On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 12:26 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
the 80s when that practice got started -- having to account for each individual subscriber pushed the complexity up, in much the same way that flat rate telecom services are popular equally because customers prefer them, and because the *cost of keeping track* becomes >delta.
Having personally and solely designed and written a toll billing system from scratch that directly exchanged billing and settlement data (and end-user data) with hundreds of ILECs, I can tell you a number of things I learned: 1) billing is only as hard as you (or your vendor) make it 2) if your company can't figure out how to bill for a new product or service, blame the billing people, not the product 3) keeping up with taxes and fees consume a lot more resources than calculating the net bills themselves; so adding products is really trivial compared to dealing with every pissant local government that decides to apply a different taxing method to your HBO (or your telephone calls) This is not to say the folks that handle billing at cable companies are equally capable, but if they had legitimate competitors, they would figure out how to run many parts of their businesses more efficiently. Imagine if Wal-Mart was the only game in town that had bar code readers at the cash registers, and every other grocery chain had to look up every item and punch in the price to check you out. Other stores would quickly improve their technology or find themselves out of business.
2) New networks prefer it, and the fact that it happens makes the creation of new cable networks practical -- you don't have to go around and sell your idea to people retail; you sell it to CATV systems (well,
My understanding is that networks/media giants like it because they can force cable companies to carry 11 irrelevant channels to get the Disney Channel that your kids want. Would enough people really ask for G4TV to make producing and syndicating shows for that channel cost-effective? I don't know the answer, but my suspicion is that people who really just want CSN, E!, or the Golf Channel are subsidizing G4 viewers. I wanted BBCA a few years ago, but my cable provider required that I buy 30 other channels I did not want or had never even heard of to get BBCA, so I didn't subscribe to it. I do not know if a la carte channel selection would be good for me, as a consumer, or not. I do think the reasons the industry does not want to offer that to end-users are disingenuous. -- Jeff S Wheeler <jsw@inconcepts.biz> Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts