AND THIS TOOK 24 YEARS?
CRTC acts to benefit consumers with cable TV industry on verge of collapse
Indeed, so rapidly is the landscape shifting that it’s debatable whether, by the time the new policy kicks in at the end of 2016, there will be such a thing as cable television, or channels to watch on it.
— Andrew Coyne That’s the true significance of pick and pay. Consumers who do pay more will get more in return.
The first reference to “pick and pay” I can find online is from 1991. At that time, the CRTC was reported to be considering the implications of radical technological change on the television industry, including the question of whether “at some point, cable subscribers may have much more freedom to pick and pay for only the TV fare they want on a channel-by-channel or even programby-program basis.”
However, hearings on the subject were postponed indefinitely, owing to “lack of consensus among competing players” (aren’t competitors supposed to differ?), not to mention all the “unanswered questions” (isn’t the point of hearings to answer them?). A CRTC official said “there’s no point in holding a hearing until we can reach an outcome that will balance all the competing interests.”
And so here we are, 24 years later, and the CRTC is finally getting around to granting cable subscribers ( just another of those “competing interests,” apparently) the freedom they should have had all along — just in time for the industry to collapse of its own uncompetitive, consumer-averse, technologically backward weight.
Really, the timing couldn’t be better.
They still couldn’t just go ahead and do it, mind you. Even in the shadow of cable TV’s looming obsolescence, the regulator is still fiddling with the connections. So, while on the one hand consumers will be free to subscribe to individual channels, or packages of channels, as they choose, they will also be required to subscribe to a slimmed-down package of channels, known in the business as “skinny basic,” at a maximum cost of $25 a month.
Mostly these will be worthy public-interest fare like CPAC or the local access channel, but since that’s unlikely to go down well with the (decidedly uninterested) public, the commission is willing to let providers throw in the four big U.S. networks (plus PBS). Not so much “skinny,” perhaps, as “americano.”
Well all right. It’s still a sight better than the status quo, wherein consumers are required to subscribe and pay for cable packages sometimes filled with hundreds of channels, most of which they’ll never so much as pause over. And yet, this being Canada, the first thing people thought to do after this deliverance was complain about how much it was all going to cost.
Understand: this wasn’t the industry complaining. Oh sure, there’d been the usual dire warnings ahead of the decision — I especially like the concern expressed by Corus, the specialty broadcaster, that consumers would be “paralyzed” by all the choices in front of them — and the odd bit of grumbling afterward. But most of the players seemed resigned to their fate.
Indeed, on the carrier side, the CRTC was ordering them to do what they would probably have to do anyway, in the face of accelerating competition from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and especially Apple, which this fall will launch a full suite of network and specialty services, all delivered online.
No, the most insistent refrain in the commentary was speculation over whether all this choice was somehow going to end up costing consumers more.
Admittedly, it’s difficult to see how. The ruling stipulates that people can keep their existing packages if they wish, which many may do out of sheer inertia. So anyone who does pay more will have chosen to.
At any rate, that’s not the point. The consumer interest, properly understood, doesn’t lie simply in the lowest price, but the right price. The shortages that result when governments cap prices below market levels, for example, are hardly in the consumer interest. Similarly, consumers confined to a narrow range of shoddily produced goods may be unimpressed by the argument that such restrictions are needed to keep prices low. They might be willing to pay more for something better.
That’s the true significance of pick and pay. Consumers who do pay more will get more in return — if not in quantity, than in quality.
The biggest impact of the CRTC’s ruling won’t be felt by the cable industry, but by all those dozens and dozens of specialty channels that have grown up within its walls. Until now, they’d been able to coast along undisturbed as part of some 190-channel “basic” package. Now they’ll each individually have to persuade consumers to part with their money. They’ll have to make a compelling case for the value they offer in exchange, or die.
They’re hardly alone: that’s increasingly true of cable as well, as consumers in growing numbers “cut the cord.”
Indeed, so rapidly is the landscape shifting that it’s debatable whether, by the time the new policy kicks in at the end of 2016, there will be such a thing as cable television, or channels to watch on it.
Why would anyone subscribe to traditional channels full of scheduled programs, when you can pay for each program individually and watch it when you want?
What case remains for delivering video signals through a separate coaxial cable, when they can be downloaded or streamed via the Net? What does it even mean to speak of television any more, as something separate from your computer, your tablet, or your phone?
And in case the cable companies think they’ve got that covered — as owners, in addition, of the Internet “pipes” — is it not exceedingly likely that Google or Apple or someone will roll out of bed one day in the not too distant future, and say to itself, why don’t we just give everyone in the world free Wi-Fi? Because it will expand our user base, or change the future, or whatever. What then? What then?
I’ll tell you what then. The CRTC will announce it’s holding hearings on it. Just as soon as it can gather consensus among all the competing interests ...