This is the best analysis I have seen on the war between the DIY tech innovators and the Cable TV establishment. I have been an obstinate cable customer for some time but I can appreciate the business side of the argument.
“The whole idea that there’s a lot of people out there that want to drop [cable] and just have a Netflix or an HBO—that’s not right.” And indeed, pay-TV services added 200,000 U.S. customers in 2011; HBO and Cinemax subscriptions grew by 7 million globally in the first half of this year...
...Consider that in 2011, ESPN agreed to pay the NFL almost $2 billion a year for the rights to Monday Night Football—a 73 percent increase over their previous deal, reached in 2006...
...Compared with onetime mass-entertainment purchases, $80 is a lot of money. But in a four-person household where each member watches three to four hours of TV a day—the national average—that comes out to only about 20 cents per hour of entertainment. That value is six times better than a magazine you buy off a stand and read for four hours. It’s 20 times better than a two-and-a-half-hour movie watched in a theater. If you bought the Xbox game Madden NFL 2013 in September, you would have to play it for two hours every day until the Super Bowl to get the same per-hour value. As a monthly fee, cable feels like a rip-off. But as hourly entertainment, it’s not...A lot goes in to creating and providing the quality entertainment that is available to us 24/7. And I understand paying for a quality product. But to me the most important message of this article is the amazing amount of opportunity.
Where are the Sean Parkers of cable TV? Why hasn't anyone been able to disrupt the old way of doing things? The article's author barely glances over the subject without explaining the establishment's control:
...downloading a single song is much easier than live-streaming an event to your computer; the demise of the music industry has taught every content owner to cling ferociously to rights.
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