Cable TV: A Weapon of Mass Media

In battle, as any student of Carl Von Clausewitz and war craft will tell you, power tends to get bunched up in the middle of the theater.  You know, circle the wagons and all that.  Or to quote the major-general himself, "a certain center of gravity develops, the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all our energies should be directed."

In the battle to liberate TV, one dark hub of power is the cable TV cabal. If we want to free the medium to change and be relevant again, that's the point where we need to strike.  Fortunately, according to USA Today, the Feds appear ready finally to apply a 10-year old clause in the liberation cause.

If the Federal Communications Commission enforces a 1996 ruling that would unbundle the equipment-service interlock--instead of rubber-stamping an annual extension--it would be a bunker buster to the hub of the cable cabal.

From the USA Today article--

"One certain outcome: A TiVo or Microsoft will be able to sell a box that connects to the cable line and the Internet. It will pull in cable channels, Web-based video and downloadable movies, mix them all together and present them on screen in a single menu. (Cable companies despise that because they lose control of the viewing experience.)  When Xbox, Wii and PlayStation 3 also become TV hubs, the mixture of gaming, TV, two-way communications and 3D graphics should get really interesting."

Unbundled TV would open the doors for a thousand seeds of innovation to be planted by entrepreneurs big and small and the biggest winner of all would be the consumer.

It is our moral imperative to seek out, find and destroy these fortified weapons of mass media if we have any hope of producing TV viable for the Bubble Generation.