Subscription Television, The Wave Of The Future
Posted on January 26th, 2007 by Rust

It’s been a number of years since I’ve subscribed to cable TV at home. Among other reasons, most of the shows are crap, what isn’t crap is interrupted constantly by commercials that are twice the volume of the show I’m attempting to enjoy, and I don’t really want to pay $100 a month to get the few channels I feel are actually worth watching on occasion.

The current model of subscription television works as follows. You pay a service provider (a cable or satellite company) a monthly fee for the right to view entertainment, news, and educational programming at their convenience. Your service provider will, at no extra cost, insert highly energetic and distracting untargeted advertisements at regular intervals. These ads will interrupt the broadcast so you don’t miss anything. As a special bonus, if the service is ever interrupted, you will need to wait for a period of time (potentially anywhere from a week to a decade) before you can watch a rerun of the show(s) you missed.

Oh, that is so worth the money!

This model of subscription television does have it’s good sides. There are, thanks to those advertisements that companies pay such large amounts of money for, literally hundreds of channels and thousands of shows you can watch. With that many simultaneous programs, chances are that you can turn your TV on and find something to watch any time you like. Of course, if you don’t subscribe to every channel your provider carries, you might not find the things you want. Even if you do, chances are pretty good that you didn’t really want to watch it right now.

Enter the PVR, or Personal Video Recorder. Since the 1970’s, and much against the content industry’s wishes, you have been able to record a television show during it’s broadcast, and then watch it at your convenience. By the early 80’s, content and service providers had realized that the battle against time-shifting was lost, and control was once again with the viewer (to some extent, at least). More recently, you have been able to record those shows digitally to a DVD or hard drive or some other form of electronic memory. This is fundamentally no different than recording to analog tape (a la VHS or Beta), yet the content industry is once again up in arms to save it’s archaic and profitable business model.

Even more recently, content providers have been pushing service providers (and indeed, even governments) to abandon the analog airwaves and start broadcasting solely digital signals. Why? Is it because digital looks better? No. Anyone with a good television set can see that most DVD videos show compression artifacting during certain types of scenes, while analog (VHS) recordings do not. Is it because digital broadcasts are more convenient for the viewer? Again, no. You have to buy a digital cable box or satellite receiver, and buy a television with digital or high-definition inputs. Is it so you can finally make use of all the neat features your new digital PVR has? Nope. In fact, that’s just about the last thing the content providers want, and by extension, the service providers.

In reality, the main reason that digital TV is being touted as the next big thing by the content providers is because it is easier for them to control - once the right laws are in place. They can force service providers to bend to their will simply by threatening to withdraw their content from that providers offerings. So you end up with pretty decent looking television shows, broadcast in high-definition to that shiny new digital receiver, that you’re not allowed to time-shift, record, or otherwise enjoy on your schedule.

So what are you paying them for?

Ah right, there is little other choice right now.

So here’s what I would like to see happen. Currently, I watch about four different television shows on a regular basis - Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and typically a current reality show (which is Grease: You’re The One That I Want right now). If it was convenient for me to sample more shows, I would probably find a few more that I like enough to want to watch.

I would like to pay a nominal subscription fee (say, $10 per month) and receive only those four shows (though I’d be allowed at least a channel’s worth at that price - say 20 shows). I want them without commercials, I want them to be high-definition, I want to time-shift them, and I want to be able to watch them at least twice each. If I can simply subscribe to a video RSS feed and download the shows as they’re being broadcast, great. If I have to receive them over the normal cable connection, I want advertisements to run the rest of the time so I’m not forced to watch them (and turn my television down) every 9 or 12 minutes during the best parts of my show.

You’re maybe thinking “Dude, no way they’ll do that for $10 a month! At 20 weekly shows (presumably), that’s only about $0.12 per episode (80 episodes per month!” I say that’s about right, but you’re currently paying, say, $50 a month and you can watch thousands of episodes per month. That works out to way, way less than $0.12 per episode! In fact, if you’re paying $50 per month for cable and receive 50 channels, and we assume that each channel will have an average of 24 shows per day, that works out to 36000 episodes per month at a mere $0.0014 each! If they take my suggestion, I’ll be paying nearly 100 times more than that! How can they possibly go wrong! The maths don’t lie!

The sad fact is that many people are paying $1.99 per episode at online stores like iTunes, an amount that is, to say the least, astronomically high compared to cable and satellite (over 1400 times higher).

Clearly, the content providers and producers do not want my business. Their business actions are the equivalent of selling bottled water at $100 per bottle during a flood. This is why people pirate television shows.

Didn’t anyone in charge do the math?