Cable.. a luxury?

Everyday day we hear that the economy is recuperating, slowly but is getting better. Still for some people money is tight and so they try to find solutions to save some money. Some choose to eat more at home, but for some others the solution is: no cable. According to an article in the New York Times’ Media Decoder, cable subscriptions have gone down tremendosly in the past months. Little by little consumers have canceled their cable and satellite subscriptions.

“Cable distributors like Comcast have been hardest hit by the loss of subscribers. Some people who had cable have switched to satellite or to new telecommunications services like Verizon FiOS. Others, according to Comcast, are reverting to over-the-air television signals.”

This situation has affected the television industry because most of the money they collect comes from cable distributors like Comcast and DISHNetwork. However, some TV companies are trying to come up with new strategies to help solve the problem. Time Warner Cable, for example, is trying to retain consumers by introducing cheaper packages of TV programming. Right now they hope that subscriptions will increase during the third quarter of the year, since during this season they expect that more people will want to watch special programming.

This issue relates to the News Corp and Cablevision dilemma. The prices of subscriptions are directly affected by increments in programming fees, and in such a hard economy customers are not able to pay much for TV.

The problem is that when companies like News Corp make cable companies pay huge amounts of money for their programming, it is causing that TV viewers take drastically actions, like canceling their cable subscriptions. The question now is, if we can watch TV for free (over the airwaves or online), why do we have to pay ridiculously amounts of money for a subscription? I agree that if you want more, well, you pay more, but I don’t agree that a regular consumer be forced to unsubscribe from this service because companies just want to take too much advantage of their products.