Unlike my sex, I actually pay for my cable and my monthly bill is over a hundred (dollars)a month. I hate paying for channels that I will never watch. You know which ones I mean. The channels that target small segments of the population:
- HGTV (greenthumbs)
- BET (black people and wiggers)
- Oxygen/Lifetime (women)
I’m a white male who watches the hell out of Animal Planet, but never ABC Family. Why should I pay for that crap? We’ll if you’re on my side, Congress is on our side…sort of. They have been debating the merits of an ‘a la carte’ system where you would choose and pay for only the channels you want.
It’s far from a clear-cut issue though. Some are saying that channels with lower number of viewers would have to charge more for their programming to make ends meet and thus shrink further their subscriber base while high-demand channels could charge more because of the demand.
To see what the American public had to say on the issue, a poll was conducted and the results were astonishing:
“Among those favoring an a la carte system, more than four in 10 believe that it would lower bills, though more than a quarter believe it would actually raise overall prices.”
That accounts for 7 out of the 10 people. What the hell did the other 3 people say?
*ring ring*
“Good evening sir, I’m with Polls R Us. Do you think that a la carte cable systems would raise or lower prices?”
“Fish.”
“I'm sorry, sir?”
“Fish.”
*click*
This might be one part of the phenom known as “Margin of Error.” Either that or someone needs to stop hiring pollsters that can’t remember the polee’s answers long enough to record them. Maybe the “error” is on the end of the person answering the questions:
*ring ring*
“Do you think murder is wrong”
“No I do not”
“OK, thanks, bye.”
“Oh shit! Did I just say I think murder is OK?”
Good thing there's that margin of error!
Even after all the data is tabulated, one small tweak can make all the hours totally wasted and not worth it. I give to you, this real example from the same article:
“Virtually every study has shown that per-channel pricing will result in higher rates and less diversity in programming. Had the poll provided that information, we can be certain the respondents would overwhelmingly oppose this unnecessary government regulation.”
Thanks for that. Why poll if you know the truth? Just to see how stupid people are? Let’s go to the phones…
“fish”
*click*