In my locality, there is a rural telephone cooperative that provides cable programming. They would really like to provide ala carte programming, but the big programming providers won't let them. Disney, for example, says "If you want to carry ESPN, you have to buy all of our other channels with it - and put them all on your basic package so all subscribers pay for them." All of the major programming providers do this. Big money corporations like the NFL seek to force cable companies to put their own propriety channels (like NFL channel) on the general package as well - again, so all cable subscribers pay money to the NFL. You're right, it really is programming socialism. I dropped cable and put up an antenna for this very reason. If enough people would drop their cable and satellite tv (which is just cable without the wire), we'd have some leverage, and ala carte programming "could" become a reality. Trouble is, most people are sheep.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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In my locality, there is a rural telephone cooperative that provides cable programming. They would really like to provide ala carte programming, but the big programming providers won't let them. Disney, for example, says "If you want to carry ESPN, you have to buy all of our other channels with it - and put them all on your basic package so all subscribers pay for them." All of the major programming providers do this. Big money corporations like the NFL seek to force cable companies to put their own propriety channels (like NFL channel) on the general package as well - again, so all cable subscribers pay money to the NFL. You're right, it really is programming socialism. I dropped cable and put up an antenna for this very reason. If enough people would drop their cable and satellite tv (which is just cable without the wire), we'd have some leverage, and ala carte programming "could" become a reality. Trouble is, most people are sheep.