Cable TV A La Carte Part 2

Ravi Swamy writes "Here's a followup article in Business Week to the Cable TV A La Carte story from last month. For those who actually read the story it was only A La Carte if you wanted to add HBO. Apparently cable companies don't know about the law or are going to reclassify HBO as a 'tier' instead of as a channel to get around the law."

Other Excuse

[jhunsake]

I just received a letter about this today. However they (Mediacom) don't mention the federal law at all, they blame it on the local authority. That's the first three sentences. Then the rest (a full page) is advertisement for their digital stuff, of course.

Previous story

[CoolQ]

For those of you who are sick of using the search "feature", here is the previous story, "Cable TV A La Carte?":

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/07/138248 [slashdot.org]

Re:Our legal system

[LostCluster]

The law is a good law. The problem is, the cable companies are dragging their feet a tech standard that once in place will end this racket.

Here's the rule: The only tier everybody has to buy is the "basic" tier, and the local regulators get to set the price of that tier. By law, that tier must contain the local broadcasters and local access stations, and usually that's all it contains.

Every other tier has to be sold one-by-one. Multi-tier discounts are illegal. They can't make you get the "digital basic" tier in order to get HBO... they can't even make you get the analog standard tier.

But in order to get anything digital off the system, you need a digital decoder. And right now, the digital decoders are a closed spec, so the only place you can get it is to rent it from the cable company. This is why it seems like you have to buy a $10.99 "digital basic" package in order to keep your HBO subscription. Really, you're paying $10/mo to rent the reciever, and 99 cents for the useless channels. You can drop the useless channels and keep your 99 cents, but there's not much you can do about the equipment rental...

However, the FCC is requiring the cable companies to come up with a standard for digital cable boxes, so that you can buy the hardware at your local electronics store, and then they hit it with the authorization codes telling it what it can and can't decode. This'll mean you can buy your way out of that decoder rental fee, and only pay for the content tiers you want.

Of course, technical problems are very easy to find when you want to roadblock a project, so the cable companies have an interest in keeping the decoder setup the way it is now. Hopefully lawmakers will put an end to this feet dragging soon.

Re:Default Service for Cable Modem Users

[WillRobinson]

Most cable co's will let you have your cable modem and also basic cable for 10$ per month more. So just call them up, and cough up 10$ a month, and dont feel guilty.

Re:Wait.......cable isn't FREE?

[Rick_T]

> Cable companies have audit teams who check the
> taps for illegal hookups. There's no easy press
> a button at the office solution, but they can
> catch you.

I'm not convinced that the threatening letters they send out aren't random mailings. I got a "we think you're stealing cable" letter addressed to "Occupant" once from a cable company in a town I used to live in. While it's true that I was at the time receiving Showtime and the "basic" channels, it was over a satellite dish. In fact, I'd been using the satellite dish for about FOUR YEARS at that point, and anyone who cared to look into the back yard could have seen it.

I also had an attic-mounted antenna for the local channels. That, I'd only had about a year or two (as an upgrade over the rabbit ears) when the cable company's letter came.

Re:Our legal system

[LostCluster]

The crazy thing is, broadcasters can demand payment for being retransmitted by cable companies... their "free signal" isn't so free when you get it over cable even at the wholesale level. What's more, if a a cable company deems a station that pumps out religous programming that hardly anybody watches as having negative value, the broadcast can then demand that the cable company take the channel for free with no way to turn it down.

Re:Legislation isn't needed!

[arkanes]

Except, of course, it wouldn't. As with any industry with a high barrier to entry, the current providers can lock out newcomers. The whole reason we decided to have local monopolies in the first place was so that there'd be some benefit in actually rolling out the wire - how many cable providers do you think there'll be when each and every one needs to run it's own cable network? A regulated monopoly is much better than an unregulated one.

Sure, we could have a "regulated breakup", like with the baby bells, where people who own the cable are required to allow others to provide service over that wire. We saw how well that worked out with DSL, right?