There’s been a lot of talk lately as to whether some form of a la carte pricing on cable would be good or bad for consumers. The idea here is that we get big bundles of channels from our cable provider. As a subscriber, you might have a choice of two or three levels of service, but no choice as to which channels come within that block of service. Don’t want five flavors of VH1 or ESPN, but do want all of the History channel options? Too bad. If they are packaged together, you have to take all of them to get any of them.
Local cable providers, such as Verizon and Cablevision, are in a similar position, according to the Washington Post. They want to offer subscribers the popular Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon, but don’t necessarily want to be paying for little watched channels like VH1 Classic or the gay-themed Logo.
Cecilia Kang reports that Verizon and Cablevision are pressuring media companies, such as those owned by Viacom, to give the cable providers more leeway in choosing just the channels their viewers watch.
The counter-argument content providers make is that the bundles make small, less popular alternative channels available to viewers, and that if cable providers only carried the most popular channels, there would be much less diversity coming out of the cable box.
The problem here is that cable/satellite TV prices are climbing rapidly, and consumers – especially younger consumers – are turning to streaming sources like Netflix for a cheaper video fix than their getting from cable.
Given that this fight is going on between content giants and cable service giants, it can be a bit hard to tell who is really trying to best serve the needs of consumers. (My guess would be neither…)