Consumers can be funny. They might allow an industry to walk all over them for decades and then all of a sudden they turn on them with a ferocity completely unexpected. The record business has been learning this lesson for the past 5 years. Cable is about to learn it to and the parallels are stunning.

One of the things that consumers hate most is paying for things they don’t use. For music buyers it used to be plopping $18.00 down for a CD only to learn that they only liked 3 of the tracks on the album. One day and alternative appeared and the record industry model was turned completely upside-down. Record companies are still whining about it.

Cable companies do the same thing. Don’t like sports? Too bad, you’re paying for ESPN anyway. No kids? Doesn’t matter, pay for the Disney Channel. Ditto for women’s networks, Spanish channels, etc., etc. Will this exist forever? Not a chance, just as the record business learned that they were not immune to the wrath of burned consumers who given the chance would bolt to a song-by-song method of buying music, TV watchers will be the same thing. Technology is around the corner to allow just that and the cable companies have done zero to instill any loyalty from their customers.

Independent Sources prediction: It’s going to be ugly. I’d love to think that the cable folks will figure it out in time and offer a la carte pricing before a competitor does but I think we all know they won’t. Once a monopoly mindset, always a monopoly mindset.

technorati: cable

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 10:58 pm by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.