Do you hate your cable operator? I have Time Warner and their customer service has sank to a new low but my only choice is to cancel the service. But I have a new idea.
Lets face it cable operators hate to pay for customer service and customers hate to pay for cable. We need more competition but the barrier to entry of building more plant and equipment, not to mention obtaining the franchise is high.
Why not change the cable company by separating the plant and equipment into a separate "common carrier" business and then lease out space on the cable system to the program providers. The "common carrier" operator would charge consumers a very low fee ($10/month) for access with only the local tv station programming and no cable box.
The digital cable service would be distributed through a PC with Windows and software installed on the PC would provide the service. No more cable boxes. The user would order and pay for their programming online to be distributed through the cable system.
Basic local TV signals would be provided as part of the access fee but everything other that would be provided by third parties. You would subscribe to and pay for whatever package you wanted from your chosen reseller. Every program provider/reseller would pay a percentage of revenue back to the cable operator for access.
No more disputes between the YES Network and Cablevision, no longer would cable operators decide what you can and can’t see on cable. Best of all the pricing would be what the market would bear.
Best of all with digital cable the channel capacity is virtually limitless. Those that could offer compelling programming would shine but it would be very similar to the internet as digital transmission allows a virtually limitless amount of programming. The programming could be delivered to the cable system via downloads to a master server from satellite or through the internet or a high speed transmission line.
Some would argue that the cable operators would lose millions; I say they could increase net profits as offering more programming that had to compete, with no incremental cost to the cable operator, would increase TV viewing and potentially increase the cable operators revenue per sub per month. This would take the limit off of how much revenue the operator could make from each subscriber each month.
Bottom line, the cable operator would get paid by the program providers, we would get enormous choice and competition and best of all very rarely would I have to call the cable operator.