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Message: [QUOTE="cuseinchina, post: 720561, member: 3079"] The question is not difficult - if you and others here think there is so much value for consumers in the bundle, why then should the cable companies be fighting so hard to stop a la carte? Why not let consumers choose to bundle or not and price accordingly. Not sure what is unclear about that question. My contention is that the cable companies fight because they know they will lose a tremendous amount of money and become a 'dumb pipe'. I was in a small meeting with a comcast exec probably ten years ago now and he basically said we'll be able to keep a la carte at bay hopefully for his tenure as ceo but it was the thing that scared him more than anything. they now know it's coming and hope to jack up the rates on internet access for people who don't buy the bundle. Google fiber and others will eventually take the profit out of that as well and the cable industry will go back to being what it always should have been, a boring utility that returns its cost of capital but little more and gets compensated by price increases for investments in technology that help consumers. That kind of company certainly won't command a 20% valuation premium to the S&P like comcast does today - THAT is why cable executives don't want bundling - their bonus pool will dry up and their stock holdings will lose 40% of their value (at least). I also didn't say the cable companies enjoyed a true monopoly, it's more like a duopoly depending on region and availability of alternatives, though the alternatives are, with the exception of places that have fios, not truly competitive equivalent offerings (satellite plus a crappy dsl connection is not an equivalent offering to comcast's services). But the bundle came from a time when cable companies were truly a collection of tiny local monopolies. they were like cement companies but with better barriers to entry. Consolidation enhanced their power versus the content side and consumers since the few large players remaining collude on pricing and offerings for the most part so consumers can't cry fowl. Bundling has remained in the early innings of the limited competition coming from satellite and telcos because of the controlling relationship the industry has built with content providers. Greater bandwidth, faster speeds, and a good interface make that relationship close to meaningless. So while the cable companies are not true monopolies (which i never said), the bundle is certainly monopolistic (which is what i said) and springs from a time when cable companies were true monopolies. Monopolistic practices happen in the space between Oligopoly and monopoly, the differentiator being how much, not if, the consumer gets shafted. Bundles will be for the old, the rich, and the lazy. you can buy one but don't force me to. [/QUOTE]

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