I missed this piece by Peter Suderman a couple of weeks back about cable's unbundling revolution, but it's well worth reading if you're interested in the intersection of government regulation and your entertainment options:
From 2005 through 2009, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin waged a small war against the cable industry, arguing that increasingly expensive channel bundles restricted consumer choice and made it difficult for parents to police their kids' viewing habits. Cable TV packages were growing more expensive every year, and consumers had no options except to buy the whole bundle or nothing at all. Parents, meanwhile, had to either decline cable altogether or allow the increasingly violent and smutty cable lineup into their homes. ...
Under Martin's watch, cable packages and prices became an issue of pressing national importance, with multiple congressional hearings and interest group pressure campaigns. When Martin left the agency in 2009, an FCC brag sheet listed the Chairman's efforts to spur "greater choice in packaging and sale of video programming services" in his top eight achievements.
Thing is, Martin didn't have much success. When he left the FCC post, cable packages were bigger and more expensive than ever. Four years of agency agony had no discernable effect.
Six years later, the issue has been back-burnered at the FCC, if not dropped altogether. And yet the great cable unbundling is finally happening—without any help or prodding from the FCC.
As Peter notes, heavy-handed government regulation demanding that private companies sell their wares in a way that the government thought appropriate was entirely unnecessary. What was necessary was new technology (high speed internet) combined with a generational shift (young adults who grew up not with allegiance to TV networks but to #content) and, if we're being honest, an economy in which people looking to save a few bucks decided to take the leap and "cut the cord."
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, I much prefer the marketplace sorting itself out: the government has literally no business whatsoever demanding that a private company selling an entertainment product do so in a way that the government thinks is best. I'm not some sort of libertarian extremist and am willing to grant the government some oversight on, say, power plants or medicine or food safety. But the idea that bureaucrats should take any role whatsoever in determining how we consume legally purchased entertainment not distributed over the "public airwaves"* is almost a parody of big government overreach. And, as Peter notes, the unbundling is almost certainly happening in a cheaper manner than it would have with government regulation.
On the other, though, I do worry a bit about the future of the so-called golden age of television. As I've noted elsewhere, if it wasn't for the fact that channels like AMC and FX were bundled—thus, penetrating tens of millions of homes, whether or not the homeowner particularly cared about said penetration—we might not have had The Shield or Mad Men or any of the other basic cable classics we all know and love:
Without a nearly ubiquitous presence (Martin quotes one exec who notes that FX was available in 75 million homes, compared to HBO’s 23 million, before The Shield debuted) networks like FX and AMC wouldn’t have succeeded. And they had that ubiquitous presence because of bundling. To find an audience for a challenging program you need to have an audience available for you to find in the first place. In an a la carte environment, FX and AMC may well have died before being able to present the world their brilliant entertainment.
Of course, the landscape is shifting even as we speak. Amazon and Netflix are getting into the content-creation business. HBO's still the best value in town, and is now available sans a cable subscription. Original content on YouTube proliferates, even if 99.9% of it is crap. There's a stable of basic cable stations that are churning out programming. So maybe we're okay. Time will tell.
Update: Of course, right after publishing this, I see that ESPN is suing Verizon over its very tentative unbundling plan:
More and more TV consumers are looking for cheaper options with less expensive streaming services, such as Netflix. The Verizon package, called FiOS Custom TV, gives customers a base package of 35 channels and allows them to choose two out of seven category-specific tiers. It costs $55 a month and customers can add on additional packages for $10 each.
Last week, 21st Century Fox and NBCUniversal joined ESPN in saying that the FiOS cable package violated their contracts. Late last week, Disney and Fox withdrew commercials for the FiOS cable package from some of their local broadcast stations.
*And, frankly, we should probably do something about the government regulation of the "public airwaves." But that's an argument for another day.