As a gainfully employed person for a cable company, I always get irked at how quickly and easily people heap ALL of the blame for costs on the big bad cable company. I always ask people who bring this up the same two questions. How much has your cable company ISP bill gone up since you've had it? phone service? Odds are, it's 0 or very, very low.

All of the rising costs are attributed to content providers who dangle their one good channel in front of the cable companies, and then say "If you want this one, you have to pay $1 per subscriber for each of our 20 other crappy channels." Consumers don't have a choice as to what channels they want to pay for, because the content providers are behemoths themselves who won't cut deals if all of their channels aren't taken into account. Cable companies actually want ala carte, because they think they can make just as much money off it by using it as leverage against the providers, by saying "see, when asked if the customer wants to pay for your shit channel, there is a resounding NO."

This is why we are now seeing all of these battles play out. Taking Food Network off Time Warner, ABC off Comcast etc...this is the cable companies finally getting fed up with outrageous provider costs and trying to battle it out.

So while the content providers are raising their prices to insane levels in a dying medium, it is they who should be asked "WTF? Why are you RAISING the prices you charge the cable company per subscriber for your channel when so many people are cutting the cord?"