A La Carte

Michael at Americablog brings up a point I think is worth a little passing mention. People talk a lot about pushing for “a la carte” cable as a way to appeal to social conservatives who say they want to limit what their children see on television. But these social conservatives are not being honest. John points out that you can block any channel just by calling your cable company. After all, they have the ability to block out HBO if you don’t pay for it, they can certainly block out MTV if you request it.

I think that most people would like the idea of paying only for the channels they watch. I pay an exhorbitant amount of money to basically watch a handful of channels in order to feed my addiction to CNN and HBO. But I think that people have to recognise that the whole 500 channel universe is built on the idea that you pay big bucks for these channels we all like in order to subsidize the ones that fit the niche markets. In the early days, they really did support new stuff this way, although it’s now become a much different game with advertisers and big media conglomerates buying up cable channels.

I think it is highly unlikely that they will create an a la carte system that will allow you to actually save money. They’ll just price CNN at 50 bucks a month and you won’t get any of the quirky channels you might watch once in a while.

And I would bet that there would still be no respite from the religious right’s screeching about decency on cable. They can have all that dirty, dirty turned off right now if they want to. It’s not that they don’t want their families to see “Deadwood.” They don’t want me to see “Deadwood.”

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