Bill Horne Verizon's Latest Plan For Cable Fees Could Lower Your Cable Bill -- Eventually > > By Alexis Kleinman > > What if, instead of paying for all of the hundreds of channels that > your cable provider offers when you sign up, you could choose exactly > which ones you want? That's definitely a dream of most cable > subscribers, riled by ever-high fees. And while Verizon isn't ready to > start offering a-la-carte channels, a new plan of theirs, reported in > The Wall Street Journal, could take us one step closer to making that > dream a reality.
Good luck with that. I worked in the retail end of CATV industry for
25 years and I've been writing about it for another dozen years since I retired. "The dream of most cable subscribers" is also the dream of many CATV retailers.Retailers are companies that sell video services to end consumers; e.g., franchised cable TV companies, non-franchised "private cable" companies, telephone companies (Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse), and satellite TV companies (DirecTV and Dish Network).
Programmers are companies that produce video programming and provide it to retailers. Programmers fall into three categories: - Television broadcast stations. - PEG (Public Access, Educational Access, Government Access) channels. - Non-broadcast channels.
In any discussion of a-la-carte, the programmers hold the winning hand:
- Broadcast station licensees have a legal right to force retailers to carry their signals on the basic tier.
- Broadcast licensees have federally-mandated geographic markets ("Designated Market Area" or DMA). In any other industry, this arrangement would be called a "geographic monopoly." In the upside-down world of television broadcasting, it's called "consumer protection."
- CATV franchising authorities have a legal right to force retailers to carry PEG channels on the basic tier.
- Any programmer that owns non-broadcast programming *and* a broadcast station licensee has a legal right to force retailers to carry the non-broadcast programming on the basic tier as a condition for granting retransmission consent for the broadcast signal.
As I've noted before in this space, if Verizon or any other retailer wants to offer programming a-la-carte, it has to start by getting Congress to repeal the grotesquely misnamed "Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992" and companion legislation governing satellite retailers.
All that said, I have some doubt that a-la-carte would actually lower retail prices anyway. My narrative about that is at:
Neal McLain