À La Carte Cable Endorsed By...John McCain?!

If you were at all familiar with my views before "meeting" me via this site, it will not shock you to learn that I am not John McCain's #1 fan. (Don't worry, Republicans: though I am a feminist and a socialist, I am also not an American citizen, so you don't have to worry about my vote ever nullifying yours.) He's voted for financial deregulation and DOMA; against reproductive rights, national health care, and a federal minimum wage; and is almost entirely responsible for giving Sarah Palin political stature on a national scale. On the other hand: he's come out in favour of à la carte cable. So maybe I've misjudged him!

If you pay for cable/satellite, even though the shows you care about most are already basically available à la carte via iTunes/Amazon Prime/whatever, it's probably because, like me, your concern is one or more of the following:

• you can't wait for twelve or more hours after air to watch them
• less than 100% of what you want to watch is actually available via online on demand services (this mostly applies to premium channels like HBO)
• you still like to watch TV the way you always have ("Oh cool, my favourite old 30 Rock is starting!" "Fun, I can live-tweet the Oscars with the rest of the internet!") as opposed to watching only specifically selected shows

Or, unlike me:

• live sports broadcasts are very important to you

Regardless of your specific interests, if you have cable, there are dozens of channels you literally never watch. In McCain's letter to the FCC, linked above, he cites the statistic that most cable subscribers only watch eighteen out of more than a hundred channels they pay for, and even that seems kind of high to me. And while you can choose tiers of programming, you can't subtract any that you will never use in order to lower your bill. Even though the ultra-niche channels I watch (Discovery Fit & Health; well, how else am I supposed to keep up with Embarrassing Bodies?) would almost certainly not survive if they were not bundled in with legitimately popular ones like TLC, McCain's not really wrong when he describes the current cable system as "socialism." (I am a socialist, but this is the bad kind, meaning, the kind where I pay a lot for ESPN for no really good reason.)

However right McCain might be, I kind of doubt the political will exists to change anything right now. The cable companies can hire great lobbyists to fight it because they have all our money. (I won't tell you what I paid last month for Time Warner. But it was a lot.) And for all the disruption in the space we've seen in the past few years from Netflix, Hulu, and whatever else, cable is still a utility most people can't replace with other currently available content delivery systems (legal and...er, not). Still, I applaud my enemy John McCain for doing what he can to try talking sense to the FCC, even though there's a good chance the idea occurred to him when he was flipping through his guide looking for the History Channel and got annoyed because his cable provider moved it and replaced it with OWN.