I Don't Want My MTV

Taking a breather from politics, here's a little something about TV. (Yes, I'm starting to get a little claustrophobic with our sharecropper cable, especially with the dawning of the new English soccer/football season.) The New Republic has an interesting article about a la carte cable TV, an issue that's recently become the focus of many conservative groups who want to keep their children away from the heathen shimmying of MTV and the cultural coarseness of the offerings of the FX channel (owned, of course, by that bastion of morality, Fox). But as the article points out, a la carte channel ordering has long been a holy grail of consumer advocates. And me.

Consumer activists peg the case for à la carte to the unchecked cable rate hikes of the past decade. Since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated the cable industry, cable prices have spiraled out of control--even as the industry has enjoyed healthy revenues. According to the FCC's most recent report, released in February, cable rates have surged by 7.5 percent in the last five years, compared to a 2.1 percent increase in consumer prices over the same period. A major culprit for skyrocketing cable bills is bundling. Currently, consumers are essentially forced to pay for dozens of channels that they don't watch in order to get the few that they do. According to the FCC, the average cable subscriber watches just 17 channels--about a quarter of the channels on offer in the "expanded basic" tier, the most popular tier cable companies provide. And it gets worse each year, as cable companies add channels to the expanded basic package and raise rates with little input from consumers. À la carte would seem to present a way out of a crummy deal.

Seventeen!?!?! Give me just the following and I'd happily chip in $20: Fox Soccer Channel, Comedy Central, BBC America, Food Network, and the Sci-Fi Channel. That's it. That's all Mrs. F and I need. But cable companies will argue that going to an a la carte system would drive prices even higher, since some of the money you're paying goes to subsidize some of the specialty programming on stations like, I dunno, Home and Garden. But this article has an easy refutation lying just north of the border:

But we need not stumble blindly into the à la carte future--just look north. In Canada, à la carte is offered by most cable companies. Miraculously, the country still stands. Gene Kimmelman of Consumers Union points to the success of à la carte in Canada as proof of its feasibility. Cable officials have pooh-poohed the Canadian example, pointing out that few customers have actually taken advantage of the option--not realizing that such reasoning invalidates their own doomsday projections. Indeed, the Canadian model points up a fatal flaw in the FCC report: its fixation on an all à la carte world. In assessing à la carte's merits, the FCC assumed a world that offered only à la carte, as opposed to à la carte and subscription tiers--which is what à la carte supporters on both the left and the right are promoting. Also known as mixed bundling, such a system is what's in place in Canada, where viewers have a wide array of choices among individual à la carte channels, numerous themed tiers, and custom-made "packs" of 5, 10, or 15 channels of their choosing. Whether picking out individual channels or signing up for ready-made tiers is a better deal is left to each viewer--as it should be. Why such a consumer-friendly system is not offered to American viewers is something that the cable industry has yet to adequately explain. That principle of consumer choice is ultimately what is at stake in the à la carte debate. Bundling the à la carte cause with the anti-indecency crusade may seem unappealing, but there have been stranger bedfellows. It hardly matters whether you don't like MTV because it's immoral or merely idiotic. The important thing is that if you don't want your MTV, you don't have to pay for it. The reasons are your own; and the choice should be, too.

(Well, on second thought, I might want my MTV, since it has the greatest show currently on TV: Pimp My Ride; but I could probably wait for the DVD collection)