I don't think they are making a mistake at all. At $100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand dollars) a second it becomes extortion. I think you have to draw the line somewhere.
Viewers may be asked to pay more for cable, satellite
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I don't think they are making a mistake at all. At $100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand dollars) a second it becomes extortion. I think you have to draw the line somewhere.
I'm sure Miller Lite liked their $100,000 per commercial input to last years Super Bowl. Those one second adverts are the ones I remember the most.
No, it's not extortion. It's called "supply and demand". There is limited commercial availability in the Super Bowl. Generally, when there is only a few of an item but a lot of people want the item, the price goes up.
Keep in mind, if it wasn't for commercials (and I don't like them more than anyone else) we would be paying for all (exception... PBS) TV programming.
The real question is the return you get on that marketing investment. I think the demand has so outrageously inflated the price that companies like pepsi realize they can get a better return spreading that money around.
But I look at your point, and wonder why I am paying for cable TV and get commercials during the actual programming, and during breaks. It should be free with commercials, or I pay for content without commercials.
The entire system is backwards, the customer is the only one getting screwed.
I'm sure advertising agencies have done studies on that. You could say the same of any commercial. Do you pick your car based on a commercial? What about your favorite beer? To say nothing of "male enhancement"
commercials.You've got to admit the amount of eyes on the Super Bowl is more than you'll get on any single event.
According to your argument, newspapers and magazines should be free also. Not many are though. Look at it this way... the advertisers are subsidizing your viewing. Don't think "if I see ads, I should get this free", think "if I didn't get ads, how much MORE would this cost?".
As far as the "customer getting screwed", nobody is forcing you to pay for programming. You are totally free to drop satellite, put up an OTA antenna, receive plenty of "free TV", and/or rely on the internet/DVD rental to watch any shows not available in OTA.
Future Ala Carte = Content from internet = CUTTING OUT MIDDLE MAN (cable companies, satellite companies, FIOS, U-Verse, etc). This means cheaper pricing. Each company would then be able to make more profit yet still be cheaper. You pay them an x amount for their set of channels (they are not going to let you watch them individually). For example, Viacom would charge you $5-10 for all the channels that they have to offer. Everyone has DVR functionality since the content comes from the computer. They can have advertisements during the show or like some do online now, not let you pause the commercials. This would bring the advertisement dollar back to the programmers and increase their profits.
That is true, I could stop paying for it and get a fraction of for free, but by paying for programming, I am getting screwed because I am the only party that is losing money.
Much of rural america has no access to high speed internet OR cable. So satellite and OTA are the only options.
It's important to realize that IP delivery of broadcast video is still very early in its technology adoption lifecycle -- the pricing that is in place today isn't indicative of what a solution would cost when fully scaled. To parallel a similar scale-constrained techology, folks running biodiesel vehicles are getting by incredibly cheap right now because they're able to tap into the discarded cooking oil from fast food restaurants for little/no cost. If too many people convert to biodiesel, now restaurants starts to face more demand for their old cooking oil -- which creates a market for that resource and pushes up prices. You also have the scale issue that there isn't enough cooking oil to support more than a fractional percentage of vehicles making the conversion.
Content from the Internet doesn't necessarily mean cheaper pricing; the current distribution methods involve unicast IP delivery feeds. That means that my video feed is separate from your video feed, so the amount of bandwidth required grows linearly with every single viewer. Compare that to Cable/Satellite/OTA which have fixed costs for transmission regardless of how many people in the broadcast coverage area are viewing the feed.
Internet-based video delivery is about 4 legitimate and 1 questionable thing:
1) Time shifting (watch what I want, when I want it)
2) Place shifting (same as #1, but not primary viewing location)
3) Archived Content (missed an episode, go back and download it)
4) Niche content (Limited distribution)
Questionable) "Free" programming
Time shifting is by far the largest driver towards Internet-based delivery, and it also represents the most inefficient use of network resources. You're taking content that is already being digitally delivered to your house via OTA ATSC feeds, cable QAM feeds, and satellite QPSK/8PSK feeds.... and transferring yet another copy of the same content over the network. Time shifting is better accomplished through local capture and playback using an already established stream as the source.
Internet delivery has a promising role in all of the other options, but re-inventing the wheel for primary / time-shifted delivery would push costs way up, not down. I see networks banding together to produce a cheap/free ad-support DVR available to customers long before they go exclusively to the Internet for distribution.
Cable & Directv to go up too
Here is an article from the NY Times about the fact that cable & Directv are raising their rates. next-up-on-cable-tv-higher-bill-for-consumers: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance So the hardware fee here isn't going to be any worse than having the programming fees go up.
Here is an article from the NY Times about the fact that cable & Directv are raising their rates. next-up-on-cable-tv-higher-bill-for-consumers: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance So the hardware fee here isn't going to be any worse than having the programming fees go up.
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