1974 (Video) http://bit.ly/8OMNWB (YouTube) Once again we see that in many ways, the more things
change, the more they stay the same. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren@vortex.com Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility -
http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad -
http://www.nnsquad.org Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein |