I am pzzled by how the CTV industry operates. WE have integrated CTV, Internet, and telephone service-which works well for us, because my wife makes a lot of phone calls, and I use the internet access quite a bit.
The TV is another story-with “basic” service, we get all of the local channels, plus a lot of oddball channels (three home shopping channels, several spanish channels, some really weird religios channels), plus many that we never watch.
I know that CTV operators make money by carrying as many channels as possible-but what is the advertising value of a “crap” channel that nobody watches?
Or take AMC-used to be good, bt now, unwatchable (you get 12 minutes of commercials for 10 minutes of movie).
I know there have been efforts to allow subscribers to choos the channels they want, but the CTV industry has a powerful lobby-they keep defeating this.
Will this ever change?
It’s certainly possible the cable providers are benefiting from the arrangement (especially companies like Comcast that also own content providers). But it’s not entirely their fault we don’t have a la carte options in cable.
Some (most?) of the problem lies with the content providers. For example, ESPN is incredibly popular. But Disney won’t let cable companies get ESPN alone. Basically, if a company wants ESPN, it also has to take the other 6-8 ESPN channels, and probably ABCFamily, Disney XD, and the Disney channel, to boot.
The economic incentive lies with offering more channels because the content providers make it virtually impossible to just take a single channel. If a cable company tried to buy just ESPN and ESPN2 without any of the others, it’s a virtual certainty that Disney would charge through the nose. But they can offer a “discount” rate if the cable provider also takes the other channels and forces their consumers to take them in their bundles.