Cable Companies. What do you see happening to them in the near future?

razerfish posted on Fri, Sep 17 2010 4:14 AM

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One of my favorite monopolies to hate -- cable companies. I'm at least glad for a glimmer of competition with satellite, though it can't really compete with "terrestrial" companies as far as speed and bandwidth. I remember the original promise of cable was commercial free programming but what a laugh that turned out to be, other than prescription based channels like HBO or Showtime. These guys used their monopoly to charge us consumers and the content suppliers for their pipe into our homes. They made money from us ($25 - $100 per month depending on what channels and or internet you want) and they made money from selling advertisements.

As internet speeds starting getting faster (Internet 2.0), I think cable companies are totally fucked. I said this a few years ago when I saw where this was going. The last thing they want is really fast internet because then all they will be are internet service providers and the content providers will simply sell their own advertising and stream their shows directly over the internet to viewers. I predicted that cable companies will have to become content providers to survive and will start buying studios and production houses.  This has already started happening.  Or they'll have to stall the super fast internet speeds and/or hope for government help, though I don't see that as likely to happen.

That was my prediction a few years back and I'm sticking to it.  Cable companies that don't provide content are not long on this earth, and I surely won't miss them.

My other thought was how do you have free competition with something like cable where it's so expensive to lay lines?  It's one of those public use type situations I would support using a public framework. I know it violates all Libertarian principles, but how could you have competition with this product other than satellite? It's just so expensive to dig up and lay new cable that once someone does it once, it basically owns that area for good. So how could you make it more competitive using a free market solution?