A lot of people blame the company they deal with directly: the cable or sat providers, but look at it from their perspective. They offer a hundred or more channels and they have to pay the the networks for every subscriber, even if only a small percentage of their subscribers actually watch it.
Even local independent stations that broadcast for free over the air want big money from the cable companies to carry them. To me, it's a symbiotic relationship: if I'm an independent station I know that if Xfinity picks up my channel, I'll increase my viewership by a thousand fold.
Now, a lot of networks are producing their own shows, and this does cost money, plus they are paying residuals for older reruns, so they also have to pay for programming. The question is whether the networks or Xfinity is the most greedy.
I would love to see all these networks go to an a la carte system. If I want Paramount, I'll pay for it. Digital cable makes this easily possible. To be honest, I'll bet Xfinity is waiting for the day when everyone streams through Hulu, Neflix, etc. Let these streaming services fight for programming and deal with the costs. Xfinity (and other internet providers) will only have to provide the connection and not deal with networks any longer.
EDIT: I remember a couple of years ago the Xfinity where I am dropped YES network (Yankees and other NY sports) because of a fight over carriage costs. I remember Xfinity offered YES the following deal: YES could charge Xfinity customers whatever they wanted and Xfinity wouldn't make a penny on them. The only proviso was that only those people who actually wanted YES would pay YES directly. YES turned them down because they wanted to be paid for every subscriber on Xfinity whether they watched the Yankees or not.
After YES was gone from our cable going into the second yea (Xfinity didn't buckle), YES dropped their price and Xfinity added them back. Of course, our cable bill has been going up constantly so there's plenty of greed to go around.
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