Letters: Cable’s unwanted cornucopia

Re “Give us a la carte channel pricing,� Column, July 13

David Lazarus writes ruefully about the absurd charges foisted on cable-TV subscribers that force them to buy a metaphorical whole sack of groceries when all they want is bread and milk.

He never mentioned the obvious choice: Get cable out of your hair and go back to your antenna. You can get all the movies you want from the likes of Netflix, and most sports by a computer tie-in. I did not need or want the hundreds of confusing choices, and I relish saving the thousands of dollars over the years.

Cancellation is the only form of public protest the media moguls will ever react to.

Allen J. Manzano

Carlsbad

Lazarus nailed it. Most people don’t watch many of the channels they are forced to buy to get the handful of channels they do watch. In the old movie distribution days, this was called “block booking,� and it was deemed illegal. The same rules should apply to television.

Whatever happened to survival of the fittest? If a new channel is force-fed to the public, we should require that it live on its own or just die. Cable makes buckets of dollars on these “reject� channels.

If nothing else, the industry should at least try an a la carte plan. Everyone might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Avram Butensky

Marina del Rey

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