I have long suspected that my husband and I may be the only people in D.C. who don’t subscribe to cable TV (sorry, David). For years we have resisted, largely because 1) cable is expensive and controlled by monopolies and 2) the only reason we want it is so that we can watch The Wire and New York Giants games that aren’t broadcast in our area on regular TV. We don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars a year for cable when we wouldn’t watch 99 percent of its offerings.
This all might change, however, if the newly energized chairman of the Federal Communications Commission gets his way. Republican Kevin J. Martin is pushing once again to restrict the monopoly power of giant cable companies, whose rates have soared far faster than inflation in recent years. (Comcast haters take note: Martin’s work would put a huge hitch in that company’s expansion plans.) Among the other measures that Martin is championing, though, is what every cable consumer has long desired: the ability to pick her own channels, without having to pay for all the Home Shopping Network additions forced into the standard packages, the so called “a la carte menu.”
The FCC’s changes are based on a law that kicks in when 70 percent of the marketplace has cable, which it does. Naturally, the big cable companies hate the idea, but it should be a boon for consumers. Indeed, the measure might not improve my New York Giants’ watching (we’d need Direct TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket for that), but we might actually get to watch The Wire in real-time instead of waiting months for it to make its way to Netflix.
