It’s probably not news to anyone that cable TV is going the way of the dinosaur. Some experts that follow the industry are predicting that 23 percent of U.S. households by 2019 won’t be subscribed to any type of cable service at all. That’s an astounding reduction. Now the decline in cable TV is multifaceted, but many of its woes can be traced back to a single parasite: the government.
It all began long ago with the Federal Communications Commission that was created in 1934, a half-decade before the first television broadcast would even be viewed at the New York World’s Fair. The FCC came into being under the Federal Communications Act of 1934 pushed through Congress and signed by regulation-trigger-happy president Franklin Roosevelt, with a stated mission of being “charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable.”
In doing so, they have killed it. The FCC, which is headed by a board of five unelected Washington bureaucrats, has deemed itself the nanny of the communications world. They were so worried that without them, America would fall into moral decay; that the only way to save her from her own people was to hand down decrees on what words aren’t allowed to be said and what body parts aren’t allowed to be shown. Aren’t we the nation that prides itself on our First Amendment, our freedom of speech and expression? It wouldn’t seem so!
Then regulators in Washington also thought Americans must be idiots, so in 1996, an FCC rule was created requiring that stations offer at least three hours of educational programming every week. This is what many experts believed killed the famous Saturday morning cartoons, because of stations not wanting to cut into primetime spots had to, but they required programming somewhere and it was the cartoon time slots that were sent to the chopping block.
The FCC got away with it for nearly three-quarters of a century. They could because TV had no competition (which led to other problems for the industry that weren't even the government's fault, to be fair). But then came the rise of online streaming services like Netflix that in just a matter of a few years have made cable providers tremble.
Netflix isn’t beholden to the rules of the FCC. They can’t be told what programming they need to have, what words they can’t say, or what type of “indecent” scenes they can’t make. The online world of content making is a Wild West free-market dream. It has given birth to masterpieces from "House of Cards," to "Orange Is the New Black," to "Making a Murderer," and the list goes on.
Yes, the wild success of online streaming content providers is in part from their ability to be fee-based and, therefore, commercial free. Yet we can’t underestimate how much an environment free of regulation creates a fertile field for creativity and ingenuity to blossom.
So really, do you want socialism? More government regulation and control? That gets you crappy,
overpriced and underperforming cable. Or do you want free markets, capitalism, and the freedom of choice? Well, that gives you Netflix, which has proven itself to be the bright beginning of the era of post-FCC programing.
