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Are Pay TV Subscribers Well Served By A System That Rips Them Off?

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Monday October 29, 2012 @ 11:51am PDTTags: Big Media, Pay TV Channels, The Atlantic

Apparently so, according to writer Derek Thompson’s well researched and engagingly presented, but unfortunately misguided, article about pay TV pricing (“Prisoners of Cable“) in the latest issue of my favorite magazine, The Atlantic. He acknowledges that the seven largest Big Media companies — including News Corp, Viacom, Disney, and Time Warner — “use their oligopolistic power” to give cable and satellite customers a simple choice: either buy “a bloated offering of channels at an arrestingly high price” or go without. “Cable’s proposition to consumers is simple: if you want the new, good, TV shows, you need the bundle.” That’s unfair, right? Not to Thompson. The system that makes people pay for channels they don’t want also gives us classy fare including HBO’s Game Of Thrones and AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad. “Indeed,” Thompson says, “it’s no accident that as pay-TV has proliferated, and costs have risen, we’ve also entered a golden age of television.” And even though “as a monthly fee, cable feels like a rip-off…as hourly entertainment, it’s not.” The proof: The bundle only costs 20 cents an hour for the average four-person home that watches as much as four hours a day. The kicker: “more than 100 million households still think the price is worth paying.”

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Can Yahoo Become The Leading Destination For Politics Junkies In 2012?

By DAVID LIEBERMAN, Executive Editor | Tuesday November 8, 2011 @ 6:16am PSTTags: ABC News, Forbes, Reuters, The Atlantic, This Week, Yahoo, Yahoo News

That’s what the struggling Internet search and content company hopes to accomplish as it unveils today what it calls “the first stage of an ambitious yearlong program” to build on its partnership with ABC News and cover 2012 campaign … Read More »

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ICM Adds The Atlantic To Newspaper And Magazine Clientele

By MIKE FLEMING JR | Wednesday August 10, 2011 @ 9:42am PDTTags: Charles Portis, Ernest Hemingway, ICM, Mark Twain, The Atlantic, William Faulkner
Mike Fleming

ICM, which has set up dozens of option deals for its client The New York Times and which just recently started making deals for New York Magazine, this week has signed The Atlantic. The agency will package the magazine’s articles … Read More »

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