What Will It Take To Make Cheap Over-The-Top TV Viable?

[Commentary] The problem lies in the definition of what’s anti-competitive. In a digital universe of nearly unlimited channel capacity, programmers may be making it difficult for new distributors to enter the market, but they’re not hurting their own competitors, ie. other programmers. Therefore past case law has determined that the practice of “tying,” as bundling is termed for antitrust purposes, is legal for TV programmers just as it’s legal to bundle together short stories into collections or songs into albums.

Of course, you can buy songs individually. While many artists were initially reluctant to make their songs available a la carte on iTunes, they knew getting paid 70 cents or $1.40 for them was better than having them pirated and getting nothing. Programmers and the media conglomerates that own them make the expected noises about piracy of television shows, but press them a little and they’ll admit they don’t take it all that seriously. The current model is just too profitable for them to risk changing just to catch the extra leakage of demand that piracy satisfies. That may change as cord-cutting accelerates, and as new services like Aereo make it easier to enjoy a relatively satisfying TV experience for far, far less than it costs to get cable or satellite