What, Exactly, is Cable?

NPR's Planet Money did an episode last week entitled "The Secret History of Your Cable Bill." It explores the question of why are we forced to buy cable in bundles that, on the face of it, seem ridiculous.

The piece is mostly historical, tracing the rise of broadcast television and the birth of cable. For the most part, the blame is placed on the weird deal that first caused broadcast channels to be free over cable and later led cable and broadcasters to deals in which channel bundles were sold. They do note that there's still controversy over an issue I highlighted in January: what are the actual economics behind cable bundles? It's still clear someone is subsidizing someone, but it's hard to figure out which direction the arrow is pointing. There's a helpful chart on their site graphing out the cost-per-subscriber that cable companies pay to media companies, but that just tells you ESPN costs a lot more than Animal Planet, not whether your fat cable bill involves one subsidizing the other.

Finally, there continues to be the youth factor. Cable-qua-cable is increasingly what your parents watched. If you're under 30 today then you've likely been raised in an a la carte world and that demographic may mean that cable isn't so much dying as being aged out of existence.

Those of us who are over 30 (or a certain age) remember wrangling the rabbit ears and how it was the younger generation who had cable and the older that stuck with broadcast. Now it seems like that process may be repeating itself, leading to the question asked by a youth from the podcast that inspired this post's title.