{"id":334513,"date":"2010-02-17T21:48:53","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T02:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100215\/1506278171.shtml"},"modified":"2010-02-17T21:48:53","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T02:48:53","slug":"bell-canada-will-give-you-a-la-carte-cable-channels-but-only-if-theres-real-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/334513","title":{"rendered":"Bell Canada Will Give You A La Carte Cable Channels… But Only If There’s Real Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve had plenty of debates on this site about a la carte TV channels. A few years back the FCC put out a report that explained, pretty clearly why mandating the ability of users to pick and choose what TV channels they wanted in their cable package would cost more<\/a> — even if the FCC later changed its mind<\/a> under pressure from “family values” groups who wanted to be able to stop having to pay for “bad” channels to get the wholesome channels. Lots of people like the idea of a la carte channels, falsely believing that they’re “paying for channels they don’t want.” Our position has always been that it’s bad policy to mandate a la carte TV offerings, when it’s happening naturally<\/a> in the marketplace — mainly due to pressure from competition.<\/p>\n

So it’s interesting to see, up in Canada, that Bell Canada has apparently started offering a la carte pricing… but only in territories where it has real competition<\/a>. Otherwise, you’re stuck with bundles.<\/p>\n

Once again, as with net neutrality and metered broadband, we’re seeing a situation where the real issue is often a lack of competition in the marketplace, and the answer isn’t necessarily to force a particular policy on providers, but to figure out ways to encourage more real competition, such that these other issues take care of themselves.<\/p>\n

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We’ve had plenty of debates on this site about a la carte TV channels. A few years back the FCC put out a report that explained, pretty clearly why mandating the ability of users to pick and choose what TV channels they wanted in their cable package would cost more — even if the FCC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}