Bill to Bring A La Carte, Indecency Regs to Cable 274
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.'"
Will we really save money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bwa?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.'
V-chip (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:extending standards to HBO (Score:0, Insightful)
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?
By Who's Standards? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
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:Will we really save money? (Score:5, Insightful)
I f*ck*ng PAY for premium channels. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A la carte, yes; decency, no (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
Re:Will we really save money? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:V-chip (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 give the Congress critters the benefit of the doubt.)
So now that they've managed to force everyone to pay more money for this feature when we buy a TV so that a few people don't have to actually act like parents to their kids and can use TV as a babysitter, these same Congress critters want to censor satellite TV because those people can't be arsed to figure out how to use parental controls? Uh... no.
If parents want to protect their kids, they are already provided with the technology to do so, and more to the point, I and every other American citizen is forced to pay extra money for our TV sets so that they will have that right. That is absolutely as far as I am willing to allow our government to regulate TV. It takes all of ten seconds to set up parental controls on a TV. If parents can't figure it out, all they have to do is ask their kids to show them how.... :-)
This law isn't about protecting the children. This is about a bunch of fascists at the FCC who want to turn the airwaves into a Barney-fest and trying to do it by tacking it onto a law that everyone wants. This is exactly why we need a constitutional amendment to mandate a single subject per bill and ban these multi-topic laws. As for this law, screw Congress. They can take my South Park and Futurama when they bite my shiny metal @$$.
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?
Re:Bring on ala carte! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bring on ala carte! (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:good and bad (Score:1, Insightful)
It's also a perspective that's blatantly wrong, or worse, intentionally misleading. Nikelodeon and MTV don't give their channels away for free, there is indeed a marginal cost for the cable company to carry them over not carrying them. Maybe if the guy was also calling for an end to copyright and a ban on content producers from charging any additional amount over the cost of production for their content he'd have a point, but as long as the cable company has to pay MTV and Nikelodeon to carry their channels, you have to pay them to carry those channels.
The perspective is also ignorant of the fact that there are more channels out there then there is cable bandwidth. Fiber to the home may fix this (if the industry ever bothers to roll it out, which for all of the Libertarians' handwaving, they can't explain other than the market didn't clap loud enough for it and the fiber fairy died) but until then, your choices are satellite or 60-70 channels on cable (or 100-110 compressed-the-hell-out-of-channels on "digital" cable).
Worse, the content providers themselves are in on "forcing" the channels on you. It's not really a matter of having to have MTV to get Nikelodeon, it's the conglomerate owning MTV demanding that the cable company bundle Nikelodeon, C-Span#49, the phone-in shopping channel, biblethumper network plus, and that channel that does nothing but show a color test pattern 24 hours a day (not because it's fun to watch, but because it fills up a slot that a competitor could have used) along with MTV.
Re:Will we really save money? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the choice not to pay for channels we don't watch?
Re:Will we really save money? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bring on ala carte! (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.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A microcosm of how the US economy is screwed (Score:2, Insightful)
No, jobs are leaving America because CEO's have to get their 20% annual pay increases, regardless of their actual performance.
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.
Re:Look at it from Congress' viewpoint. (Score:1, Insightful)