Last week I wrote a blog concerning internet piracy and the financial reasons behind downloading show illegally. Pay-TV customers do not want to pay for channels they're not watching, Verizon is the first large media company to act on this sentiment. Today the Wall Street Journal published an article about Verizon's plans to bring al-la-carte television to its customers by only charging viewers for channels watched for more than 5 minutes. This would certainly be a game changer in the market place as large media companies have been unwilling to change their pricing structure despite customer complaints. Customers subsidize channels that have low viewership, for example ESPN receives $5.04 per subscriber from Verizon regardless of whether a subscriber watches the channel or not. ESPN is vehemently against this because on average nationwide they only have one million viewers. Verizon, however still has to pay $23,688,000 to ESPN.
This would be one of the largest game changers in Pay-TV in recent years, probably more than the high definition revolution. Cable companies have to discover new ways of bringing the high cost of cable down for its subscribers, if Verizon is successful other large companies such as CableVision, Time Warner, and AT&T may follow suit.
I thought this was in interesting article, I share the same sentiment as other cable TV subscribers. I feel as though it is a waste of money and have debated pulling the plug on Pay-TV in exchange for streaming TV over the internet.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324392804578362943263175884.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Darticle
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