John McCain Working On Legislation For 'a La Carte' TV Channel Packages 614
An anonymous reader writes "John McCain, Republican Senator for Arizona and former U.S. presidential candidate, is drafting a new bill that would pressure TV providers to allow customers to select and pay for only the channels they want to watch. The bill will also 'bar TV networks from bundling their broadcast stations with cable channels they own during negotiations with the cable companies, according to industry sources. So for example, the Disney Company, which owns both ABC and ESPN, could not force a cable provider to pay for ESPN in order to carry ABC.' Perhaps most importantly, the bill could 'end the sports blackout rule, which prohibits cable companies from carrying a sports event if the game is blacked out on local broadcast television stations.' This would hamstring the ludicrous practice of blacking out TV broadcasts in order to drive fans to buy actual tickets to a game. The cable and satellite TV industry is expected to push back very strongly against the bill."
Re:WHY!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WHY!? (Score:4, Informative)
I think the man's entirely responsible for his choice of running mates, TYVM.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
He lost by the time he correct the old bat that claimed obama was a muslim. Even his correct was pandering to the nutbars, the correct correction would have been "No ma'am I don't believe so, nor would that matter in the slightest".
Re:Sounds good. (Score:5, Informative)
Not likely.
Chatter amongst the conservative set paints McCain as a RINO (Republican in Name Only) these days, and he's not getting much love from the rank-and-file either.
Of course he could try, but I doubt he'd get past the primaries, especially with far stronger candidates (e.g. (Rand) Paul, Cruz, Rubio) already both emerging and getting their political 'street cred' going.
Re:Federal law? (Score:5, Informative)
Me neither. I'm hardly a libertarian, except in the sense that everyone is*, but this seems to me to be government overreach.
Cable TV is not a vital public service, in any shape or form. It's not important infrastructure you must have access to or else be significantly disadvantaged. Nobody is any the worse for not having it. In fact, it's actually just awful.
Given that, let the market take care of it.
I will assume you mean the mythical "free market". There is no such thing, of course, and this is especially true where market choice is limited by natural monopolies, as is the case in cable and satellite television service. So your solution fails. It's less than ideal, but only regulation will see to it that the consumers are not getting the short end of the stick, as they are now.
Re:Sounds good. (Score:4, Informative)
Screw all that. Do what I did:
1. Download XBMC and install it on your desktop computer. Play around with the plugins and add the repository for the repository installer plugin.
2. Download via XBMC the plugins for Free Cable, Hulu, You Tube, and whatever other video plugins look good. From the previous step you shouldn't have to add any repositories on via their websites, you can do it via the repository installer plugin.
3. Once you get things working fine on the previous step, get a nettop PC to put by your TV and use a remote control to control (this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0041ULKW2/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 [amazon.com] is great as it comes with a remote and built in IR receiver and can turn itself on via the remote as well.)
4. Cut out the Video part of your cable bill and just get a reasonable download speed on your internet (the cheapest level is probably enough).
Hopefully at this point you'll be able to control XBMC via the remote control and never have to touch the nettop computer again.