Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
On 12/18/10 7:27 PM, Kevin Oberman wrote: From: Robert E. Seastromr...@seastrom.com ... I can see a future where you buy internet from the cable co and they give you the basic cable TV channel lineup at no charge but in reality, you're paying for the cable internet what you used to pay for both cable internet and TV. Here in NoVA (Comcast former Adelpha territory), the future is now. I used to have internet-only service (there is little on TV that I care about). A bit over a year and a half ago, we added basic cable to the service. Total additional cost per month to go from Internet-only to Internet-plus-TV-bundle (same speed) was about $4. Hmmm. Better than the situation in my Comcast area. Internet w/o any cable costs MORE than basic cable (i.e. over the air + PEG). ... Likewise, here in Michigan I helped a brother setup Comcast, and discovered that the charge for Internet + Basic Cable was about $2 per month *cheaper* than Internet-only.
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
Jon Lewis jle...@lewis.org writes: This Can't End Well. Why not? As people shift from watching broadcast channels to streaming content and look to shut off their cable TV service, but keep internet, the cable co's are just going to have to raise internet prices to compensate. I can see a future where you buy internet from the cable co and they give you the basic cable TV channel lineup at no charge but in reality, you're paying for the cable internet what you used to pay for both cable internet and TV. Here in NoVA (Comcast former Adelpha territory), the future is now. I used to have internet-only service (there is little on TV that I care about). A bit over a year and a half ago, we added basic cable to the service. Total additional cost per month to go from Internet-only to Internet-plus-TV-bundle (same speed) was about $4. -r
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
It's an interesting question. Even leaving aside the question of billing costs, there are conflicting incentives. Service providers want to extract maximal revenues, but that requires not just fine-scaled pricing, but very overt and fine-scaled price discrimination (which may often be illegal). On the other hand, even aside from general customer preferences for flat-rate simplicity (and the empirically demonstrated willingness to pay more for flat rates), even in the conventional economic model in which Homo economicus customers are trying to maximize well-defined utilities, flat rates can be seen as a form of bundling, which allow the sellers to benefit from the uneven valuations of buyers. A simple argument demonstrating this is on p. 19 of the preprint of my paper Internet pricing and the history of communications, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.communications1b.pdf (which appeared in Computer Networks 36 (2001), pp. 493-517). This is something that most people in the telecom industry appear to be blissfully unaware of. Just as they are unaware of the fact that for almost a century, the US, which was an outlier on the world telecom scence in having (predominantly, although not universally) flat rate residential service, had higher telecom spending (as fraction of GDP, say) than countries that switched to metered rates. One cannot say a priori whether flat or metered rates will be better for either sellers or buyers, it all depends. But it is amusing to see the cable companies, in particular, fighting tooth and nail against moves to make them unbundle video channels while at the same time arguing they have to charge by volume (which is a form of bundling). Andrew On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Jeroen van Aart wrote: Jay Ashworth wrote: individual subscriber pushed the complexity up, in much the same way that flat rate telecom services are popular equally because customers prefer them, and because the *cost of keeping track* becomes delta. Can someone then please explain me why the hell in many other countries flatrate telecom service (I refer to flatrate local calls) does not exist or has been phased out. In the Netherlands they phased it out in the mid to late 80s. I am sure the then government owned telecom rats saw increased revenue coming real soon now due to increased modem usage. (still pissed at ridiculously and unnecessarily high phonebills...) It seems to me that at least in that case the cost of keeping track was far less than the increased revenue that metered (if that's the right word) local calls would provide. Regards, Jeroen -- http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
From: Robert E. Seastrom r...@seastrom.com Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 06:51:17 -0500 Jon Lewis jle...@lewis.org writes: This Can't End Well. Why not? As people shift from watching broadcast channels to streaming content and look to shut off their cable TV service, but keep internet, the cable co's are just going to have to raise internet prices to compensate. I can see a future where you buy internet from the cable co and they give you the basic cable TV channel lineup at no charge but in reality, you're paying for the cable internet what you used to pay for both cable internet and TV. Here in NoVA (Comcast former Adelpha territory), the future is now. I used to have internet-only service (there is little on TV that I care about). A bit over a year and a half ago, we added basic cable to the service. Total additional cost per month to go from Internet-only to Internet-plus-TV-bundle (same speed) was about $4. Hmmm. Better than the situation in my Comcast area. Internet w/o any cable costs MORE than basic cable (i.e. over the air + PEG). I'm sure that this pricing is to discourage customers from switching to a satellite provider for TV since I'm going to get most of it, anyway, and its not THAT much more to go to the standard package with the popular cable channels. Of course, you may want digital, HD, ... and discover the cable bill hits $200/mo. (Mine doesn't, but I have friends paying that.) -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: ober...@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
I have been trying to get NASA TV in Uruguay for a long time, obviously to no avail. Even though it's probably free / very cheap. I do believe that video over the Internet is about to change the cable business in a very deep and possibly traumatic way. Even I only have 4 megs DSL at home and have almost 250 msec delay to get to Terremark in Miami, my Apple TV plays YouTube reasonably well and I am probably near to the point where I would probably pay for premium content from YouTube or other providers to get over my crappy cable service. Cheers, Carlos On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 5:58 AM, Jeff Wheeler j...@inconcepts.biz wrote: On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 12:26 AM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: the 80s when that practice got started -- having to account for each individual subscriber pushed the complexity up, in much the same way that flat rate telecom services are popular equally because customers prefer them, and because the *cost of keeping track* becomes delta. Having personally and solely designed and written a toll billing system from scratch that directly exchanged billing and settlement data (and end-user data) with hundreds of ILECs, I can tell you a number of things I learned: 1) billing is only as hard as you (or your vendor) make it 2) if your company can't figure out how to bill for a new product or service, blame the billing people, not the product 3) keeping up with taxes and fees consume a lot more resources than calculating the net bills themselves; so adding products is really trivial compared to dealing with every pissant local government that decides to apply a different taxing method to your HBO (or your telephone calls) This is not to say the folks that handle billing at cable companies are equally capable, but if they had legitimate competitors, they would figure out how to run many parts of their businesses more efficiently. Imagine if Wal-Mart was the only game in town that had bar code readers at the cash registers, and every other grocery chain had to look up every item and punch in the price to check you out. Other stores would quickly improve their technology or find themselves out of business. 2) New networks prefer it, and the fact that it happens makes the creation of new cable networks practical -- you don't have to go around and sell your idea to people retail; you sell it to CATV systems (well, My understanding is that networks/media giants like it because they can force cable companies to carry 11 irrelevant channels to get the Disney Channel that your kids want. Would enough people really ask for G4TV to make producing and syndicating shows for that channel cost-effective? I don't know the answer, but my suspicion is that people who really just want CSN, E!, or the Golf Channel are subsidizing G4 viewers. I wanted BBCA a few years ago, but my cable provider required that I buy 30 other channels I did not want or had never even heard of to get BBCA, so I didn't subscribe to it. I do not know if a la carte channel selection would be good for me, as a consumer, or not. I do think the reasons the industry does not want to offer that to end-users are disingenuous. -- Jeff S Wheeler j...@inconcepts.biz Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts -- -- = Carlos M. Martinez-Cagnazzo http://www.labs.lacnic.net =
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
On 17/12/10 4:54 AM, Carlos Martinez-Cagnazzo wrote: I do believe that video over the Internet is about to change the cable business in a very deep and possibly traumatic way. +1 It's clear that this is a major driving factor in the Comcast/L3/Netflix peering/transit issue. Comcast is obviously looking for ways to fill the looming hole in their revenue chart as consumers turn off Cable and get their TV/video entertainment delivered via the internet. jc
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
Original Message - From: JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com On 17/12/10 4:54 AM, Carlos Martinez-Cagnazzo wrote: I do believe that video over the Internet is about to change the cable business in a very deep and possibly traumatic way. +1 It's clear that this is a major driving factor in the Comcast/L3/Netflix peering/transit issue. Comcast is obviously looking for ways to fill the looming hole in their revenue chart as consumers turn off Cable and get their TV/video entertainment delivered via the internet. The more I look at this, the more it looks like pharmaceuticals bought from Canada are cheaper than ones purchased in America -- and they will be *just as long* as only a minority of Americans buy them there. As soon as *everyone* in America is buying their drugs cross-border, the prices will go right back up to what they were paying here. This is what's gonna happen with Comcast, too; if their customers drop CATV, then they're going to have to raise their prices -- and the cable networks themselves will have *no* way to collect revenue; the cable systems being their collection agent network. This Can't End Well. Cheers, -- jra
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Jay Ashworth wrote: The more I look at this, the more it looks like pharmaceuticals bought from Canada are cheaper than ones purchased in America -- and they will be *just as long* as only a minority of Americans buy them there. As soon as *everyone* in America is buying their drugs cross-border, the prices will go right back up to what they were paying here. This is what's gonna happen with Comcast, too; if their customers drop CATV, then they're going to have to raise their prices -- and the cable networks themselves will have *no* way to collect revenue; the cable systems being their collection agent network. This Can't End Well. Why not? As people shift from watching broadcast channels to streaming content and look to shut off their cable TV service, but keep internet, the cable co's are just going to have to raise internet prices to compensate. I can see a future where you buy internet from the cable co and they give you the basic cable TV channel lineup at no charge but in reality, you're paying for the cable internet what you used to pay for both cable internet and TV. The people I see this being a problem for are HBO/Showtime/Stars etc. unless they can hop on with the streaming providers or make that move themselves. -- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net| _ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
On Friday, December 17, 2010 01:27:44 pm Jon Lewis wrote: On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Jay Ashworth wrote: and the cable networks themselves will have *no* way to collect revenue; The people I see this being a problem for are HBO/Showtime/Stars etc. HBO, et al == the cable networks themselves.
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
Jay Ashworth wrote: individual subscriber pushed the complexity up, in much the same way that flat rate telecom services are popular equally because customers prefer them, and because the *cost of keeping track* becomes delta. Can someone then please explain me why the hell in many other countries flatrate telecom service (I refer to flatrate local calls) does not exist or has been phased out. In the Netherlands they phased it out in the mid to late 80s. I am sure the then government owned telecom rats saw increased revenue coming real soon now due to increased modem usage. (still pissed at ridiculously and unnecessarily high phonebills...) It seems to me that at least in that case the cost of keeping track was far less than the increased revenue that metered (if that's the right word) local calls would provide. Regards, Jeroen -- http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
On 17/12/2010, at 1:17 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: Original Message - From: JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com On 17/12/10 4:54 AM, Carlos Martinez-Cagnazzo wrote: I do believe that video over the Internet is about to change the cable business in a very deep and possibly traumatic way. +1 It's clear that this is a major driving factor in the Comcast/L3/Netflix peering/transit issue. Comcast is obviously looking for ways to fill the looming hole in their revenue chart as consumers turn off Cable and get their TV/video entertainment delivered via the internet. The more I look at this, the more it looks like pharmaceuticals bought from Canada are cheaper than ones purchased in America -- and they will be *just as long* as only a minority of Americans buy them there. As soon as *everyone* in America is buying their drugs cross-border, the prices will go right back up to what they were paying here. This is what's gonna happen with Comcast, too; if their customers drop CATV, then they're going to have to raise their prices -- and the cable networks themselves will have *no* way to collect revenue; the cable systems being their collection agent network. This Can't End Well. Cheers, -- jra if the retail price of the content is inflated to support the distribution mechanism (e.g. cable, dsl, fios) and the provider doesn't own the content the result is inevitable. content owners could care less about how the content reaches eyeballs as long as it does so reliably. Comcast/NBC merger in the face of comcast/L3-Netflix fight gets interesting. jy
RE: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
The primary reason for the lack of a la carte is that the content providers tie groups of channels together, sometimes for prices less than one of those channels on a stand-a-lone basis. The secondary reason is the one you list as your first, and that's keeping track of what customer has what channel and making sure it's billed appropriately. With digital simulcast, and the right backend system, this could become manageable. Frank -Original Message- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:j...@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2010 11:27 PM To: NANOG Subject: Alacarte Cable and Geeks - Original Message - From: Brian Rettke brian.ret...@cableone.biz Interesting point. I'd also like to point out that putting the cost on the content providers rather than the network may raise the cost of the content service, but only to those that want that service. In effect, if the transport provider is paying for the bandwidth generated by a content provider, in effect we have another service bundled to all services offered, which increases the cost to people using Internet service but not necessarily accessing that content. Kind of the same reason TV channels aren't a la carte. Having worked for a small cable TV network in the 90s, I have some insights into why cable systems don't sell most channels alacarte. 1) The accounting goes pear-shaped pretty quickly, or at least, it did in the 80s when that practice got started -- having to account for each individual subscriber pushed the complexity up, in much the same way that flat rate telecom services are popular equally because customers prefer them, and because the *cost of keeping track* becomes delta. 2) New networks prefer it, and the fact that it happens makes the creation of new cable networks practical -- you don't have to go around and sell your idea to people retail; you sell it to CATV systems (well, really, multi-system operators) *once* -- generally at something like the Western Show -- and they buy it and give it to *all* of their subs as part of a tier. Makes it much easier to achieve critical mass. And finally, 3) the increased complexity of having *everything* alacarte increases the cognitive load on new subscribers to the point where they probably will consider other alternatives -- it's just too many decisions to make when you're trying to sign up. Additionally, it makes marketing harder: there isn't a real base price, nicely equipped to point to. In the current tiered approach, a very small group of people inside the cable system is charged with picking the channels, and putting them in the tiers, and they're the only ones who ought to have to care about that, in my mostly humble opinion. The percentage of people who want channel by channel control over their cable service, I think, is roughly akin to the percentage of people who root their Android phone so they can play with the apps and the controls that you can't get without doing that; ie: minuscule. (I actually mistyped minusclue, but that's what those people are *not*; our only real blindspot as geeks is realizing that we're exceptional -- that most people really couldn't give a damn.) Cheers, -- jra
Re: Alacarte Cable and Geeks
On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 12:26 AM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: the 80s when that practice got started -- having to account for each individual subscriber pushed the complexity up, in much the same way that flat rate telecom services are popular equally because customers prefer them, and because the *cost of keeping track* becomes delta. Having personally and solely designed and written a toll billing system from scratch that directly exchanged billing and settlement data (and end-user data) with hundreds of ILECs, I can tell you a number of things I learned: 1) billing is only as hard as you (or your vendor) make it 2) if your company can't figure out how to bill for a new product or service, blame the billing people, not the product 3) keeping up with taxes and fees consume a lot more resources than calculating the net bills themselves; so adding products is really trivial compared to dealing with every pissant local government that decides to apply a different taxing method to your HBO (or your telephone calls) This is not to say the folks that handle billing at cable companies are equally capable, but if they had legitimate competitors, they would figure out how to run many parts of their businesses more efficiently. Imagine if Wal-Mart was the only game in town that had bar code readers at the cash registers, and every other grocery chain had to look up every item and punch in the price to check you out. Other stores would quickly improve their technology or find themselves out of business. 2) New networks prefer it, and the fact that it happens makes the creation of new cable networks practical -- you don't have to go around and sell your idea to people retail; you sell it to CATV systems (well, My understanding is that networks/media giants like it because they can force cable companies to carry 11 irrelevant channels to get the Disney Channel that your kids want. Would enough people really ask for G4TV to make producing and syndicating shows for that channel cost-effective? I don't know the answer, but my suspicion is that people who really just want CSN, E!, or the Golf Channel are subsidizing G4 viewers. I wanted BBCA a few years ago, but my cable provider required that I buy 30 other channels I did not want or had never even heard of to get BBCA, so I didn't subscribe to it. I do not know if a la carte channel selection would be good for me, as a consumer, or not. I do think the reasons the industry does not want to offer that to end-users are disingenuous. -- Jeff S Wheeler j...@inconcepts.biz Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts
