The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

A la carte programing for cable TV? Sounds like that is coming down the pike, starting with a family tier soon to be offered. First, the news…

Cable-TV companies to offer a ‘family tier’

By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY

Bowing to pressure, the USA’s biggest cable-TV operators confirmed Monday that they plan to offer a “family tier” of programming.

Comcast and Time Warner, the No. 1 and No. 2 cable operators, respectively, said they will introduce a family-friendly tier in early 2006. A few smaller cable operators, including Charter, Insight and Advance/Newhouse, also plan family tiers. The new family packages would be geared for digital-cable customers.

Programmers generally oppose special “tiers,” seeing them as a slippery slope to “a la carte” programming. A la carte is the notion of letting consumers choose — and pay for — only the channels they want.

Some analysts say the family tier could herald a more customer-friendly business model for cable TV. “The thing that’s breaking up is the more homogenized way of offering programming that’s optimized for nobody,” says Boyd Peterson of Yankee Group.

Peterson says he thinks genre-specific tiers — for family, sports, news, etc. — would be a hit. He points to “NFL Ticket,” a popular sports package from DirecTV.

“NFL Ticket is evidence that there is demand for subject-specific programming,” Peterson says.

Ford Cavallari, an analyst at Adventis, says family tiers are a good start. But he says a la carte is ultimately what people want: “Consumers love it.”(more…)

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Presently I have cable, but I will be switching to satellite next week (still keeping my cable broadband connection–too many bad experiences with DSL). My local cable company must be getting their but kicked by the satellite market because as of about 5-6 months ago, they offered to give me ALL of the premium channels (minus the sports and porn channels) for $1 a month. This package beat satellite hands down for what I was getting.

Then they switched to Moxi.

Moxi is a DVR system similar to TiVO. The big problem that I have with this box is that it takes on average about 3-5 minutes to navigate through the menu–because it locks up. Not only that, if a racy commercial is on television and I am trying to switch channels, it can take about 5 minutes for that command to register. Tech support and field techs are aware of the problem, but don’t know what to do.

Peace!

Anyway, with all of the channels that I am currently getting, it STILL seems to me that there is nothing on TV worth watching. Most of the movies suck, network TV (with the exception of a couple of shows) isn’t worth what I am paying, I don’t listen to the umpteen music channels. So what am I left with? About 10-15 channels total that I scan on a regular basis (10-15 out of 200 or so).

I have always thought that a la carte would be a huge plus for pay TV (cable/satellite), but I also know that it could be a loss of revenue for the cable/satellite companies.

This is long overdue.