Cable Caves, and We Pay

[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Editorial Staff]
[Commentary] The move to provide "family tiers" cut the legs out from under the drive to impose decency standards on pay TV, and that's a good thing. Putting government censors onto networks such as FX and Comedy Central, which people can't watch unless they pay for cable service, flies in the face of the 1st Amendment. But cable operators aren't really empowering customers to control what comes into their homes. If they want to do that, they would offer individual networks on an a la carte basis, not just inflexible bundles of channels. Unfortunately for viewers, cable and satellite operators have little incentive to go the a la carte route. The entertainment conglomerates supplying most of the programming insist that their less-popular networks be bundled with more popular ones. The major cable operators own cable networks, too, which they want to beam into as many homes as possible for the sake of advertising revenue. These groups argue that paying for, say, eight channels on an a la carte basis would cost subscribers more than getting a package of 60 channels. Of course, most subscribers never watch most of them. Even if they wanted to offer channels a la carte, cable industry officials say their long-term contracts with networks bar such an approach, at least in the near term. Those contracts also make it difficult to assemble an attractive family tier.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-cable16dec16,1,3313855.story?coll=la-news-comment
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