Having grown up with TV and rabbit ears I would have never thought about paying for television. Isn't that what the ads are for? In 1974 I moved to Kingston, NY and tried my hand at a roof mounted antenna. No Good! We got more ghosts than a Casper Cartoon marathon. I had to go with cable. It was a bitter pill that I had a hard time swallowing. Paying for TV? So I tried to put it into perspective, the cable company was providing me with the antenna and I was paying for the service of them delivering the service to my home. OK, that worked. I could understand that explanation. They had a vast array of capital investment and they needed to be compensated for operations, maintenance and upkeep.
Premium channels at the time were either Showtime or HBO, depending upon the cable company you had. Nobody in those early days had both, at least not here. And of course you had to pay extra for those "Premium Services." If you chose not to then you didn't spend the money.
Then, without noticing the cable companies started raising their prices and changing the overall makeup of the channels provided. I started to question, early on, about why we had all these "Sports Channels" in the basic package but you had to pay extra for educational programming. It didn't make sense to me. I like some sports, baseball, curling, Iron Man competitions but did I need ten channels of this stuff? The marketing gurus at the cable companies were pushing our youth towards a precipice of untold proportions. The sports figures making mega bucks and really doing nothing but playing some game for entertainment value gave rise to the unrealistic dream of youth who put aside their studies to seek a lotto payout with some sports franchise. These kids had a better chance of a dollar and a dream than making those seven figure figures playing some game. This should have been "Premium service," not the educational channels.
When cable first started we were paying $15 a month to start and now well over $50. The cable companies became larger, and more powerful. Big conglomerates bought up all the small systems under the guise of economies of scale will give lower prices. I can't say how many times I heard that one! Never did I see the cable bill go down. Pretty soon the wire into your house became a thing of the past. You had to rent converter boxes to watch you TV plus you had to pay a rental on the remote for the converter box.
Now I might have been born at night, but I did have my eyes open and I just can't see how we let this animal get so big it's eating us out of house and home. Let's look at the facts:
We pay for the cable or satellite service to entertain us. So if we want to see the service we are paying for we have to rent their controller and remote. We want local stations in the mix, yet the cable companies got some high pressure lobbyist in Washington to let the cable or satellite company decide what's local. Case in point, Kingston is 50 miles from Albany, NY, and 90 from New York City. New York City are the local stations, Albany are not! Another thing is the offering of channels YOU want! Well how about offering an ale carte menu of channels? Buy just what you want to watch and not pay for those channels that you don't want!
So I recently looked into this whole morass and found that the cable companies have a franchise with each municipality that allows them to operate as a monopoly in that community. So there is usually a cable commission that oversees the franchise in each community. I asked a member of the local commission about this and I was told, they have no power over regulating the cable company!
No power? The cable company comes to the community every few years to renew their franchise. It sounds like to me there should be some bargaining room here. Have the commission set the tone. Some one will have to blink. What would happen if a competing cable company would come in and offer a better arrangement? What happened to competition? I think we all need to get on our local cable commissions and demand they have the cable companies to stop fleecing us!
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