The Horror, The Horror…

I was very amused to read the story online this week about the new Oprah Winfrey network, and the minor storm of protest brewing about it because a number of cable systems are planning to carry it as part of their premium package – which is to say, viewers who want it will have to pay more than the cost of their basic cable package. It’s always hard to say how many of the people spewing about this sort of topic are really that upset, and how many are trolls having a good time at the expense of people who don’t really understand economics or cable television operations, but as I was enjoying a quiet chuckle over the issue it occurred to me that MOST people don’t really understand how cable works, and we should probably take a closer look…

To begin with, it’s important to understand that most cable systems have a hardware limit on the number of channels they can bring you, whether it’s the amount of copper wire they have buried under your street or the amount of fiber-optic cable they’ve been able to install or the bandwidth their satellites can beam down to your DSS dish. Back when your only cable option was the local cable company this didn’t matter so much, but most major population centers now offer at least two or three options for getting your television content, and that means that every channel a given provider is offering is a selling point that they can use to attract your business. On the other hand, your cable provider also has to pay a certain amount (it ranges anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars) for each customer who receives each channel. These factors combine to make the provider want to bring you any channels that they think might make you more likely to engage their services, but want to avoid any channels that most people wouldn’t care about…

Tiers of cable channels work like any other bundled product – you are offered a group of products for a single price, partly because the product you actually want is going to vary a bit from one customer to the next, and partly because that way you’re paying extra for products you don’t really want and will never use in order to get the one you do want. So putting the new OWN network on a higher tier means that, in theory, the people who want it can pay a small additional monthly charge to get it, while the people who don’t want it do not have to pay a higher cable bill. Cable companies often claim that they can’t add or delete a single channel from your cable service because of hardware limitations – and a decade or so ago this was frequently true – but these days it’s more often because the effort of keeping track of millions of individual cable bills, all for differing amounts, would require a lot more effort (and drive their costs up)…

In the case of the OWN network, the channel they’re taking over in most cable systems was previously held by the Discovery Health Network, which was generally a premium service already. The real problem would appear to be that Oprah’s show was broadcast over the air for twenty-five years, and even people who have been paying to receive it (on basic cable) seem to be convinced that it was free the whole time. Asking that your cable company provide you with something they have to pay for at no additional cost to you is just as asinine as asking any other business to give you products or services for free, and even asking that they create a new tier (the “Oprah” tier, presumably) which will drive up their expenses and raise everyone’s cable bill isn’t much better. The bottom line is that your cable company is in business to make a living, and if you want to watch the OWN network programming you should expect to pay for it…

Although I can’t help adding that, to paraphrase the late Sam Kinnison, if this is the biggest issue that is disturbing you, you, my friend, do not yet have a problem…