Cracks in the Tier

[SOURCE: Multichannel News 1/30, AUTHOR: R. Thomas Umstead & Linda Haugsted]
The Parents Television Council doesn't like "Family Tiers" which introduced in the last month under pressure from federal regulators, who wanted to give parents a collection of channels that would be a haven from sexual, excessively violent and profane content. Why? These cable tiers include the sometimes indecent programming aired by broadcast TV stations. This could sabotage cable’s efforts to keep Congress or the Federal Communications Commission from calling for further regulation of content on multichannel-video services, executives of major cable-system operators say in private. The biggest fear: That they'll mandate that each channel a subscriber pays for be offered on an a la carte basis -- a prospect that Oxygen Network chief executive Geraldine Laybourne has said would undo the economic model that has allowed scores of new channels to flourish in cable over the past two decades
http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6302824.html
(requires subscription)