Neat trick with Viacom slapping crawls on its programming telling little kids they are going to lose Dora the Explorer unless mom and dad raise hell with Time Warner.
See, if we had actual al a carte pricing — remember that? — these tiering and carriage fee tricks would not work. Consumers could pick and pay for just the channels they wanted. But because that would almost certainly result in orphan channels no one would pay money to get, both the cable companies and the content providers would lose revenue. There would also be little doubt as to how much consumers valued certain programming, but as we’ve seen from bailout mania, no one much likes the brutal judgment of the marketplace anymore — not when you can socialize risk while preserving profit.
So back to the crawl it is.
Update: Viacom is now threatening to block TW broadband customers’ access to their online content. This’ll end well.
