businesses making money?
oh man how dare they! how dare they force me to pay for something!
oh wait ... they don't.
The problem is, if one of these businesses wants to charge 2-3 times what they had been or pull any other shenanigans (supposedly they were trying to force bundles of other channels at much higher prices on DISH), my only option to do anything about it is to basically entirely give up service, which means multiple other businesses will be hurt. I can't just go, no leave FOX off and just not charge me for their bullshit.
Essentially there's no way I can put pressure on FOX to stop being shitheads since giving up FOX means having to give up all the others, plus the intermediary.
If you think that gets the message across properly I don't know what to tell you. All it will end up doing is hurting DISH who will then feel they need to cave to shit like this in the future in order to keep their customers, meanwhile FOX and the effective media oligopoly they're a part of will be able to keep asking for more and more money (which is why we've seen a lot of this the past few years).
Not that the intermediaries are really any better (see what the telecoms did to Netflix).
Me and you are going to open up a bottle of scotch and talk more about this one day, but not right now! Your choices are your business. If you think economists, marketing, businesses, policy makers and the like, do not influence purchasing decisions of the masses, then obviously your naive to think people started smoking for medicinal purposes in the 1930's and High fructose corn syrup is digested the same way as pure cane sugar. Welcome to the real world sir, I hope you find yourself in it one day.
I just want to know where the money is going and why people are obviously still paying so much! That's it! It's not going to fiber optic lines that have been laying dormant for 20 years, or for acting scholarships, or for TV shows on-demand (Without subscriptions).
What are we valuing here when people are willing to pay so much for so little? When people vote for tax cuts (yet do not know where the money is actually going or how it is used in the first place) then pay for 120-200 dollars for cable TV!
Your ramblings about cane sugar vs HFCS just highlight that you're every bit as out of touch as anyone you're chastising and you need to take your own advice and join the real world.
shows cost a shitload of money to make and distribute and then you got shareholders on top who want a return on investment.
But really, the answer as to why your cable bill is ridiculous: sports
And yet they still have had no problem making money on shows for decades upon decades now. Sick of content companies pulling this "woe is me, it costs us money" while they continually make more money than ever. It's so transparently bullshit. Maybe if they spent less money buying off politicians they could line their pockets with more money (while they use the little guys they continuously screw over to act like things are so goddamn bad).
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...acks-off-google-investigation-pushed-by-mpaa/
The real answer on why cable/internet/etc bills are ridiculous: mixing telecomms and television service providers with modern media companies. Both have been trying to screw their customers every which way they can for decades now. Considering both groups are effectively operating oligopolies now, we're double fucked. And the government agencies tasked with oversight are so rife with conflicts of interest and political bullshit that nothing is being done while those companies pay other politicians to rewrite the laws and use their government powers to waste taxpayer money to enforce what those companies want even when it's blatantly averse to the interest of the people (that they're supposed to be actually representing).
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