1) Should I pay 6 dollars for my newspaper at the news stand in order to support Cycling magazine? Of course not and yet there is plenty of variety in periodical choices.

2) If the cable companies are so altruistic why is their such difficulty in getting channels such as NFL onto certain cable systems?

Just as previous monopolies(e.g. the old AT&T, and utilities), the cable industry pleads public service and righteous value until true competition (not likely) or regulation (unfortunately necessary) can address the current inequities in their service pricing.

“I have DirectTV too and they don’t allow you to program to skip channels. Also, when you go to menue you have to look at all the channels, even the ones you don’t have and it doesn’t tell you what you do and don’t have.”

I think that’s a problem with the individual receiver you have, tim; I had DirectTV until I moved last year, and I had several distinct guides available to me: “All Channels” (So I could see what I was missing), “My Channels” (or something like that; only displayed what I actually got), and then multiple custom guides, showing only the channels I wanted. I had a custom guide set up to only show me what was on the networks, TNT, TBS, USA, and Sci-Fi; Another custom guide, for use during College Football season, showed every network that I got that might be airing said College Football. A third picked up the channels that my baby sister would want to watch when she was there.

On the other hand, my grandfather’s DirectTV installer came with a completely different model of receiver, and he had the situation you’re describing. He was stuck looking at every channel they offered, not just the channels he received.

The filters are now software, so there shouldn’t be much of an increase in costs (minor labor increase adjusting the settings), but there won’t be any decrease. It’s not like they’re shipping physical widgets to your house.

There is an argument that channels that charge some form of royalty payment for each subscriber do add costs (and letting me remove them from the basic package reduces costs). But how many of these are there in the basic package? Isn’t the basic package mainly the companies that make their money from the advertising they carry?

On a similar note, I love to eat herring while I watch professional wrestling. When you write the letter to those government cable people, tell them to mandate that cable companies must deliver jars of herring to all subscribers every day professional wrestling is being shown.

It’s getting harder to find good herring, but if we all just chip in this way, I can be sure of getting the herring that I like, and it will cost me very little money.

Regulation of cable companies is, IMHO, a tricky one. They’ve been given a monopoly on their services by the local government, and so it’s not like we as consumers have much choice (not everyone has line-of-sight for DirecTV). Therefore, in exchange for being granted a monopoly we expect the cable companies to be restrained from screwing us too badly.

My solution is to have community-owned last-mile wiring (twisted-pair, coax, fiber, whatever) – the economics are against having every last company tear up the streets, yards, etc. to install their crappy wiring. A place where hippy-dippy collectivism makes sense, especially in upscale neighborhoods where we could afford to install some cool high-tech stuff. The we let the various cable and telephone companies connect to that infrastructure at designated access points (like a telephone company central office or a neighborhood distribution box). We as consumers can choose who our wires plug into. At this point, it becomes economically feasible for multiple cable, telephone, and Internet Service Providers to serve a community rather than giving us the one (inevitably horrible) choice. If some company wants to bundle 3000 channels including 5 dedicated to kite-flying and 10 devoted to Puppies Around the World, I can feel free to ignore them and choose the one that offers 500 channels of hard-core pr0n (and Fox News, which is to liberals what holy water is to vampires – lots of smoke and boiling, followed by a messy explosion).

There would be no reason why all the channels would have to be priced similarly. If you’re a new niche network price yourself so the customer will include you next month. If you’re ESPN see how much customers will actually pay to keep you on their roster of channels.

The way I see the current system is like throwing a party and charging everyone $50 cover no matter if they don’t drink alcohol or choose the vegetarian entree. Why penalize people who want to join the party but not with the full features.

It’s why I don’t have cable TV actually.

iTunes is just one of many that have built a phenomenal business based on unbundling (at least only having to purchase one song from what used to be a CD – the proprietary DRM I could do without, but it’s not hard to work around), in breaking from the status quo.

I believe your suffering from a lack of imagination on this issue.