What Is CNBC.com Thinking?

I spent most of my vacation in a rather blissful CNBC-free zone. Other than catching Kudlow on a rainy Thursday night (Very nice tie, Larry!), I pretty much avoided the channel all week.

So when Doug Kass sent an email linking to clips from his Friday appearances, I thought -- what the hell -- let's see what I missed last week.

Except I couldn't.

Those clips appear to be subscription only; It appears that most of the clips that are on CNBC today end up behind the firewall eventually.

Subscription costs: They want $14.95 per month to view their clips. Or, if you subscribe for the full year, it's $169.95 -- an astounding savings of $9.45!

Am I the only one who finds that rather unbelievable?

Alternatively, I could subscribe to the WSJ.com for $79 and access all of their video, or WSJ print edition plus the web version for $99 a year.

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So here' s my question: How many $169.95 subscriptions a year is CNBC.com gonna sell?

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Incidentally, WSJ.com uses BrightCove flash embedded video, which is vastly superior to the poky old Windows media CNBC.com uses -- which will not play on my 1 year old, Windows XP, 2 gigs of RAM, Dell (DELL).

Comments

[james joseph:]

there is nothing i like about cnbc and its socialist type comments and guests including larry kudlow. i would not pay .10 for any clips from them. i am waiting for october when fox comes on and maybe they will act more like a financial program and less like a shill for the socialist party.

2007 Jul 12 10:26 AM

[East Coast:]

socialist?!? I take it that you confused this with capitalism?

2007 Jul 16 09:39 AM

[Sr. Pessimist:]

I notice that the video they use is the ever popular Flash embedded video, as Barry pointed out. Flash video uses a patented codec. The recipients of the royalties of the Flash video are probably heirs to very large fortunes, and so they are promoting the use of the Flash video Sorensen codec over those of others to secure more US Dollars coming their way. The Flash codec isn't all that great. It probably just sends the right money to the right people.

A subscription-based service? $170 a year won't fly. Who'll buy propaganda for $170 a year? Subscription-based services aren't competitive because they rely on attracting the consumer as the customer. Standing American business is incompetent, and so if they were to attempt to compete in a market where the consumer, being the customer, is always right, they'd go belly up pretty quick. Instead, the businesses are each other's customers, and the consumer is held hostage to choose between one propaganda and another. That way they don't actually have to do anything appealing to the consumer audience to stay solvent. They mutually agree to be right together, and so generate income by advertising for each other to the consumers, who choose between one advertised uncompetitive thing and another.

And with George Bush in office, he steals money from foreign nations, sends it into hedge funds that old barons own through buying futures of shares of the stock markets, sits there and declares no estate tax through 2010 or 2012 so the old fools can give their children and grandchildren money without being taxed out of it, and after 8 years under Bush we have a new aristocracy that we saw rob us blind before our eyes to transfer power to the new generation of born-rich non-working. And the born-indebted working are up for another depression, not unlike 1928-1933, where we're supposed to work for the US Dollar to keep the born-rich alive at our arbitrary expense.

So we have more propaganda like this in another 90 or so years for sale.

No.

2007 Jul 12 11:06 AM