If you like cable television but don’t like paying for dozens of channels that you’ll never watch, you’ll be pleased to know that at least one cable company no longer has a beef with a leading programmer over station bundling.
In 2013, the cable company Cablevision filed suit in the U.S. District Court in New York, charging that Viacom would only license their popular offerings if the service also put them together with more than a dozen little watched channels. The Los Angeles Times late last week reported that the suit had been settled, though terms of the settlement have not been released.
The practice of putting products together in a package that buyers cannot avoid is known as bundling, and is generally considered a violation of anti-trust rules.
Cablevision was interested in Viacom’s popular Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central channels, but according to their lawsuit, they could only take those channels if they also purchased the other, less successful ones. Other programmers including Disney and NBC Universal also put together channel offerings with pricing that entices distributors to purchase all of the channels.
But small cable providers have long complained that this practice makes it more costly tom provide the few channels that people want than bundles with hundreds of unwanted channels.
Still, with recent competition from online video and on-demand sites, programmers are becoming more flexible, often dropping their bundles in order to remain competitive in markets where flexibility to viewers’ preferences is key.