My Current Situation

As a result of the Adelphia bankruptcy, Time Warner Cable and Comcast have agreed to re-adjust their territories in the LA area. As a result, my old Comcast service has gone away and it's been replaced by TWC. Up until this past week, the change has been meaningless to me, but as of the beginning of this month, TWC has adjusted their channel lineup "for my convenience."

Of course, it's not really for my convenience at all.

Cable companies make their money two ways. They get you to pay to have the service delivered, and they get the various networks to pay to be included in their service. If I'm watching the Discovery channel (as I often am) you can bet it's because somebody at Discovery struck a deal with TWC to be included in the service. It might be a straight cash payment, or a revenue share on ads, or some other mechanism, but you can bet that TWC is getting a cut.

How much of a cut varies of course. If you're ESPN, you probably don't have to give much of a cut at all. TWC knows damn well that a good chunk of their subscribers would cut and run for satellite if the ESPN service disappeared. Their negotiating leverage is limited and ESPN's is big. The opposite is probably true of the History Channel.

So, when they suddenly take a nice, relatively compact 200 channel lineup and spread it out over 500 channels, it's not because it's "for your convenience." It's because it gives them lots more of those nice round numbers which they can sell to their content providers, for a nice steep fee. Want to be channel 101, pay up, or else you're channel 147 and only part of some obscure package that nobody will buy.

They also tell me that by concentrating different types of programming in different defined ranges, they'll make my life more convenient. I guess they've never paid attention to how people really channel surf, or use their TVs. Most of our surfing is a lot more like the iPod shuffle feature than anything else. I don't know anybody who goes out and just surfs the sports, or news, or entertainment "sections." We surf randomly, and typically tend to focus on a limited set of stations across all categories.

Want to make my life more convenient? Allow me to select which channels will show up on my surfing list. Just like I could years ago when I was still allowed to use my TV's tuner instead of the cable box. Of course, it means that only 20 stations or so will be in my list, and it would really piss off all those channels who are paying for access to me if I could just block them out of my mind so easily.

And if you really wanted to make things convenient for me, you'd allow me to assign the channel numbers myself, just like I assign presets on my radio, my satellite radio and virtually every other device I own. Oh yeah, that would fuck up your business model of charging networks for "better" channel numbers.

[Growing up overseas I got used to the fact that channel numbers were pretty much yours to set. Each station -- and there weren't many -- had a frequency, and each TV had a bunch of buttons that could each be tuned to whatever frequency you wanted. The station you watched most was usually "1", the second favorite usually "2" and so on. The US decided that allowing people to pick their own numbers was too complicated. I suspect that this concept will die a long and miserable death too, as ultimately freedom will reign.]

But as Cody has been saying, this is changing. These guys are missing on earnings, in part because the internet generation is less and less likely to pay flat fees for all sorts of programming they will only use occasionally or never. We want choice, not crap forced down our throats, and the increased expectation is that we should get it.

Yes, these guys will also try to force this model on the internet by quashing net neutrality and giving bandwidth to their favored partners. It'll be a fight for the next couple of years but eventually it'll be a moot point. With increasing numbers of WiFi hotspots, an upcoming WiMax rollout in major urban areas, and more and more condo and homeowner associations just going out and leasing T1s to be shared by their residents, these guys will find themselves in an increasingly competitive field. I suspect that ultimately we'll have some form of "pay for service," where you'll pick a level of service and price that are appropriate to your use. But the concept of the cable or phone company as the arbiter of what entertainment you can get into your home will disappear, and as Cody notes, that will suck for their margins.

So, to make my life easier, and frankly in recognition of how little good stuff is out there to begin with, I'm going to take advantage of their new plans to drop lots of things I don't want or need. I figure I can drop my cable bill by about 30% without experiencing much pain.

• Going to drop "Howard TV" which I had signed up for on an early trial subscription and allowed to continue. I still love Howard on the radio, and won't ever drop Sirius so long as he's there, but the selection of bits for his on-demand pay service is pretty lame. For the one or two things I really want to see, it'll be cheaper to just buy them individually.
• Probably going to drop HBO. This one's a tough choice as there are a couple of shows that I like, but HBO unfortunately runs pretty short seasons. When you add up the number of hours I watch and compare to the amount I'm paying, it comes out to more than a movie for each of the new episodes they put on each year. And Entourage really has kind of been sucking. From the perspective of this LA resident, it was funny when it mocked Hollywood, stopped being so when it became part of the "hot" establishment.
• For now, going to drop to a slightly lower level of internet throughput. I find that I'm not really getting what I'm paying for now. I suspect that by dropping to "only" 2mbs service, I may find myself actually getting what I pay for.
• Going to be really picky about the tiers that I want. This will mean losing a bunch of channels I don't watch, mostly sports, but won't be missed.

More on this after I try it. Either way, TWC will make less money from me.

-btc