What cable companies don't want to face about their future

A recent article on CNN.money stated that cable companies are going to be raising their prices over the next few years, to where people are paying about $95 for cable per household. The article goes on to state that the reason cable companies have to do this is because a lot of their clients have switched over to Web programming and cable offerings that can be obtained through such sites as Hulu.com, so their only option is to raise the prices on the subscribers that they have left.

As one of the many people who have left paying cable behind, I can say without a doubt that cable companies have a much worse time ahead of them than they want to admit. Granted, I still get cable because it's lumped in with my current housing package, but to be honest, if it wasn't, I wouldn't be paying for it because there's not enough on television that I want to pay to watch. I used to love watching certain television shows on the Sci Fi channel (which for some mysterious reason has changed its name to SyFy, or something stupid like that). Most of those shows are gone, or on hiatus, or in mid-season disappearance mode, or whatever. Most shows on other channels have either ended their run (Monk) or got cancelled by the networks (Firefly, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Veronica Mars, etc.). Honestly, there aren't enough shows left worth watching. I'm not a fan of reality programming, or the latest version of American Dancing With the Idols, or whatever those shows are. So, I have really zero desire to subscribe to cable. I watch about the average of three or four shows now, if that (trying to think: Lost, Chuck, Stargate Universe....), so I'm not really missing much. I even missed those shows when they played because they have the strangest broadcast scheduling (kept getting put on hiatus in the middle of their seasons as if this would entice me to watch the other garbage they put in its place).

This is the problem cable companies have with the rest of the country. They don't offer enough quality programming that people are really excited about subscribing to. What they have is an audience of people who turn on the tube for companionship, or as a talking night light. With other diversions like World of Warcraft (for me), dvds (Netflix), the Internet (I can't even begin to point out the opportunities available here), and whatnot, cable companies really aren't the "necessity" that they want people to expect. There's an old marketing aside about how most of the things we have today weren't really considered necessities in the past. Someone had to convince us that we really needed them. That includes the telephone, the radio, the television, the microwave and then the computer. In the beginning of all of these technologies, ad men had to convince us we needed them. Now, we expect them, so we now think of them almost as if they're part of Maslow's Heirarchy. They're not. The radio is almost nonexistent these days, the telephone moved to the cell phone, and each thing reaches a point to where it is replaced with something else. Cable is that way, too, because television has slowly been replaced by so many other items that occupy our time and attention. Cable companies aren't going to want to face that anymore than record companies wanted to face that their business model was irrelevant ten years ago, and they were about to be surpassed by file sharing sites. Come to think of it, they still haven't gotten over that, nor have they come to realize it either.

So, cable companies are going to slowly realize they've become somewhat irrelevant. Or that they should be irrelevant. The only thing they have in their favor is the complacent viewer who will continue to buy their content. But that can only last so long. The dvd was out for quite some time before the last vinyl record buyer finally switched to cds and dvds; some never did. But a huge company can't survive on the nostalgia factor.

At least, that's what they're going to discover.

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