An anonymous reader writes "A bill introduced this week would force cable operators to offer à la carte cable and so-called family-tiers of service. Those opting for à la carte programming would get refunds on their cable bill, but the legislation would also extend broadcast indecency standards to cable and satellite TV for the first time: 'In accordance with the indecency and profanity policies and standards applied by the [FCC] to broadcasters, as such policies and standards are modified from time to time, not transmit any material that is indecent or profane on any channel in the expanded basic tier of such distributor except between 10pm and 6am.' As Ars points out, 'With the parental controls built into every television set, set-top box, and DVR being sold these days, the need for such legislation seems questionable at best. Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite.'"
But if they can't sustain themselves, why would you continue paying to produce it? Unless you're doing non-profit, why would you support a company policy that said "Hey, we're just gonna spend a lot of money and go further in debt, just in order to make 0.5% of the population happy." Seriously, not all indy is good either. If something is valued by people, then it should bring in more support than it requires to produce. If it isn't, unless you had money to blow, why would you keep it going?
But if they can't sustain themselves, why would you continue paying to produce it?
I understand your point, but it's not really a valid one. If it was, not only would you only ever hear Britney Spears on the radio, it's all you *could* ever hear *anywhere*.
The problem is a lot of stuff starts out "indie" that becomes mainstream later. Almost by definition, most experiments fail. The ones that succeed, though, are the ones that drive the mainstream forward. So a lot of money must be lost in order for money to be gained over the long term. How do you think bands like Coldplay and U2 were initially financed? They didn't pay for themselves at first; they were financed by people like Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Same goes for TV talent. You've gotta run before you can walk.
With a-la carte pricing, I guarantee channels like IFC and Sundance Channel will die. You may not watch those channels, so you personally may not care. But is the point of a-la carte pricing to bring us less choice? Is that the goal we should be working towards?
You don't necessarily pay for those channels. They are bundled by the studio/broadcaster that owns them into one purchase. The more channels a studio has, the more advertisements they can sell.
Think of Nickelodeon or Disney. They have their main channels. They pay money to either get, or produce shows for those main channels. Does Nicktoons, and ToonDisney pay that same money again to rerun them? No, but the studio does get another channel to sell advertisement slots on. The more impressions, the more money they bring in.
So, we go a-la-carte, no one buys Nicktoons, because they want all the programming, not just the cartoons, on Nickelodeon. No one watches Nicktoons, advertisers won't buy slots on Nicktoons, soon, it goes away. The extra revenue generated by another channel that really didn't have much expense is lost. Nickelodeon now costs more to recoup those loses in order to cover their production costs.
TV Viewers need to understand, it's not the cable company that's forcing them to get every channel offered under one package. Whoever owns a particular channel requires the cable provider to bundle them all together, and asks for a specific amount per viewer for all of the channels together. If they are forced to allow cable providers to offer them individually, each channel you want will end up costing more overall than if you just got then entire bundle to begin with.
What about the choice not to pay for channels we don't watch?
I agree. Although I'm not nearly as concerned with this as I am with the "indecency" regulation; censorship isn't a good idea under any circumstances, it is distressing to see it creep further into the realm of acceptability. It is also distressing to see how little commentary has been made here with regard to it, at least thus far. I don't want a small group of people regulating what everyone else can see. If people don't like something, the
With a-la carte pricing, I guarantee channels like IFC and Sundance Channel will die. You may not watch those channels, so you personally may not care. But is the point of a-la carte pricing to bring us less choice? Is that the goal we should be working towards?
I don't know about you, but around these parts I pay for 80+ channels and watch 2 of them. Maybe. About 1/3 are foriegn language stations. Another 1/5 are sports related, then you have the MTV channels. There are about 5 selling/auction channels. The rest are made up of gardening/home channels and the basics. I don't really want to pay for any of those, and have a moral problem supporting some of them ( MTV ).
I'd be OK with less choices; If it ended up with me not having anything to watch on TV, I'd be ok with that. It's just not that important.
With a-la carte pricing, I guarantee channels like IFC and Sundance Channel will die.
Dear lord, if channels have such poor viewership that they cannot survive without being tied to some bundle then let them die. Just because the channel is not mainstream does not mean it's some artistic endeavor worth saving.
You may not watch those channels, so you personally may not care.
That's right, I don't watch them and I don't care.
But is the point of a-la carte pricing to bring us less choice? Is that the goal we should be working towards?
What goal? Since when did all cable subscribers start working towards a goal? My goal is to pay for what I watch, and only what I watch. In the past, when I had cable before I got sick of all the retarded bundling, I was paying for 125 channels + 4 digital packages just to watch the six stations I really want. I don't really know what you are talking about when you mean "choice", but forcing me to get all those channels is not much of a choice. In fact I made the choice to cancel my cable over a year ago.
That bothers me too. I support a la carte cable. I had my cable cancelled a few months back becasue I was paying $80 to get 60+ channels (&HD) and really only watched about 8 channels.
But with a la carte cable might feel they have to go the way of network TV and try to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator instead of their niche audience. Which would destroy the entire reason cable is worth having in the first place...
Actually, I think the opposite may be true. Currently, it is difficult to target a niche audience because you, as a television channel, have to convince broadcasters to add your content to their lineup. It is a risky venture for cable companies. They don't know if their viewers really want the content.
With a la carte, cable companies have little to risk about adding a channel since they can pay for what their customers use. N subscribers makes them pay $N for the channel.
Channels will have to continually produce content for their viewers, too, or customers will sign up for the months when new content is on and cancel afterward, much like many people do with HBO/Shotime/etc. Of course, this can also bring in a new market sector of channels: those that are only on air for a few months out of the year, reducing operating costs and having a very strong profit for the few months they are on air showing good content.
I don't, however, like this getting tied in with even more indecency laws. Laws and indecency have nothing to do with one another, even for broadcasters. If we allowed anything on air and current statiosn suddenly went apeshit and started swearing about the mother fucking fire on main street that caused the anchor to be late for mother fucking work while blaming it on those shithead firemen a new market sector would instantly appear: the moderated, tame, channels. Especially if we had a la carte.
The indy channels disappeared a long time ago. What you think of as "indy" channels are just the media monopolies doing odd stuff to try to capture niche audiences. The real indy channels went away when the MMs used their clout to force the cable companies to buy big bundles of channels. ("If you want to carry the local Fox station, you have to carry our new FX channel too. Yes, we know there's nothing on it yet. We'll worry about that later.") That left no room for all the weird little cable channels you used to see: the channels run by obscure religious sects, the public-domain movie channels (I saw the entire work of Ed Wood on one of those!), the Flat Earth society channel, the origami fetish channel...
Of course, these bundles aren't cheap, which is why cable rates are so ridiculous.
I think the folks that want alacart (I insist on spelling it that way, given the context) aren't interested in saving money or "protecting" their kids. They are just are pissed off that some of their money is going to pay for "un-Christian" content. In other words, this is just another lame "culture wars" battle that has no relation to the real world.
I still don't understand how/why they bundle fundementally different concepts into one bill. You can't get a stop sign at the end of your street unless you also vote for new garbage bins for the courthouse...what??
It forces those voting on a bill to make a decision about how bad they want one thing versus how bad they don't want the other.
And it works both ways. Someone who initially would be dead-set against a bill is more inclined to do so if they get something that they do want in return for a yes vote.
Now I'm even more confused. If you can get any channel you want a la carte, then why do you need to impose indecency regs on channels. I could almost see the logic when you had to get Spike and TNT in order to get Nickelodeon for the kids, but now if you can cherry pick the safe channels you specifically want (and as such, pick the not so safe at your discretion), you should do away with the regs and let the market sort out what people are willing to pay for.
Now I'm even more confused. If you can get any channel you want a la carte, then why do you need to impose indecency regs on channels.
How else can you get people to voluntarily give up their 1st Amendment right, without promising to ease up a bit on the cable monopoly. And it works too, just the other day this guy politely asked me to voluntarily give up my wallet, and he promised he wouldn't shoot me, thus saving my life.
The sections talking about a la carte service are there to distract people from the real meat of the legislation, allowing the FCC to censor cable channels. Currently the FCC's able to censor over the air broadcasters quite well, restricting the information that they are allowed to push to their viewers. They do not have this ability with cable channels and I suspect that they desperately want it.
Just think about it, over the air broadcasters are unable to show or talk about certain things (eg. horrors of war, human sexuality). As a result, it becomes much easier to control what people believe about certain things. Cable channels do not have this sort of restriction, so they're able to get this information out to their subscribers/viewers/listeners.
If the FCC is allowed to censor cable and satellite (and Internet?) content along with traditional television and radio broadcasts, then they will become the information gatekeepers for the majority of Americans.
"A bill introduced this week would force cable operators to offer à la carte cable and so-called family-tiers of service.
à la carte cable, good now those garbage channels will finally die. restrictions on profanity etc. no, half the good scifi/action etc. shows have this in them. I like the idea of being able to cut out garbage channels and get a nice refund back for it but I dont like the idea of anyone telling me what I can and can not watch at the times they specify. Let me choose what I want to watch and keep your slimy tentacles off my remote.
...when we complained about the FCC's censorship, we were told: Oh, you can get cable if you want uncensored stuff.
And they they started labeling everything and building controls into TVs to filter by rating. That was okay, because they told us, with everything labeled, people could complain less about 'inappropriate' things, because, after all, everything's rated.
Look, we've given those fascist 'think of the children' asshats every damn thing they wanted, and, magically, they always want more. It is trivial to filter content from children at this point, via broadcast or cable. We should be reducing such general restrictions, not adding to them, because we've added specific abilities to filter to end users. There's no logical reason we should be extending restrictions them to cable.
The one conclusion is that they wish to keep such content from adults.
You know what? Media companies need to start labeling everything TV-MA. Everything. All channels, all shows, are now listed as bad as possible. You can either live and operate as an adult when interacting with the TV, or you can not ever watch anything ever again. Your choice.
We tired, God knows we tried, but you fascist assholes either mindbogglingly stupid you can't avoid the carefully labelled content we've made, or deliberately don't want to. We're just going to have to draw the line in the sand, and label everything as 'hardcore porn' so you will shut the hell up. If people want cable, or, hell, wish to purchase a TV, they get handed a form that they have to flip past ten pages of porn to sign, and certify that they consent to have the filthiest things possible beamed directly into their and their children's brain.
Of course, TV would remain the same, with different shows aimed at different audiences, but we'd have a lot less assholes whining about it, because there would be huge clear warnings that 'The following show contains every bad thing on earth. Do not watch it under any circumstances.'
...hey, South Park actually has that warning. Hmmm.
I am now basically convinced that only people from an engineering field should be allowed to draft laws. Why? Things like this. All it will end up doing is driving up the costs of cable service, undermining the buying power of families.
But politicians are, in general, too stupid to understand that. So are the American people, in general, because they keep electing leaders who are leading us toward national economic suicide. More regulations, more taxes. Gee, you wonder why jobs are leaving America? Could it be the cost of compliance with every asinine regulation that some moron drafts?
Sheesh. The people who are too lazy to regulate their own kids' use of TV will love this. They'll get their "family tier," only it'll probably cost them about $20-$30 more per month than the current system costs.
Then they'll institute price controls because these same whiners will demand $45-$50 or less. Then, the cable companies will make less money per customer, weakening their position.
I have never been impressed by my Engineering friends' patience for the disturbing capacity of the human organism to frustrate expected error tolerances; they tend to expect things to work in regular and predictable ways (with easily twiddlable control values). Individual humans are bad enough in this respect, but in aggregate, human beings are frustratingly difficult to predict in their behaviors and constructing systems for channeling and mediating those behaviors have unexpected and often catastrophic failures.
When you stop and think about it, law and legislation is very much like engineering; just with none of the convenient physical laws and thresholds to depend upon when designing the machines for operation. The engineering mindset, however, tends to value efficiency above all other qualities, and efficiency is not the primary goal of legislation; there are other things of value to be preserved in human-government interactions that would undoubtedly be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.
I do agree that this particular legislation sucks lots, though. Doesn't take an enginner to figure that out.
Unlike broadcast television, which is available to anyone with a TV and an antenna, people subscribe to and pay for cable/satellite.
The author has never lived in a concrete apartment building with nothing but cable available. When *I* lived in such places (and a few others that had bad broadcast reception for other reasons), I had the option of not subscribing, which meant absolutely no TV, or maybe a couple of snowy channels.
I'm not commenting on the article in general. I just thought that particular stat
and yes, the sets have "parental controls." However:
The parents don't use those controls,
Therefore the Government has to step in For the Sake of the Children!
There are rumors that one reason the parental controls aren't being used is because the parents who want them are also dependent on their children to set them up.
The controls are worthless, because there is no independent standard by which a show is judged. What does TV14 mean? Well, Disney defines it one way and Viacom another. Heck, the same network isn't always consistent. I'm pretty sure I think this "decency" provision is a bad idea, but the cable channels have in part brought this on themselves. The people who care what their kids watch have trouble knowing if it meets their definition of appropriate.
I suspect that letting people choose what channels they wan
Indeed, that's the reason we agreed to allow them to mandate those chips in the first place. The far right mandated that we (the consumer) foot the bill for a small minority of parents who are not only horrified that their poor children might be permanently scarred by words that are no worse than the things they'd hear on the playground, but also are unwilling to monitor their own kids and what they watch on TV. (This is, of course, assuming that these parents ever really even existed, but for now, I'll g
This violates free speech plain and simple. They managed to slip this crap through on radio by claiming that broadcast radio was pushed out to consumers. Supposedly this meant that broadcasts were equivalent to yelling in the street. That was a fairly lame argument since you had to make an intentional effort to actually hear those broadcasts but whatever. Cable TV doesn't even meet that shady criteria. You actually have to pay to have a wire run into your home and pay a subscription to receive it. Cable TV is like speaking privately in your home. In your home YOU and not the public and not the FCC decide what content you want to purchase.
Cable companies and content producers should ignore this. If the FCC tried to claim to that they are a higher authority than the constitution they would quickly be put in their place by the courts. This provides an excellent window of opportunity to get rid of all the censorship the FCC has forced upon television.
What is the rationale for the Free Speech infringement here?
With broadcast regs, it is reasoned that the airwaves are a limited public resource. Thus, the public supposedly has a right to regulate content broadcast over it.
But cable is neither a limited, nor a public resource. And I don't gather that satellite is either. So how does the Congress get around the First Amendment and regulate their content?
Congress can try all they like, but there's basically no difference from a first amendment perspective between censoring cable, and censoring any other subscription based press medium.
In other words, if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of censoring cable, say goodbye to the first amendment. Normally I'd say this was impossible, but with the extreme right leaning of the court these days, anything is possible.
A la carte good, censorship bad. They don't have much leg to stand on since cable isn't broadcast on public spectrum and satellite already has special permission to broadcast "indecent" content so long as it is scrambled or encrypted. There's no way the satellite lobby will let the congress-criters take this away.
Cable rates have increased at 6 times the rate of inflation this decade, it's insane.
I want cable, but I don't want to scroll through 200 channels of crap I'll never watch (MTV, VH1, Lifetime, Oxygen, the fucking Golf channel... these are my opinions, keep your flames).
I do want to watch the Hitlery, er--I mean, History Channel (when it's not about WWII), History International, the Discovery networks, Comedy Central, and a few select others. Give me my 20 or so channels that I actually want at $1 each, and I'll be happy.
I'm still subscribing, and there are still commercials, so the only people who lose from censoring cable are the majority of people who aren't offended by OMGBOOBIEZ!!!111one on the National Geographic channel. If you don't like it, turn back to the 700 Club.
The premium channels (HBO, Showtime, Skinemax, etc) are the ones they likely want to censor, and these are the ones you have to effectively subscribe to twice.
The FCC is not my kid's parent, I am. Don't impugn my ability to perform my parental duties, you pseudo-family-values fascists. I suspect that they want to do this to increase DVD sales.
A major reason why I pay for premium channels is so I can watch things like Penn & Teller Bullshit! and Orgazmo. If pay cable has to be just like the three major networks of old then I'm dropping my cable like a hot rock. You hear that cable operators?; I'm not the only one who pays to see things the more public networks can't show. Lobby this one down pronto.
I pulled the plug on my TV about 2 years ago. Not bragging about it, I just got upset about a $40 a month fee, biased news, empty programming, endless reruns, series based on previous series that were based on...., series based on commercials, 20+ minutes of commercials in an hour show.
I took about 6 months to get use to being without the TV. I am busy enough with my normal life now that I would not want to lose the hours I use to spend watching it. It's strange now when I am at a friend's house while their TV is on, I get mesmerized / hypnotize by it, all intelligent thought is removed.
A lot of people find it enjoyable; great for them, I found it to be an addiction.
Would all those great shows like the Sopranos, Sex in the city, Deadwood, etc ever been possible had HBO been worrying whether or not they're hurting all of those beautiful minds in the heartland?
Certainly not, they'd have been too risky.
Matter of fact, this is just another example of a bunch of lawyers (i.e., Congress) creating a lot of makework. That's all this is: yet another Congressional subsidy to the corporate attorney crowd, as if Sarbanes-Oxley and intellectual property (hah!) weren't enough. We're at the point where no company can take a breath (much less create something worthwhile) without having to consult some lawyer and have him pass on the idea. Which he won't, with laws like this on the books, because if he did, he wouldn't be doing his job.
Regarding "decency" laws: what is it about certain people that they feel the need to force their pattern for living upon everyone else? I just want to grab one of these idiots by the throat, shake him a few times, and point out that I'M NOT OFFENDED BY A FEW BAD WORDS, YOU STUPID LITTLE PRICK, I PAY THE DAMN CABLE BILL NOT YOU, AND WORRYING ABOUT WHAT ME OR MY FUCKING KIDS SEE ON THE GODDAMN TELEVISION IS ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NONE OF YOUR GODDAMNED BUSINESS!
"Decency" laws my ass. What we need are laws that make Congress behave decently. I might go for that. But they'd fuck that up too, it's the nature of that particular collective beast. It really is twisted that some of the most amoral individuals in our society are the ones trying to define what is acceptable and "decent" (whatever that actually means) for the rest of us. Still, they do say that hierarchies are like septic tanks: the really big chunks always rise to the top.
And I'm sorry if any of you found this post to be "indecent" but sometimes Congress just torques me into a fucking pretzel. As Lewis Black says, "The only thing STUPIDER than a Republican or a Democrat... is when these little pricks work together!"
Congress can also remove old stupid laws. Maybe if they spent odd numbered years getting rid of old laws, then the laws we keep might have a bit more dignity. Or maybe if they really paired down our "Code of Law" to under 5000 pages or so our judicial system wouldn't be such a "game" played by lawyers, and could actually return to being about justice. Wouldn't that be novel.
the point is that cable companies are given special rights above and beyond normal companies, just try to start up darjen's cable service and string some copper from the telephone poles and see what happens.
since they are given special access to public property there is a legitimate public interest in regulating their buisiness practices beyond simply preventing dishonesty and criminal activity.
Will we really save money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will we really save money? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Will we really save money? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Will we really save money? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand your point, but it's not really a valid one. If it was, not only would you only ever hear Britney Spears on the radio, it's all you *could* ever hear *anywhere*.
The problem is a lot of stuff starts out "indie" that becomes mainstream later. Almost by definition, most experiments fail. The ones that succeed, though, are the ones that drive the mainstream forward. So a lot of money must be lost in order for money to be gained over the long term. How do you think bands like Coldplay and U2 were initially financed? They didn't pay for themselves at first; they were financed by people like Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Same goes for TV talent. You've gotta run before you can walk.
With a-la carte pricing, I guarantee channels like IFC and Sundance Channel will die. You may not watch those channels, so you personally may not care. But is the point of a-la carte pricing to bring us less choice? Is that the goal we should be working towards?
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Re:Will we really save money? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the choice not to pay for channels we don't watch?
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Re:Will we really save money? (Score:5, Informative)
Think of Nickelodeon or Disney. They have their main channels. They pay money to either get, or produce shows for those main channels. Does Nicktoons, and ToonDisney pay that same money again to rerun them? No, but the studio does get another channel to sell advertisement slots on. The more impressions, the more money they bring in.
So, we go a-la-carte, no one buys Nicktoons, because they want all the programming, not just the cartoons, on Nickelodeon. No one watches Nicktoons, advertisers won't buy slots on Nicktoons, soon, it goes away. The extra revenue generated by another channel that really didn't have much expense is lost. Nickelodeon now costs more to recoup those loses in order to cover their production costs.
TV Viewers need to understand, it's not the cable company that's forcing them to get every channel offered under one package. Whoever owns a particular channel requires the cable provider to bundle them all together, and asks for a specific amount per viewer for all of the channels together.
If they are forced to allow cable providers to offer them individually, each channel you want will end up costing more overall than if you just got then entire bundle to begin with.
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I agree. Although I'm not nearly as concerned with this as I am with the "indecency" regulation; censorship isn't a good idea under any circumstances, it is distressing to see it creep further into the realm of acceptability. It is also distressing to see how little commentary has been made here with regard to it, at least thus far. I don't want a small group of people regulating what everyone else can see. If people don't like something, the
Re:Will we really save money? (Score:5, Insightful)
With a-la carte pricing, I guarantee channels like IFC and Sundance Channel will die. You may not watch those channels, so you personally may not care. But is the point of a-la carte pricing to bring us less choice? Is that the goal we should be working towards?
I don't know about you, but around these parts I pay for 80+ channels and watch 2 of them. Maybe. About 1/3 are foriegn language stations. Another 1/5 are sports related, then you have the MTV channels. There are about 5 selling/auction channels. The rest are made up of gardening/home channels and the basics. I don't really want to pay for any of those, and have a moral problem supporting some of them ( MTV ).
I'd be OK with less choices; If it ended up with me not having anything to watch on TV, I'd be ok with that. It's just not that important.
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Re:Will we really save money? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear lord, if channels have such poor viewership that they cannot survive without being tied to some bundle then let them die. Just because the channel is not mainstream does not mean it's some artistic endeavor worth saving.
You may not watch those channels, so you personally may not care.
That's right, I don't watch them and I don't care.
But is the point of a-la carte pricing to bring us less choice? Is that the goal we should be working towards?
What goal? Since when did all cable subscribers start working towards a goal? My goal is to pay for what I watch, and only what I watch. In the past, when I had cable before I got sick of all the retarded bundling, I was paying for 125 channels + 4 digital packages just to watch the six stations I really want. I don't really know what you are talking about when you mean "choice", but forcing me to get all those channels is not much of a choice. In fact I made the choice to cancel my cable over a year ago.
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But with a la carte cable might feel they have to go the way of network TV and try to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator instead of their niche audience. Which would destroy the entire reason cable is worth having in the first place...
Plus the whole decency thing is just stupid.
Re:Will we really save money? (Score:5, Interesting)
With a la carte, cable companies have little to risk about adding a channel since they can pay for what their customers use. N subscribers makes them pay $N for the channel.
Channels will have to continually produce content for their viewers, too, or customers will sign up for the months when new content is on and cancel afterward, much like many people do with HBO/Shotime/etc. Of course, this can also bring in a new market sector of channels: those that are only on air for a few months out of the year, reducing operating costs and having a very strong profit for the few months they are on air showing good content.
I don't, however, like this getting tied in with even more indecency laws. Laws and indecency have nothing to do with one another, even for broadcasters. If we allowed anything on air and current statiosn suddenly went apeshit and started swearing about the mother fucking fire on main street that caused the anchor to be late for mother fucking work while blaming it on those shithead firemen a new market sector would instantly appear: the moderated, tame, channels. Especially if we had a la carte.
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It's not about money (Score:5, Interesting)
The real indy channels went away when the MMs used their clout to force the cable companies to buy big bundles of channels. ("If you want to carry the local Fox station, you have to carry our new FX channel too. Yes, we know there's nothing on it yet. We'll worry about that later.") That left no room for all the weird little cable channels you used to see: the channels run by obscure religious sects, the public-domain movie channels (I saw the entire work of Ed Wood on one of those!), the Flat Earth society channel, the origami fetish channel...
Of course, these bundles aren't cheap, which is why cable rates are so ridiculous.
I think the folks that want alacart (I insist on spelling it that way, given the context) aren't interested in saving money or "protecting" their kids. They are just are pissed off that some of their money is going to pay for "un-Christian" content. In other words, this is just another lame "culture wars" battle that has no relation to the real world.
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Funny, I didn't know IFC and the Sundance channel was part of the media monopoly.
IFC [wikipedia.org] is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, Inc. [wikipedia.org] which is a conglomerate that also owns AMC among other things.
Sundance Channel [wikipedia.org] is owned jointly by Showtime, Universal Studios, and Robert Redford.
RE: Bill to Bring A La Carte, Indecency Regs (Score:2)
You can't get a stop sign at the end of your street unless you also vote for new garbage bins for the courthouse...what??
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It forces those voting on a bill to make a decision about how bad they want one thing versus how bad they don't want the other.
And it works both ways. Someone who initially would be dead-set against a bill is more inclined to do so if they get something that they do want in return for a yes vote.
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Congress is just a bunch of ball-scratchers, I tell ya!
It's political. (Score:2)
#1. To get an "earmark" (aka "pork") passed because it attached to a bill that will be sure to be passed.
#2. To force an opponent to vote AGAINST it because of their stance on a particular issue.
#3. To get an opponent to vote FOR it because it includes on of their pet projects.
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CSA Consitution (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, a line item veto was also included, Article I, Section VII, Paragraph 2 reads:
http://www.law.ou.edu/ushistory/csaconstitution/ [ou.edu]
Bwa?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Give and Take (Score:2)
How else can you get people to voluntarily give up their 1st Amendment right, without promising to ease up a bit on the cable monopoly. And it works too, just the other day this guy politely asked me to voluntarily give up my wallet, and he promised he wouldn't shoot me, thus saving my life.
Re:Bwa?? (Score:5, Informative)
The sections talking about a la carte service are there to distract people from the real meat of the legislation, allowing the FCC to censor cable channels. Currently the FCC's able to censor over the air broadcasters quite well, restricting the information that they are allowed to push to their viewers. They do not have this ability with cable channels and I suspect that they desperately want it.
Just think about it, over the air broadcasters are unable to show or talk about certain things (eg. horrors of war, human sexuality). As a result, it becomes much easier to control what people believe about certain things. Cable channels do not have this sort of restriction, so they're able to get this information out to their subscribers/viewers/listeners.
If the FCC is allowed to censor cable and satellite (and Internet?) content along with traditional television and radio broadcasts, then they will become the information gatekeepers for the majority of Americans.
Parent
Bill? (Score:3, Funny)
I want a'la carte, but (Score:5, Insightful)
the price they want is too high.
good and bad (Score:4, Insightful)
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
...when we complained about the FCC's censorship, we were told: Oh, you can get cable if you want uncensored stuff.
And they they started labeling everything and building controls into TVs to filter by rating. That was okay, because they told us, with everything labeled, people could complain less about 'inappropriate' things, because, after all, everything's rated.
Look, we've given those fascist 'think of the children' asshats every damn thing they wanted, and, magically, they always want more. It is trivial to filter content from children at this point, via broadcast or cable. We should be reducing such general restrictions, not adding to them, because we've added specific abilities to filter to end users. There's no logical reason we should be extending restrictions them to cable.
The one conclusion is that they wish to keep such content from adults.
You know what? Media companies need to start labeling everything TV-MA. Everything. All channels, all shows, are now listed as bad as possible. You can either live and operate as an adult when interacting with the TV, or you can not ever watch anything ever again. Your choice.
We tired, God knows we tried, but you fascist assholes either mindbogglingly stupid you can't avoid the carefully labelled content we've made, or deliberately don't want to. We're just going to have to draw the line in the sand, and label everything as 'hardcore porn' so you will shut the hell up. If people want cable, or, hell, wish to purchase a TV, they get handed a form that they have to flip past ten pages of porn to sign, and certify that they consent to have the filthiest things possible beamed directly into their and their children's brain.
Of course, TV would remain the same, with different shows aimed at different audiences, but we'd have a lot less assholes whining about it, because there would be huge clear warnings that 'The following show contains every bad thing on earth. Do not watch it under any circumstances.'
A microcosm of how the US economy is screwed (Score:5, Interesting)
But politicians are, in general, too stupid to understand that. So are the American people, in general, because they keep electing leaders who are leading us toward national economic suicide. More regulations, more taxes. Gee, you wonder why jobs are leaving America? Could it be the cost of compliance with every asinine regulation that some moron drafts?
Sheesh. The people who are too lazy to regulate their own kids' use of TV will love this. They'll get their "family tier," only it'll probably cost them about $20-$30 more per month than the current system costs.
Then they'll institute price controls because these same whiners will demand $45-$50 or less. Then, the cable companies will make less money per customer, weakening their position.
Need I go on?
Re:A microcosm of how the US economy is screwed (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never been impressed by my Engineering friends' patience for the disturbing capacity of the human organism to frustrate expected error tolerances; they tend to expect things to work in regular and predictable ways (with easily twiddlable control values). Individual humans are bad enough in this respect, but in aggregate, human beings are frustratingly difficult to predict in their behaviors and constructing systems for channeling and mediating those behaviors have unexpected and often catastrophic failures.
When you stop and think about it, law and legislation is very much like engineering; just with none of the convenient physical laws and thresholds to depend upon when designing the machines for operation. The engineering mindset, however, tends to value efficiency above all other qualities, and efficiency is not the primary goal of legislation; there are other things of value to be preserved in human-government interactions that would undoubtedly be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.
I do agree that this particular legislation sucks lots, though. Doesn't take an enginner to figure that out.
Parent
Broadcast is not available to anyone (Score:2)
The author has never lived in a concrete apartment building with nothing but cable available. When *I* lived in such places (and a few others that had bad broadcast reception for other reasons), I had the option of not subscribing, which meant absolutely no TV, or maybe a couple of snowy channels.
I'm not commenting on the article in general. I just thought that particular stat
Yes, people pay for cable (Score:5, Funny)
There are rumors that one reason the parental controls aren't being used is because the parents who want them are also dependent on their children to set them up.
Re: (Score:2)
V-chip (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, that's the reason we agreed to allow them to mandate those chips in the first place. The far right mandated that we (the consumer) foot the bill for a small minority of parents who are not only horrified that their poor children might be permanently scarred by words that are no worse than the things they'd hear on the playground, but also are unwilling to monitor their own kids and what they watch on TV. (This is, of course, assuming that these parents ever really even existed, but for now, I'll g
It doesn't matter if its needed or not (Score:5, Interesting)
Cable companies and content producers should ignore this. If the FCC tried to claim to that they are a higher authority than the constitution they would quickly be put in their place by the courts. This provides an excellent window of opportunity to get rid of all the censorship the FCC has forced upon television.
In other words... (Score:2)
Nice. Thanks politicians.
Rationale? (Score:5, Insightful)
With broadcast regs, it is reasoned that the airwaves are a limited public resource. Thus, the public supposedly has a right to regulate content broadcast over it.
But cable is neither a limited, nor a public resource. And I don't gather that satellite is either. So how does the Congress get around the First Amendment and regulate their content?
Is this unconstitutional or what?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Censoring cable/satelite TV in unconstitutional. (Score:2, Troll)
In other words, if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of censoring cable, say goodbye to the first amendment. Normally I'd say this was impossible, but with the extreme right leaning of the court these days, anything is possible.
Re:Censoring cable/satelite TV in unconstitutional (Score:2)
By Who's Standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Overreaching (Score:2)
A la carte, yes; decency, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Cable rates have increased at 6 times the rate of inflation this decade, it's insane.
I want cable, but I don't want to scroll through 200 channels of crap I'll never watch (MTV, VH1, Lifetime, Oxygen, the fucking Golf channel... these are my opinions, keep your flames).
I do want to watch the Hitlery, er--I mean, History Channel (when it's not about WWII), History International, the Discovery networks, Comedy Central, and a few select others. Give me my 20 or so channels that I actually want at $1 each, and I'll be happy.
I'm still subscribing, and there are still commercials, so the only people who lose from censoring cable are the majority of people who aren't offended by OMGBOOBIEZ!!!111one on the National Geographic channel. If you don't like it, turn back to the 700 Club.
The premium channels (HBO, Showtime, Skinemax, etc) are the ones they likely want to censor, and these are the ones you have to effectively subscribe to twice.
The FCC is not my kid's parent, I am. Don't impugn my ability to perform my parental duties, you pseudo-family-values fascists. I suspect that they want to do this to increase DVD sales.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, you want a challenge, find a way for me to get a date on Friday that doesn't involve a "rough trick named stan" and I'd salute you.
Tom
I f*ck*ng PAY for premium channels. (Score:3, Insightful)
Go cold turkey (Score:4, Interesting)
I took about 6 months to get use to being without the TV. I am busy enough with my normal life now that I would not want to lose the hours I use to spend watching it. It's strange now when I am at a friend's house while their TV is on, I get mesmerized / hypnotize by it, all intelligent thought is removed.
A lot of people find it enjoyable; great for them, I found it to be an addiction.
Re:extending standards to HBO (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly not, they'd have been too risky.
Matter of fact, this is just another example of a bunch of lawyers (i.e., Congress) creating a lot of makework. That's all this is: yet another Congressional subsidy to the corporate attorney crowd, as if Sarbanes-Oxley and intellectual property (hah!) weren't enough. We're at the point where no company can take a breath (much less create something worthwhile) without having to consult some lawyer and have him pass on the idea. Which he won't, with laws like this on the books, because if he did, he wouldn't be doing his job.
Regarding "decency" laws: what is it about certain people that they feel the need to force their pattern for living upon everyone else? I just want to grab one of these idiots by the throat, shake him a few times, and point out that I'M NOT OFFENDED BY A FEW BAD WORDS, YOU STUPID LITTLE PRICK, I PAY THE DAMN CABLE BILL NOT YOU, AND WORRYING ABOUT WHAT ME OR MY FUCKING KIDS SEE ON THE GODDAMN TELEVISION IS ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NONE OF YOUR GODDAMNED BUSINESS!
"Decency" laws my ass. What we need are laws that make Congress behave decently. I might go for that. But they'd fuck that up too, it's the nature of that particular collective beast. It really is twisted that some of the most amoral individuals in our society are the ones trying to define what is acceptable and "decent" (whatever that actually means) for the rest of us. Still, they do say that hierarchies are like septic tanks: the really big chunks always rise to the top.
And I'm sorry if any of you found this post to be "indecent" but sometimes Congress just torques me into a fucking pretzel. As Lewis Black says, "The only thing STUPIDER than a Republican or a Democrat
Parent
Re:Look at it from Congress' viewpoint. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if it means imposing the indecent "indecency regulations" on cable channels?
And what if it means the channels your family likes are no longer available at all, because they were only sustainable in package form?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
since they are given special access to public property there is a legitimate public interest in regulating their buisiness practices beyond simply preventing dishonesty and criminal activity.