Looks like I picked a good time to yank the cable:
While wages for US workers have remained stagnant, cable bills have quietly climbed 6 percent a year and will pass $200 a month by 2020, according to an alarming industry forecast released yesterday.“As pay-TV costs rise and consumers’ spending power stays flat, the traditional affiliate-fee business model for pay-TV companies appears to be unsustainable,” said Keith Nissen, research director at research firm NPD Group, which issued the forecast.
NPD blamed the TV price-spiral on a perennial tug-of-war between cable operators and creators of programming over who gets the bigger share of ever-rising cable payments.
That, of course, is horseshit. The reason they're constantly hiking their monthly rates is Because They Can. If you want cable TV where you live, you don't get to comparison-shop between competing cable providers because they're government-sanctioned mini-monopolies in every market they service. If I wanted cable in my apartment, for instance, the choice was Time-Warner or nothing. I was willing to settle for that for a number of years, but eventually discovered less-expensive alternatives, i.e., satellite/Internet. That's the beauty of competition---it actually forces companies to stay abreast of changes in market dynamics and continually adjust their business models to adapt. Of course, that costs money for market research, product planning and development, etc., and that's why most mega-corporations like Time-Warner hate competition and will do everything in their power to stifle it---because it inhibits their ability to extract money from the enterprise, and from their clients, to redistribute to shareholders/executives. How to fix? Well, stronger antitrust regulation would help, as would ending perks in the tax code like "carried interest" that reward rent-seeking and discourage innovation. Not holding my breath waiting for this to happen, but it would be nice if our political leadership started insisting that our job creators abide by the principles of actual market competition instead of merely paying lip service to them.
---Baron V