Cable TV Ala Carte: Who’s in Your Top Five?

Does anyone, who is not a coma victim, watch the Golf Channel?  Is anyone without insomnia watching HSN or QVC?  Isn’t the need to buy useless crap fulfilled by the Internet now?

There are at least 15 channels in everybody’s cable TV lineup that are completely useless. Admit it, for $60 a month, you are paying for a lot of content that you’ll never watch.  Ratings are sinking since the web has arrived. Ratings have even taken serious blows since the highly adopted use of TIVO and DVRs. Most people in the know don’t watch a talking head for 20 minutes to find out which mission critical toxin “might” be present in their cupboards. Anyone with half a brain knows that real content today is delivered on-demand and chosen to reflect your interests.

Gone are the days of spending a half an hour with your eyes glued a scrolling marquee on the lower portion of ESPN. Today you check your phone or ESPN’s own web site for the score.  Today you can use your computer or mobile phone and have all of of the day’s news fed directly to you.  So why are we still paying for cable as a complete service when we only want the programming we actually watch?

In 2007, FCC chairmen, Kevin Martin showed support for the idea of cable programming served ala carte, but Obama’s recent nomination for new FCC chair might kill idea entirely as the focus seems to be mostly on the digital TV transition and making programming accessible.

Let’s pretend for a minute that the government was proactive and prepared to let us chose our cable channel subscriptions. You’d still have the full line-up, but you’d choose the networks you’d get, and pay for only those networks.  I would like a basic package of five channels that would include:

BBC America-  Doctor Who, Torchwood, Coupling.  British goodness can be found within this channel. The world news is much better than the crap we watch stateside as well.

Comedy Central-  I love my Daily Show and Colbert Report.

Cartoon Network- Adult Swim and Ben 10 is about all that saves this network.

G4- I can take or leave X-Play but I LOVE Attack of the Show

Discovery- Mythbusters!  That is all.

Notable Omissions:

Sci Fi Channel- Programming has been questionable lately.  Battlestar is over and there is little else to keep me watching.  Let us not even speak of the name changing.  SyFy?  Siffie?  Why?

FX- While I love Nip/Tuck, its the only show I’m still watching on this network.

If all channels were to cost the same exact amount, which five channels would you pick?

(Photo by: Aaron Escobar)

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