The meter is running
There’s been talk (but no discernible action) for several years about “unbundling” cable: instead of this tier and that, you buy just the channels you want, à la carte. Since all I ever watch is the handful of local stations, the occasional telenovela, and Fox Sports — they carry our NBA team — I might like this notion on philosophical grounds. The industry, however, resists the idea, making arguments like this:
Without carriage on broad tiers, startup and niche programming wouldn’t be able to attract advertising and would quickly wither away, leaving consumers with fewer choices. In addition, as audiences fragment among all the channels, plummeting advertising rates would force surviving networks to raise the license fees they charge cable companies. Those higher fees would in turn get passed right along to customers, increasing the price of each individual channel.
And, of course, as everyone knows, cable companies hate raising prices.
McGehee proposes an alternative plan:
What I would prefer above all is a metering system: bill me for the time I am either watching TV or receiving it to my DVR. Use what I pay to reimburse the channels I watched or recorded.
I think we’re going to wind up with that anyway, though in a different form: cable service and Internet service via cable will eventually fuse into a single service. It’s all just bandwidth, after all, and they have no qualms about metering bandwidth — whether or not there are any additional costs involved as usage increases.
McGehee »
7 June 2009 · 4:28 pm
When it comes to pay-TV though, the content is not just bandwidth, it’s somebody’s intellectual property. Right now the providers have to pay a blanket rate for access and that’s why they charge for access. What they charge, though, is determined by statistical sampling.
Metering actual content takes the guesswork out of the equation. Seems to me the strongest argument against it would therefore be the content sources whose intellectual property only makes money because of Mr. Nielsen’s margin-of-error.