When sweet little Heather O'Rourke died, she left a good looking corpse.
Cable TV won't.
I don't like supermarkets. I don't like having to buy bacon and Spam and lard in order to get broccoli and oatmeal. That bothers me. It sucks. I'm not sure who thought of this concept, but they're a fiscal rapist of the first order.
Brothels bother me, too. It truly irks me that if you want to spend an hour with a pretty young lass of South American extraction, you are obligated, at the same time, to entertain a fat, sweaty, cake-eating mountain pig whose vagina went into hiding a decade ago. Even worse, you must pay the mountain pig regardless of whether you touched her or not.
Is this the world our forefathers built?
I'm speaking hypothetically, of course. Nobody would really force you to buy SPAM if you wanted oats. And nobody would compel you to lie down with a mountain of sweaty flesh, either, would they?
Actually, they would.
Who's THEY?
Cable TV.
You know the drill. If you want IFC (the Independent Film Channel), you must also take Lifetime Women, Jewelry Television, and ION Life. Oh, and they'll also oblige you to pay for NFL Network, too.
But I don't watch sport!I don't care what you watch or don't watch, asshole. You're taking these extra channels and you're paying for them.
OK. I'd like CNN International, too.
Really, sir? Well, if you want that, please remove your pants and take BET, Fit TV, Basket Weavers Network, and another twenty-five loser channels that play infomercials between midnight and 7 am, too. Get dressed when we're done fucking you and leave your wallet by the door.
Why is there such fiscal injustice in this world?Because the cable companies delight in bending you over and fucking you up the ass. No reach-around. No candlelit dinners. No compliments or foreplay. Just hard, dry, brutal penetration.
They make money by spreading the good channels across a variety of tiers. For every good channel, there are ten shitty channels. Your money pays for the good channels and the shitty ones. It doesn't matter whether you watch them or not. You simply pay and fuck you, Charlie!
Eventually, this will all come unstuck, and cable's dick will be removed from your ass.
The present structure is about five years behind the times. Mainstream business always is. It's populated by followers, not leaders.
Netflix is leading the charge against the cable rapists. You pick what you want. They send it to you. You send it back. They send your next choice. Simple.Now, you can do this on-line. You flick through the on-screen menu. You choose what you want. They send it down the line to you. Easy.
The cost?
About a quarter of what cable charges.
With cable, you get what you're given. It's not unlike like the old days when there were half a dozen channels. You watched what was on. If you didn't like it, too bad.
The internet has changed the way we think about entertainment. We're become accustomed to searching for and finding what we want. The plateau has shifted one hundred and eighty degrees. For the most part, the TV networks are perceived as old hat. They are losing an entire generation of younger viewers who've been weened on the web -- a generation weened on choice.
There is still plenty of good programming on cable, of course. You just have to look between the televised "crack".Even though I have close to 200 channels, I watch a handful only. These are A&E, The History Channel, National Geographic, Investigation Discovery, MSNBC, USA, AMC, Spike, CNN International, TCM (Turner Classic movies), IFC, Comedy Central, The Sundance Channel, and BBC America. I like HBO and Showtime for a couple of original series, but I have zero interest in their movies because I already see close to 300 movies a year at the cinema or on DVD from a variety of regions.
My point is I'm paying for 200 channels and watching a dozen or so.
With Netflix, you're paying for exactly what you watch. They're not raping anybody. That makes for smiley faces.This is why cable TV (in its present form) will die.
Very few human beings enjoy being raped repeatedly. This may be news to the sociopathic corporations, but, trust me, an object inserted without invitation into the human body is not pleasant. For the rapist, it is a demonstration of power.
As it is for the rapists running these corporations.
Their power comes from the money they make. There is no other power for them.
Unless they begin a collective withdrawal of their corporate penises from their customers' rear ends, their power will go away. Their penises will no longer be capable of maintaining wood.
These companies have the resources and infrastructure to make changes. They may not have the will right now, but when revenues plummet, they will find it.The Netflix model is the model of the future because it's about choice. Nobody is being dragged into a room and raped. A straight man isn't being forced to suck dick. A gay man isn't having his faced pressed to a vagina against his will. A stoner isn't being compelled to smoke a cigar or a huff a clove cigarette.
In its present form, cable TV will die.
The internet has made it abundantly clear that exciting entertainment niches exist. Cable TV is not serving these niches because it's geared towards the masses. But the masses have fractured, and what was once a mass is now a dozen niches. Do you ignore these niches when they still collectively comprise a mass, or do you go back to the drawing board and create new structures to extract revenue?
Smart companies do that.
I don't want to pay $100 to watch 15 channels. Today, I may pay $40 to watch 15 channels. And if I'll pay $40, you can bet I'm not alone.
Amongst my friends and colleagues, many are dropping cable. The costs are too high. The subsidization of shitty channels sucks. And there's Netflix, DVD's, and Blu-Ray, anyway. There are Netflix clones, too.
The economics of cable becoming more choice-oriented are clear. By adapting a pay-for-what-you-want-and-not-what-you-don't want approach, the corporations running cable will entice or attract back the millions of hold-outs who aren't repaired to bend over and take it fiscally in the butt.
Cable is officially a living corpse. Living corpses don't look so good and they smell like shit.
On this week's brilliant Family Guy, Brian ate Stewie's shit direct from the little monster's diaper. I'd put money on it that he wouldn't go near cable.
