We Can Land People on the Moon but We Can't Give Consumers the Cable Channels They Want? Come On!

While today's kids are growing up on the internet and their cell phones, as a child of the 70's I grew up on TV. I woke up for school each morning and watched cartoons on the local channels until it was time for leave, I came home from school each day and watched cartoons until the boring shows like the news came on, and on Saturday mornings it was a five-hour marathon of cartoons.

TV went along relatively unchanged until the advent of cable. When cable originally came out, it was a pretty reasonable deal. I used to get 57 channels for $9.95 a month. However, as channels spawned like a brood of horny rabbits, the price skyrocketed.

Now with "basic" cable or satellite costing around $29.95 a month(at the absolute cheapest), I no longer have cable or satellite in my home. It's not that I no longer like TV. It's just that TV does not offer the sorts of options that most other subscription services do.

Take cell phones, as an example. There are so many plans out there allowing just about every conceivable configuration. You can get unlimited everything, pay for only a certain number of minutes a month, pay for only unlimited calling but not unlimited text, pay as you go, etc. The cell phone people realize that one plan does not fit all.

The pay TV people have yet to figure this out. Most cable or satellite companies offer something like three plans: basic, an intermediate plan of some sort, and then an ultimate plan. The problem with this is, other than movie channels and a few others that you can choose and pay extra for, you have to buy a ton of stuff that you never watch.

If I ran a cable or satellite company, I would set up packages based only on the channels desired. Do you only watch about 10 channels altogether? Then you should be able to get a package that has those 10 channels for a price that reflects what viewers are currently charged for standard packages.

For example, if a cable or satellite company is charging $30 a month for a basic plan that offers about 70 channels, the consumer is paying about 43 cents a channel. So if I decide that I only want 10 channels, I should pay around $4.30 a month. Think of all the channels you wouldn't have to mess with like C-Span, the Food Network, The Golf Channel, or whatever particular channels that you wish you weren't paying for.

Since the digital transition occurred just a short time back, I am relying solely on my converter box and antenna to receive the handful of stations I now have. Until the pay TV companies get it through their heads that paying about $25 a month for channels that I don't want is not a "deal", that's what I'm going to stay with.