Kyle McSlarrow is the head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. He sees the FCC’s attempts at legislating the cable industry as hurtful to consumers, particularly the idea of offering us a la carte pricing which would basically allow you and me to subscribe only to the cable channels we actually watched. He says it would "fundamentally wreck business models and hurt customers."
The two basic sides of the argument are as follows; The FCC thinks that people shouldn’t be required to subscribe to ESPN2 just to get ESPN. The cable industry says that bundling ESPN2 with ESPN results in more viewers for ESPN2, which results in more ad revenue for ESPN2 and if people only subscribed to ESPN, it would cost more in order to offset the loss of ad revenue for ESPN2.
To those of you cable subscribers out there, what do you think of the idea of a la carte cable? I’m interested to hear your opinions. I’m leaning towards a la carte because I only watch a handful of channels regularly but I have a major fear that big cable would use it as another excuse to raise rates so high that subscribing to just 15 channels would cost more than the 200-some unwatched channels I have access to now.
Head of Cable Lobby Condemns FCC Report [Washington Post]