By Carol Kopp, Minyanville Staff Writer
"The Hole Saga," or holesaga.com, was an ill-fated attempt by the cable television industry to use humor and high production values to illustrate the importance of subscription cable service in our lives.
"The Hole Saga" showed the potential horrors of cable cord-cutting in four vignettes, most notably one starring a man who suffers an attack by a crazy-eyed mutant rabbit because he missed the news on TV. Horribly, the vignettes were "interactive," demanding that the viewer make the life-or-death decision to cut the cable, or keep it.
The feature appears to have been taken down after running for only about 10 days. A spokesman for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, its sponsor, told Washington Post that the site would be shut down this week.
It seems more likely that it was a heavy-handed attempt at public relations. With all the attention that cable cord-cutting is getting, the big cable companies seem to be just concerned enough to make a few token gestures.
In slightly more substantive gestures, big cable providers Comcast CMCSA and Time Warner Cable TWC recently rolled out competing special deals for subscribers who are fed up with paying for huge packages of channels they don't want.
In response, Time Warner Cable recently added a promotion for a $19.99 per month “Starter TV” package that includes little beyond the broadcast networks and some shopping channels, or a $29.99 per month version that includes HBO.
Both companies' offers also have a glaring strategic omission: cable sports programming. You want your ESPN, you have to buy the big package.
There are other reasons: Streaming video choices are vast and deep on the Internet, but they do not include “live” programming, from sports to news and special events. Nor is most first-run television programming available online until the day after or the season after, unless — you guessed it — you've got a cable subscription.
Worse, most people who have cable subscriptions get their Internet service from the same source. Researching the quality and price of the alternatives is more time-consuming than most busy consumers like to contemplate.
So, when does the least-respected industry in America start to worry about its future? Presumably when that fabled tech-savvy, Internet-based younger generation comes of age.
So, the real message of the pitiful public relations efforts may be this: The cable companies are not in full-on panic mode yet, because they don't have to be.
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What Apple's 2013 Shopping Spree Tells UsThe following article is from one of our external contributors. It does not represent the opinion of Benzinga.
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