We live in a rapidly changing world and the cable, satellite, and network companies are not in step. We live in a world where people are looking for the media they want on their time schedule. The music industry has seen people want to own their music, take it with them, and listen to in when ever. It was a revolution and demanded the music industry to change to keep up with the consumers.
The United States is switching to digital broadcasting but the industry is still behind. There will always be appointment TV but it will never like it was. DVR’s allow us to time shift programming to watch our shows on our time. Ratings systems are slowly catching up to viewing habits but there are still issues with capturing how many people are watching. Shows are still canceled too soon or moved to different time slots too soon.
Then there is the whole issue for the industry dictating what programming and channels we can watch. Nothing illustrates this better that sports. People grow up in one part of the country and live in another. The problem is they can’t watch their teams.
Take me for example. I decided to get into baseball a few years ago. I live in North Carolina and we have no MLB teams. I saw that a team was being moved to Washington, D.C. That team is the Nationals. I choose them as my team for several reasons. The problem is unless the Nationals are playing the Braves I can’t watch them. Even if I bought the MLB package on cable I could not see them. Why, because the cable companies and the network disagree. The provider wants the channel an one spot at the tier and the network wants it at another. So I have to purchase game day audio or video from MLB and both loose. Then there is the case when local sports preempt network programming. Then all of us hope the digital program menus are up to date so that our DVR records our program at 2:30am.
So hear our plea on the following demands. Let us choose what channels we want on our tier. Let us pay for X number of channels for a reasonable fee. Don’t make me buy a 5 kids networks that I will never watch. Have your tiers that you have now, but offer customer choice tiers. We pay for 40 channels that we choose. Also offer us a choice between local sports or the network feed. Let us choose which sports channels we want. The bottom line is we are in a digital age and we want you to catch up.
