like the AARP for geezers
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Why no lobby for cord cutters?
- Thread starter nomadcowatbk
- Start date
Why not start one?
What policy would such a group lobby for?
I suspect most cord-cutters do so because they feel the cost for services outweighs the value. There are probably a portion of these whose financial condition is such that they just could not spend any more household money but I think those would be in a minority.
So, based on cost = value I would say the objective would be to return to ala carte enabling each of us to pay for services that we would actually watch and not have to subsidize others.
So, based on cost = value I would say the objective would be to return to ala carte enabling each of us to pay for services that we would actually watch and not have to subsidize others.
I've been wondering about that cost vs value thing. The only folks in my sphere that have CATV are OVER 65. None of us "kids" or people I know have CATV, they use OTA and either stream or download from internet things to watch. It's little to do with finances, but perhaps technically it would fall into "cost vs value" but it appears to me that CATV service is for older folks- not the other way round!
kinphoenix2 said:
maybe the geezers are bigger sports fans
F
FredLeonard
Guest
No money in it.
Hiring lobbyists costs money. Wooing politicians costs money; buying politicians costs even more. Lobbies have some financial ax to grind - or some cause to support that deep pocket donors are willing to fund.
Who wants to back cord cutting? Antenna manufacturers? OK. Not Internet service providers; they are also in the "cord" business.
Hiring lobbyists costs money. Wooing politicians costs money; buying politicians costs even more. Lobbies have some financial ax to grind - or some cause to support that deep pocket donors are willing to fund.
Who wants to back cord cutting? Antenna manufacturers? OK. Not Internet service providers; they are also in the "cord" business.
Perfect name for such a club: Cutting Crew. ;D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wvHVGvyUzY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wvHVGvyUzY
FredLeonard said:
Some parts of the religious right want a la carte, but Pat Robert$on and other TV preachers think that would their ability to reach the unsaved. With the money the cord cutters think they save, they can hire some lobbyists
Weird thread. Cord cutters need a lobby to keep the FCC from shutting down broadcast tv. The agency seems help-bent on auctioning off the tv broadcast spectrum. That would be a disaster and force cord cutters back to cable or satellite.
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FredLeonard
Guest
There really is no longer any reason for wasting spectrum on OTA TV. Cord cutters are just a small percentage of the audience. Shut down OTA TV and find a better use for the bandwidth. Cable companies have cheap "basic" reception only packages.
Same with the AM and FM bands. All obsolete technology.
Same with the AM and FM bands. All obsolete technology.
FredLeonard said:
There may be valid reasons for moving on from today's OTA radio and TV but it is not because any of them are obsolete technologies. And the reasons do not apply to all equally.
Sat/cable TV cannot replace OTA TV currently. Either in technology nor in quantity. Note the number of sub-signals in virtually every major market and their lack on sat/cable. Also note that replacing OTA TV with sat/cable "basic" service does not provide the natural HDTV that OTA provides. Suddenly OTA viewers are supposed to give up HDTV for SD sat/cable AND at cost? I don't think so.
Radio is another situation entirely. Let's take AM first. The current state of AM radio is a human-caused disaster but it doesn't have to be this way. Cull out the clutter and remove the HD screeching would be a big step backward to the days when blowtorch AM's covered the nation with essential emergency capability not to mention all manner of entertainment in the meantime. FM cannot replace this capability.
FM's are the most popular technology in OTA radio today - especially the mobile receivers. It makes NO sense to get rid of this bandwidth and there is no argument that makes it so.
Which again begs the question: who'd pay the lobbyists? Individual cord-cutter households are, for the most part, cutting the cord specifically to save money. Are they going to drop a $100 or $150 monthly cable bill and then pony up, say, $50 a year to be represented in Washington by a hypothetical "OTA TV Association"? Seems unlikely.
The broadcasters themselves have motivations that are mixed at best. Sure, they want the additional viewership that comes from OTA households. But all of the networks also have significant cable interests (and in the case of Comcast/NBC and Fox, are arguably more invested in cable than in broadcast at this point) - and the big station-ownership groups now depend on retrans-consent money they get from cable as a significant part of their revenue. So they're unlikely to do much more than a token lobbying effort (as we've seen from NAB and AMST) on behalf of full-service OTA television.
Who's left that has both the motivation to lobby for OTA TV and the financial wherewithal to make it stick?
The broadcasters themselves have motivations that are mixed at best. Sure, they want the additional viewership that comes from OTA households. But all of the networks also have significant cable interests (and in the case of Comcast/NBC and Fox, are arguably more invested in cable than in broadcast at this point) - and the big station-ownership groups now depend on retrans-consent money they get from cable as a significant part of their revenue. So they're unlikely to do much more than a token lobbying effort (as we've seen from NAB and AMST) on behalf of full-service OTA television.
Who's left that has both the motivation to lobby for OTA TV and the financial wherewithal to make it stick?
Scott Fybush said:
I agree. Although I didn't drop sat "to save money" but rather to avoid wasting money. I wasn't watching enough sat to have it worth the money it cost. If prices drop substantially I might go back but that seems very unlikely. In the meantime I have found virtually everything I formerly watched on sat over the Internet in one fashion or the other and the net cost has been zero so it makes even less sense to ever consider sat again.
I realize the following comparison is over two decades so there are some obvious inequities there but consider that I paid $12/month for my C-band subscription in the early 90's for the five or so services I watched regularly. Now consider that in 2007 I paid $65/month for essentially the same services (although I received many more channels I watched none of them). That is the relative value I was speaking of earlier.
There are many options for getting the personal content you desire, and very cheaply. If the cable industry doesn't restructure their pricing to reflect this competition they will eventually lose a huge amount of revenue as the very people they want to attract are those most fluent with alternate means of reception.
FredLeonard said:
Spectrum space is only as limited as we allow it to be. The wired world is older than the broadcast world. Alexander Bell came before Marconi. Cable is inefficient and expensive. It's much cheaper and more direct to be wireless. Cut the chord! That's what Marconi wanted!
FredLeonard said:
Who let the troll in?
Seriously, broadcasting is an efficient use of spectrum -- try streaming all that data to the viewers and listeners that are watching broadcast TV and listening to FM broadcasts, and see how much bandwidth that takes.
You talk of the "cheap" packages that cable companies offer, but even at $15/month, that is still almost $200 more per year than watching off-air costs. And, of course, the only reason that package exists is because government regulation requires cable companies to offer it -- take away the regulation, and see how long that package lasts...
As for replacing radio -- radio is a medium that is generally listened to on the go, which means that eliminating FM broadcasting would force all that data over wireless services. I can only imagine the issues that would cause for listeners who have service that includes a monthly data cap...
TexasTom said:
Amen.
could cutters need a lobby keep free TV or force cable cos to offer A La Carte or standalone subscriptions of Hulu or HBO Go
nomadcowatbk said:
Several cable companies are apparently already suing their content providers for the ability to limit their services to those that actually have viewers and eliminate the current bundling. If that is successful it is only a matter of time before ala carte is restored or at least for the current tiers to get a whole lot smaller and more selective.
And when will the FCC require that cable and sat companies deliver 1080 when 1080 is broadcast?
If they were including OTA signals as a favor, I'd say they could deliver them in whatever miserable quality level they wish.
But they are charging actual money to deliver a degraded product.
Seems to me every sat and cable subscriber is due a pretty good rebate check for the restitution for data lost, hidden
or otherwise not delivered by their contracted service.
If I pay to have something delivered and 25% of the shipment is lost by the carrier, I want to submit a claim immediately.
So what's up at the FCC that no one seems to require cable/sat services to provide undegraded services?
Outages are foreseeable and arguably, "when things go wrong".
But deciding to actually throw away the customers' data in a federally regulated communications service,
well, that sounds like a criminal act to me.
If they were including OTA signals as a favor, I'd say they could deliver them in whatever miserable quality level they wish.
But they are charging actual money to deliver a degraded product.
Seems to me every sat and cable subscriber is due a pretty good rebate check for the restitution for data lost, hidden
or otherwise not delivered by their contracted service.
If I pay to have something delivered and 25% of the shipment is lost by the carrier, I want to submit a claim immediately.
So what's up at the FCC that no one seems to require cable/sat services to provide undegraded services?
Outages are foreseeable and arguably, "when things go wrong".
But deciding to actually throw away the customers' data in a federally regulated communications service,
well, that sounds like a criminal act to me.
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