“Most people realize that the cable and broadcast industry has worked tirelessly to protect its legacy cash cow from disruption,” Carl Bode reports for techDirt.
“Dish was forced to make its ad-skipping DVR less useful if it wanted streaming licensing rights. Fox, Disney and Comcast/NBC for years kept Hulu from being too disruptive. ESPN sued Verizon for trying to offer more flexible TV lineups,” Bode reports. “Apple keeps running face first into broadcasters terrified of real disruption with its own TV plans. That’s before you even get to cable companies busy capping and metering usage to hurt streaming services, while zero rating their own services for competitive advantage.”
“Gosh, it’s almost as if there’s a broad, coordinated, decade-long effort to keep legacy television expensive, barely-competitive, and shitty,” Bode reports. “Enter the FCC, which, according to a Wall Street Journal report, is ‘probing’ whether there’s a coordinated effort by the cable and broadcast industry to keep Internet video from truly taking off.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Let’s hope this FCC “probe” leads to something meaningful, something that increases competition, for a change.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]