The same busy little lobbyists who are doing their best to outlaw your Tivo are also hard at work preventing the Cable-TV consumer's dream: <i>A la Carte Cable</i>. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25188-2004Mar25?language=printer" title="Sorry --- No a la Carte Cable: Channel Packaging Is So Much Cheaper, Incredulous Senators Are Told" source="Washington Post">Sorry --- No a la Carte Cable</a> explains that the same people are hard at work making sure your cable bill never, ever goes down. What is "a La Carte Cable"? Imagine, if you would, a world in which you only pay for things you actually want and use. As a cable-consumer advocate put it: <iq>When I go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk, I don't have to buy a package of celery and a bunch of broccoli.</iq> The cable-subscription model we're all familiar with forces you to do just that; if you want ESPN, you probably have to order a <iq>package that includes MTV, FX, MSNBC and 33 other channels.</iq> Cox Communications Inc. President's reasoning is selfless: <bq>Expensive set-top boxes would be needed to give consumers the pick-and-choose capability, and the upgrade could cost the industry billions of dollars. Companies would inevitably be forced to pass on some or all of the expense to subscribers.</bq> Translation: cable companies are just trying to prevent our silly demands from costing us too much; they're just here to protect us from ourselves. Why do you have to have new set-top boxes? They already do a great job of preventing HBO from showing up if you haven't paid for it; can't the same be done for every channel? It's really just a billing system change, not an infrastructure change; don't be fooled. Cable companies are ready with further logical ripostes to arguments against the current model, maintaining that <iq>[u]nder the current system, consumers effectively subsidize less-popular channels, ... provid[ing] diversity in the cable and satellite universe.</iq> Let's tackle that one bit at a time. <dl dt_class="field"> Diversity? It's exactly the lack of diversity that makes subscribers want to dump large swaths of channels that all look alike and they never watch. Subsidizing? Since when do American corporations, much less large media conglamerates, support this type of socialist business model? If subscribers cared about diversity, they would pay for it, no? (just playing devil's advocate here, ... I personally think non-profitable entertainment is a necessity in a society). </dl> Cable companies gladly hide behind the 'diversity' shield while forcing consumers to purchase dozens of channels they don't want in order to get the ones they want. The channels are usually strategically placed in different packages to ensure you buy more than one. Since you're buying a package of channels, you naturally can be charged much more than if you purchased only a single channel; it's <i>your</i> choice not to watch the other channels. These types of arguments, including those that the system would cost astronomical amounts and that the cost, unfortunately, would have to pass to the consumer, are all a smokescreen. The real problem, from a cable company's standpoint, comes when a subscriber could actually get only ten channels at a dollar apiece per month (with perhaps a flat service fee for cable on top). That subscriber just went from $60 a month for cable to $30. That's the reason we're seeing such resistance to this; given the actual choice of paying 1 or 2 bucks a month for most channels, people would quickly narrow right down to the 15 or 20 channels they actually watch and that would hit profit margins pretty quickly. Another interesting side-effect would be that more channels would experience the "HBO-effect" (ever notice the shows people talk about most are on HBO?) --- they'd be forced to create better, more interesting content because people would be purchasing them directly. Higher-quality entertainment as a result of market forces --- that's the capitalist way, isn't it?