How Verizon's Bundle Busting Cable Hack Could End the Golden Age of Television

From the outside, Verizon FiOS’s theoretical plan to shake up the cable bundle and find a way to pay cable channels based on their

viewership seems like a godsend. Enable the free market! Lower prices, or at the very least, “stabilize” them! Pave the way for huge numbers of small, boutique channels! There’s one problem, though – any plan to move cable to a ratings-based pay system could jeopardize the shows I love the most and, for that reason, I’m wary.

Derek Thompson has a piece in the Atlantic explaining how exactly we find ourselves in the current “golden age of television.” Some of my favorite shows on television get terrible ratings, and probably wouldn’t do so well under a new pricing regime . Broadcast, he explains, makes its money from advertising, so it's forced to make shows that appeal to the widest audience possible. We all know how that goes. Cable channels, on the other hand, gets a slice of every subscriber on their bundle. So one or two hits can ensure their place in the bundle, and thus their success. That's why cable will throw gigantic amounts of money at one or two shows -- that's all they need. So that corrupt morass of bundling that we love to hate is also responsible for the shows we love.

It’s hard not to get behind an assault on the Byzantine beast that is the cable bundle. It could, theoretically, mean lower, logical TV prices. But right now, that elaborate mess has brought me some of the most memorable entertainment experiences of my life. Do we really want cable to be bound by the same numbers game as broadcast? Would expensive shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad survive a transition to a viewership-based economy?

Plenty of people benefit from various forms of corruption. I suppose that with TV, I and everyone else who likes elaborate hour-long dramas are among them. Any sort of pricing strategy is unlikely to go through without the consent of Time Warner and Viacom, so I feel myself feeling an unlikely affection for the media giants at this moment.