FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and the Parents Television Council (PTC) both had words of praise over allowing satellite radio subscribers the ability to block adult-oriented channels - and to subsequently give a rebate for those blocked channels.It's a plan that was outlined by Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin last week, as well as in Sirius and XM's official merger filing. If a subscriber wishes to block a channel (like the ever-objectionable Martha Stewart Living Radio channel), the merged Sirius-XM would give a rebate back for that channel's value.
Karmazin called it a more "à la carte" approach - a plan that both the FCC's Kevin Martin and the PTC seemed to approve of.
Martin said Karmazin's proposal "sounded, in general, like a good idea," although he has yet to fully study it. "One of the options I have encouraged," he said, "is allowing parents to block channels and also [have] the companies reimburse the price they are charging consumers for content they don't want. I think that a block and reimburse mechanism may be a good idea."
Parents Television Council Government Affairs Director Dan Isett called it "a significant step in the right direction. You finally have a major media outlet recognizing the reality about some of these subscription-based platforms."
The PTC has long been a vocal anti-indecency group (making up for a very large number of the FCC indecency complaints) and consists of over a 1,000,000 members.
[Broadcasting & Cable]
The PTC is a scam. If they have 1 million members, I'm the Pope. I guarantee they have no more than a few thousand jerkoffs as members who have nothing to do all day but send "complaints" to all those idiots in DC. They're just a bunch of loud mouth fanatics who love to tell people what to think.
Fuck them.
Cool...I could get a basic group of stations, block the 70's on 7 (XM) as being 'objectionable' (hey, lots of disco...)and get a reduced rate on a basic package??? :-)
Can the PTC and the FCC please make this claim to the cable companies. I would love to block the spanish chanels, BET, Home Shopping Networks, etc.
As for for the PTC I wish they would take a more parenting themselves approach to parenting then to tell the government to parent. They might be sort of right with this since they can not watch their kids every second when they are not at home but when they are at home they should learn how to parent there own kids. There is a commercial running lately that simply says, "learn how to use parental controls." Simply tells them to do their jobs.
Note that most of the shopping channels pay the cable company to be there, so if they had a "block and rebate" applied, the potential bill would actually go up, not down.
Similar thing with Clear Channel-provided content on XM. XM isn't really paying for it, CC just provides it, so it's unclear how a block-and-rebate would actually help in this case.
would this be truly a la carte, or more of a bundled situation similar to XM's current XL channels. a parent could choose to block all XL channels, not 1 offs, and get a set rebate for not getting XL channels? seems more realistic than calling up and blocking 1 channel here and 1 channel there. just my $.02