The other day, I got rather miffed at the cable company because they had put out a list of all of their channels in a brochure, but even before I received the brochure those channels had all changed, along with the numbers. When I spoke to someone at the company about this they noted that in the contract (somewhere in the 10-pages of fine print) they had the right to change the channels and the programming at any time, for any reason, without any notification. Well, that’s great except they’re charging quite a bit of money each month, and the service quite frankly is inferior.
No, I’m not surprised the cable networks now have pretty much a monopoly, once you sign up it’s hard to leave, and even if you go with a different cable network, they are probably just as bad. Now I realize there are consumers who try to take it advantage of them, steal their programming, or try to dodge their system, but that doesn’t mean that every one of their customers is trying to pull a fast one, and yet look how we are treated. In any case, after going through all of the channels one by one, I created my own listing, table of contents, of each of the 1000 stations.
Indeed, I was amazed how many music stations there were, almost 50 in all, and those were the ones which were in English, there were also Spanish cable radio stations as well. With that many options, one has to believe that this is interfering with satellite radio – thus, a big competitor. No, you can’t take your cable box with you in your car, so satellite radio is still needed, but it prevents satellite radio from entering the home market because it would just be a duplication of the bundled services people already have in their home if they already take cable TV service. The question is; “is this really cutting into satellite radio’s customer base?”
Well, consider this, as a consumer the other day I was in an electronics store, and I noted there was a satellite radio device which was transportable. In other words you could have your satellite radio in your car, or take this device with you from your car to the beach, or into the office. Since it was one of those little miniature boom boxes, you could also take it into your home, leave it by a window, get good reception, and listen all day. However, why would you wish to do the latter if you could merely turn on the TV, put it on a, let’s say; “80s rock station” and listen all day?
It doesn’t cost any extra to have these cable TV radio stations, they come with the package, as part of the basic service. Meanwhile, it costs $9.99 per month to subscribe to satellite radio. The duplication and bundling from the cable TV networks has prevented satellite radio from entering their realm, and is in some regards diluting their market share, at least that is the way I see it.
That doesn’t mean that the cable TV network stations don’t have to deal with other things such as online radio, online TV, or many of the other challenges ahead, they do, and it will be a challenge for them moving forward. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
