Bwaaahaaahaahaa!!! Cable companies 'stunned' by Obama's 'extreme' net neutrality proposals

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116. They still get some ad revenue from those channels.

I'm not at all saying that the cable companies want a la carte pricing. They want business as usual, with a high monthly fee for a large cable package with lots of channels, that each generate some degree of ad revenue. But they are only going to sustain that model for so long.

My point is that when they are forced to go the a la carte route (as they will be), then it will be the top tier channels demanding the highest prices. They aren't just going to go "Oh, o.k. you can pick any 10 channels you want for $3 each per month." and hope that people pick all these second tier channels. They are going to charge according to demand and based on that demand they aren't going to charge the same amount for ESPN or NBC as they do for Logo or SpikeTV or C-Span.

I forget where it was (I believe somewhere in Canada) that already went to a la carte, and the numbers bore out my main point. Overall cable bills went down nominally, if at all.

It's the same issue I have with people demanding everything be streaming now, under the assumption that all these media companies are just going to send all their stuff to Netflix and everyone will get to pay their $9 a month to stream current content. That's not what's going to happen. What will happen is that the companies are going to all start their own service, and even if they each charge $5 a month for theirs, it will all add up to not that much less than what people are paying for cable now.