HomeVideo Savant Weekly Rewind: FCC Weighs Customer Limits for Cable TV
Weekly Rewind: FCC Weighs Customer Limits for Cable TV
Written by Video Savant
Saturday, 01 December 2007
Win one, lose one.
That's how it went for the cable TV industry this week, as Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin was forced to beat a retreat from his widely publicized plan to expand the scope of the FCC's regulatory power over the US cable TV industry under the so-called 70/70 provision.
While that would seem to be cause for relief for cable TV executives, Martin has instead put forward a compromise plan that, if adopted at the FCC's next meeting Dec 18, would result in the FCC placing a limit on the number of customers nationwide that can be served by any single cable television company.
If this is compromise, it makes one wonder what sort of draconian regulations Martin would have unleashed on cable TV had he been able to push through his 70/70 plan.
I'm no fan of the cable TV industry, but it's difficult to see how this sort of arbitrary cap on any company's growth potential would benefit consumers. And I'll go further out on the limb and say that I don't see any obvious consumer benefit to areas where the FCC has traditionally regulated the Pay TV industry.
But leaving that broader rant aside, it really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to limit the size of any single cable TV company, particularly in an environment where there's more and more competition for pay television dollars.
The real problem here is one of the key issues with government regulation in general -- controls and restrictions are being driven by the demands of competitor companies in an industry or related industries, rather than any legitimate need or genuine desire to protect consumers.
Following on from the lead item on customer limits for cable TV, be sure to read the excellent New York Times article that explains what will happen if Kevin Martin gets his wish and the FCC actually imposes "a la carte" pricing on the cable TV industry. This is a textbook example of the so-called rule of unintended consequences, in this case with most of them backfiring in the face of consumers...
With all the cut-price HD DVD players that have been sold in the past month, it would seem reasonable to expect to see a corresponding increase in the sale of HD DVD discs. But that doesn't seem to be happening yet, at least based on Thanksgiving Week sales, where Blu-ray outsold HD DVD by nearly a 3-to-1 margin. It's possible this is due to the fact that recent HD DVD buyers haven't worked their way through the free discs bundles they received when they bought the players, but it's hard to understand how HD DVD lags further behind in light of recent player sales...
While the flood of HD channel additions all around have slowed since DirecTV began rolling out its aggressively expanded hi-def line-up, there were a few noteworthy additions this week, with Cablevision adding the HD versions of HGTV and Food Network, and DirecTV adding Biography HD...
If you're not familiar with the phrase, "We have met the enemy and he is us," then be sure to read the Techdirt item in the Copyright and Digital Rights section below that recaps a recent interview given by the chief executive officer of Universal Music. It's difficult -- no make that impossible -- to believe that Universal is part of the General Electric conglomerate. This is the sort of thing that could send former GE CEO Jack Welch spinning toward his grave...
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