I am a cable tv subscriber. I'm not permanently glued to my magnet box, but i do occasionaly watch a little. One series of freqently displayed PSAs, if I should call them that, issued by my cable company Comcast is starting to bug me because of it's blind agression. Commercial announcements featuring paid actors attacking the rather new wave of satellite television.
Each of these diatribes against satellite providers all run along similar themes. "Installing a dish is invasive and destructive", "I can't get my local channels", "Satellite tv sucks", "Satellite tv is evil", "I have to pay for extra programming", "I installed a satelitte dish, and now a goat legged demon has popped out of my tv set and is raping my children".
These words remind me of an video I stumbled over on a random website a while ago. An advertisement shown in movie theaters possibly during the 70s stating "Monsters have their place, in the dark, under you bed, but not in your living room. Cable TV companies want to charge you for the same programs you get for free on regular tv. Write your congressmen and tell them to keep monsters from invading your TV". So apparently, the current stranglehold on good entertainment was forseen and not well met by some certain groups of people in its infancy.
So satelitte tv, which is growing in popularity is seen as a threat to cable companies. Their reaction: "We need guns...lots of guns...scratch that, let's just run some of those good old scaremongering ads to keep any potential heretics in our boat". I know this getting kind of rambly, but don't consumers have a choice? What if we do want to be able to choose our own programming? What if we want to try somthing different? What are you cable providers going to do when a consumer sits down and compares satellite tv and cable side by side and makes a decision? Huh, whatchoogonnado?