Oscar Blackout For 3 Million in New York Area– And Hitler’s Pissed

Looking for someone to blame for the blackout of the Academy Awards? How about the Senate Commerce Committee, which voted 20-2 against the consumer — blocking à la carte cable pricing…

More than 3 million people in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut were deprived of watching the first hour of the Academy Awards Sunday night — caught in a catfight between WABC 7 and the increasingly notorius Cablevision.

At issue is the re-transmission fee. Local stations desperately want the revenue that cable-only channels get. Disney reportedly wants $1 per month per subscriber. Cablevision balked, reportedly paying other broadcast networks about 50 cents.

Making matters worse is the charge that Cablevision already sticks customers with $18 per month for local channels, but is passing none of that on to WABC, with whom they have not had a contract for more than two years.

Cablevision recently removed HGTV and Food Network when those channels attempted to raise monthly subscriber fees. But HGTV and Food Network are second tier channels — hardly delivering content such as The Academy Awards.

As content providers and distributors determine what you can and can’t watch while simultaneously raising prices, the consumer is increasingly powerless.

Consumer advocates have struggled for years to push forward the idea of à la carte pricing, whereby the consumer could actually pick the channels they want, and stop subsidizing the channels they don’t. But cable channels know that unbundling the packages will mean the death knell for many of them. Fringy, minor channels would probably go out of business.

The Senate Commerce Committee under the Bush administration agreed, killing the idea, even though the Bush FCC at the time was a proponent of à la carte.

The Commerce Committee was clueless, falling for a quantity over quality argument. If cable packages were unbundled, many people would drop many channels. To survive, the channels would need to raise prices. For example, the $3+ per month you currently pay for ESPN (the most expensive basic cable channel), would increase as non-sports fans bailed out.

The Commerce Committee cited a study that suggested that if cable was unbundled, the average consumer would get just 20 channels.

But what’s wrong with that? As long as they’re the 20 channels I picked, who cares? What bothers most of us is the money we pour down the drain funding garbage that we don’t watch.

In a related note, check out the meme featuring a raging Hitler. While on its face a bit tasteless, parodies featuring a crucial scene from the German-Austrian film Downfall are all over the web.

The ABC/Cablevision fight, complete with lots of insider jabs at Cablevision/New York Knicks owner James Dolan, did not escape parody.