Long Comment at the Sliver

The Palmyra Sliver: "Like most government attempts to fix things, I fear that cable ala carte will, in the end, only make cable even more expensive and make for less choices of stations.

I don't think it really has anything to do with government actually. Somehow, whether they de-regulate something or regulate it, in the end it costs more. Sort of a something for nothing, perpetual motion machine of regulation and corporate profit.

There certainly are a lot of channels on my cable I don't watch, but when you dig into it you find you don't pay for most of them anyway, the broadcaster strong arms the carrier to take the unwatched channels in order to get the one channel they want... Want NBC? Well then you have to carry ShopNBC. Then NBC can sell more ads and they are happy. The cable company can say there's nothing they can do, so they don't care. And the customer is stuck with ShopNBC and feels like they are paying for something they don't watch, when in reality they are just paying for NBC in a round about way.

Internet video will be the death knell for all of it if government keeps the development robust and doesn't kneecap it to keep the existing providers and carriers fat.

With DSL you can almost moot cable now - almost. Some live things are hard to manage in real time. But just about everyeverything that goes on TV is available online eventually if you know where to look and are not conflicted about downloading it.

Well. This was quite long."