Cable Companies Charge More for Less
Written by admin on May 26, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
There was an article in the New York Times recently about the cable companies. According to a study that was done, cable prices have risen 77 percent since 1996. That’s insane to me.
Most cable packages are high priced and include more channels than a person can ever watch, and the channels usually have nothing even on them. The concept that people should pay for television, then be bombarded with advertisements has always flummoxed me.
If you’re paying more than $100 a month for TV, why should you endure commercials? Thanks to the wonders of Tivo and other similar DVR’s, commercials can easily be zapped out of your life.
The cable companies take over wherever they go. Most communities only have access to one cable company thanks to monopolistic powers granted to them by local authorities. Sure, satelltie TV can compete on price, but it’s been my experience that the prices are just about the same, the selection is the same and you have the unreliability of a satellite signal.
One of the best cable products that has been developed is cable internet access. Anyone who has ever had it, can atest to how great it is. Light years ahead of DSL. I live in the Chicagoland area and it has pretty much been taken over by Comcast. You can’t walk two steps without running into a Comcast ad.
What amazes me is that they feel the need to even advertise. They are the only option (RCN is small potatoes compared to Comcast and is not available everywhere) and they can undercut any competition, while raising prices further down the line. Not a week goes by that I don’t get a gigantic cardboard mailer in the mail advertising Comcast’s latest gimick. You could tile the floor with them. Most people just throw them on the ground. It’s insane. If Comcast didn’t spend so much trying to advertise, they could probably lower their prices.
The big cable companies are also strangling free speech. Being owned by the big media conglomerates keeps out alternative new media that the market is thirsty for. There’s a huge demand for the BBC 24 hour news network on American Cable, yet no cable service will carry it because it would step on the toes of their cronies in big media, who wouldn’t like the competition that commerical free, unbiased news would bring.
I’ll be moving soon and leaving the cocoon of the free WiFi provided by my apratment building. I’ll have no choice but to go with Comcast. I do it with a heavy heart. But hey, at least I’ll have Comcast OnDemand, which is actually a decent product.
I dream of the day that you only have to buy the channels that you actually want and enjoy cable without having to fork out a car payment a month just to watch TV and use the internet.
Oh well. Feed the beast.
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