FCC’s chief pushes ‘a la carte’ TV
“Consumers should be able to purchase the products and services they want without being forced to buy something they do not,” Martin told an audience at The Cable Show, the largest industry gathering of the year with 15,000 expected to attend.
“I recently agreed with cable that consumers should not have to buy DirecTV (satellite) service in order to see major league baseball games,” he said. “But similarly, I don’t agree that consumers should have to buy Spike TV in order to get Discovery.” Martin has supported implementing “a la carte” service, in which consumers could choose and pay for individual channels, rather than purchase them in bundles from their cable companies. He said the issue was increasingly important since the price for “expanded basic” cable has doubled since 1996.
Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, quickly rejected the idea and said it contradicted another government suggestion that cable companies should offer multiple digital signals from broadcasters, known as “multicasting.” “One says I’m going to mandate you to disaggregate your bundle. And multicasting is a way of saying, I’m going to mandate you to add to the bundle,” McSlarrow said at a news conference after Martin’s speech. “There’s an inconsistency there that I don’t understand.” “The larger point is, this is a private system built with private capital. It’s designed to serve our consumers and offer them the best choices. Those choices are going to be most appropriately determined by the free market, not government mandate,” he said.
Brian Dietz, spokesman for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association which is hosting the conference, said “expanded basic” prices may have doubled but the package now includes about 70 channels, up from 45 in 1996.
“The analysis we think is over-simplistic and doesn’t take into account how people are watching programming and how many more choices there are today,” he said.
Martin credited the industry with spending more than $100 billion on infrastructure since 1996, enabling it to expand broadband Internet service, and through Voice over Internet Protocol services, provide “the most successful and sustainable competition in the voice market” to incumbent telephone companies.
The number of customers using digital phone service from cable companies grew from 1.5 million in 2001 to 9.5 million in 2006, according to the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
“Your success has contributed significantly toward the downward pressure on prices for phone services, benefiting all the consumers,” Martin said. “It is this type of competition that the 1966 Telecommunications Act envisioned.” Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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