A la carte cable

[mjlarochelle]

Rogers has been test-marketing a la carte cable options for its subscribers in London, Ontario. I have read one review of this so far, and it isn't good:

http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2011/12/08/cable-tv-plan-designed-to-fail-reader/

Great idea, poor execution.

 

[chrish]

Real a la carte cable would be great, I would keep about 125 Comcast channels and dump the other 500 useless crapola waste of bandwidth signals that no one
really watches but we are made to pay for. Can you imagine if we did not have to susidize sports channels the team owners and players would be brought down to reality.... fast. They are nothing but spoiled bastards

 

[spunker88]

When analog cable gets shut off it will be pretty easy for cable providers to provide a la carte cable. Unfortunately it would force you to have a cable box for each TV with only locals being available on clear QAM. Everything else would be encrypted QAM that would require a cable box, but the technology is there to make it a la carte. Channels that demand more money from cable companies would cost higher such as ESPN here in the states. There could be channel bundle packages that would give you cheaper rates then buying them individually (sports, movies, cartoons, etc). But the individual option would be there, and with an on screen programming guide it would be pretty easy to buy/cancel channels.

 

[landtuna]

Rogers has been test-marketing a la carte cable options for its subscribers in London, Ontario. I have read one review of this so far, and it isn't good:

http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2011/12/08/cable-tv-plan-designed-to-fail-reader/

Great idea, poor execution.

Agreed. Over 25 years ago, when the C and Ku-band dishes were popular, there was an online and foolproof way of adding/canceling subscriptions which did not have any of the drawbacks illustrated in the blog. Any company which requires their customers to go through a phone bank to switch services is not going to make people happy - and, not to mention, increase their cost of doing business.

One of the other things mentioned in the blog was that certain services required a package or were priced differently when subscribed without. ESPN was in that category back then. My programmer used to require a minimum of five other services before they would offer ESPN at an ala carte price.

It was the difference between $60 per year then and $600 per year now. There is some gain due to inflation and new services but it was a much better deal than today.