Please let Me Pay and Choose My TV Channels

As politicians will ever find ways to buy our votes with tax breaks and sugarcoating reality; I applaud the Conservative Party's sweetener of giving Canadians more freedom of picking and choosing their TV channels.   Yet no details been made public by Industry Minister James Moore, who made the initial announcement.  The Conservative Party has no additional information on their website and best article I have seen so far is from the Globe and Mail - Five things you need to know about pick-and-pay TV.  So, we likely have to wait until after the throne speech for details.

With no public knowledge to what pick-and-pay will allow, I would like to make my points clear starting with the Basic Cable package.   We receive approximately 35 English channels and we don't even watch half that number.  We must be old since we do not care for Much Music or MTV and confused that they hardly show music videos.  We have never cared for Country Music (CMT) and the Christian Television Station (CTS) air reruns of Gilmore Girls and the West Wing.  I always skip the APTN network and have only ever stopped by accident when they are showing a Tommy Lee Jones movie.  I guess since Tommy Lee Jones grandmother is Cherokee that it qualifies as Aboriginal content for that channel. 

We also receive duplicate CTV channels for Kingston and Peterborough.  Likely we are not paying for these, but you only need one CTV channel for primetime.  CTV Toronto works just fine with us.  My list goes on with such channels  as YTV, E!, SunNews.  The latter which is fighting to get a higher carriage fee and to be standard in the basic cable package.  Since they are the conservative news channel this seems hypocritical as they are not letting market forces dictate demand and price.

You can quickly see how 35 channels can be halved.  All of these channels could disappear in our household and they would not be missed.  I can understand that many people could love and enjoy those channels and they could simply pick-and-pay for them.  However, I think you could find a consensus with the major Canadian and US broadcasters, you could never find one with the smaller tent channels.  On the other side we would love to get a few more channels including AMC (Breaking Bad and Mad Men), Discovery HD (nature documentaries and world travel), Food Network (tasty food ideas), and Sportsnet (for the odd hockey game).

The technology we know exists.  Our cable provider has the ability to provide individual channels and mini- packages for over 200 world language channels.  So, let's have our household tastes and market forces modernize our cable viewing options and prices.