Well, here we are again. It was only a couple of summers ago that I was writing about the standoff between cable company Suddenlink, and media giant Viacom. Well, the boys who brought you the annoying,walking and talking sponge are at it again. As I understand it, Viacom is demanding a thirty percent rate increase from Direct TV, for the privilege of providing its list of cable channels like MTV, Nick and Nick Jr., TV Land and quite a few others; this despite sinking ratings.
The Satellite provider has refused the higher rates and has stopped broadcasting the extra networks until such a time as a deal can be struck, but its not going well. Neither side is willing to budge. Now I am not necessarily an opponent of big companies. The person or group who provides goods and services has the perfect right to ask what they want for those goods and services. I’m fine with media, cable and satellite providers making money.
A rising tide lifts all boats. I get it. But I’m increasingly opposed to what I see as Viacom’s shakedowns of every cable and satellite company who carries their channels. The fact is the network giant does the same thing to the carriers as they do to us. They sell their networks in packages, forcing them to pay for unpopular, low rated channels and programming in order to obtain programs that actually sell. Thus, we as customers can’t pick and choose our own lineups.
Now I should say that this is all perfectly legal, however, I read a few different articles in order to better understand the issue, and numerous authors cite the probability that the loss of channels will drive more customers to the likes of Netflix or Hulu where they can not only pick their networks but their individual programs. I’m certainly no expert on how these markets operate, but it seems to me that Viacom is working hard to get as much milk as possible from a dying cash cow, before she finally expires. The company would do better (in my humble opinion) to find a way to give as much choice to the consumer as possible before they go somewhere else entirely.
NetFlix is a great way to watch the most movies from your home, and they keep making their business more convenient. For a while you had to wait for the mail to come in to get to watch a new movie. You would pre-choose your top movies that you would want to watch and make your list on the NetFlix website. They then send you one movie at a time starting with your first choice. They still use this old way of doing things, but they have added even more simple ways to watch movies from home. They first started the ability to instantly watch movies through their website. They give you many options of tons of movies to watch. Last year NetFlix came out with the technology to watch movies over your Wii or Playstation. They use to send you a disc to plan on your console but now you can now download a NetFlix application right to your game console. You can then scroll through the many different categories, such as; children and family, foreign, horror, television shows, drama, and romantic comedy. You can put any movies on your instant queue to watch whenever you want. You can also watch your instant queue through your computer. You can rate the shows and movies that you like and NetFlix will suggest movies to you that are like the movies that you liked the most. Do not expect that movies that have just been released to be on instant NetFlix, you can get all new releases through the mail though.