Continued Cord Cutting Hits the Pay TV Business Hard 319
An anonymous reader writes: Cord cutting is not a new concern for the pay TV business but a recent massive sell-off in media stocks has many in the industry worried. Cable, satellite and TV companies suffered their worst-ever quarterly subscriber declines losing more than half a million accounts, sending stocks tumbling. Researchers say this may be the beginning of the end for the pay TV business. According to analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson: "A year ago, the Pay TV sector was shrinking at an annual rate of 0.1 percent. A year later, the rate at which the Pay TV sector is declining has quickened to 0.7 percent year-over-year. That may not seem like a mass exodus, but it is a big change in a short period of time. And the rate of decline is still accelerating."
Don't worry! (Score:3)
To quote Blizzard's management when WoW lost three million subscribers in a single quarter: "Don't worry, it's cyclical."
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That reminded me of a scene in "This Is Spinal Tap", when the manager, Ian, told the band that their Boston gig was cancelled - "I wouldn't worry about it though, it's not a big college town."
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In this case, I think it actually is cyclical. When the current cycle of forcing consumers to pay for 50 channels they don't want for each one that they do want ends, then there will be a new cycle of cable TV subscription increases.
This isn't the death of pay TV, it's just the death of forcing people to pay for TV content they don't want. Let me buy just my top five favorite channels for $5-10 a month, and I'll sign up in a heartbeat. Until then, the cord remains clipped.
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Or rather...let me buy my *content* in a convenient way.
Netflix streaming was great until they started removing lots of movies.
Now the providers are fracturing the content between multiple services ... so you do kind of get the ala carte except you have to buy from a half dozen places. Oh, and fight with wonky interfaces that differ between them all. And you generally can't watch offline. And...so on.
Or just torrent whatever you want for free of course. I killed off cable TV ~5 years ago and still don't
A comparison would be good (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently paying for both Hulu and Netflix (and also Crunchyroll) and i'm thinking of picking up HBO Go. I have no problem paying for the content i want, it's the hassle of dealing with the cable company plus paying for a lot of crap that i don't want that's the problem.
My big gripe at the moment is SyFy. For the first time since they changed their name to something that sounds like a venereal disease they're producing content that i'm actually interested in. But i can't watch it because even though they're posting it to Hulu they're requiring that you have a cable subscription to view it. I don't know if this is stupidity on their part or some kind of legal tangle they just can't free themselves from, but i _want_ to watch their stuff and i'm willing to pay them, either directly or indirectly, but they just won't let me.
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How are Hulu and Netflix doing? Even better, how is HBO doing now that they've made HBO Go available without a cable subscription?
It's an interesting time to be a cable subscriber. I called Comcast to cancel my HBO & Starz from my cable service since both Game of Thrones & Outlander were finished. They told me I could keep them both for just $1 a month each for 2 years, so I decided to keep them. They're desperate to keep the customers they already have.
Re:A comparison would be good (Score:5, Interesting)
They're desperate to keep the customers they already have.
Procedure for lowering ISP bill:
- Research introductory price from local competing ISPs with same speed (cable vs. DSL, etc...)
- Call current ISP, select billing from the phone menu.
- Tell Person1 you want them to match the other ISP's introductory price.
- Person1's job is to make you go away so they will put you on hold for 5 minutes. Don't go away.
- Person1 will return and tell you they can't match the price.
- Tell Person1 you'd like to cancel.
- Person1 will transfer you to Person2 in the billing department.
- Tell Person2 you've found a cheaper rate and would like to cancel.
- Person2 will keep you on hold for 10 minutes to see if you'll go away, occasionally returning with progressively lower rates but still above the competing rate. Don't go away. Don't accept anything above than the competing rate.
- Person2 will "find" a lower rate equal to the competing ISP's introductory rate for 1 year
- Wait 1 year, repeat.
I have done this 3 times with a success rate of 100% on RoadRunner. Average annual savings = $180.
The most recent time I was already on an introductory rate ($45/mo for 30 megabit) but found an even lower intro ($34/mo for same) rate at the competing ISP. Person1 had the audacity to say "I think you're already getting a pretty good rate". I was tempted to not even give them the opportunity to keep my subscription at that point.
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Research introductory price from local competing ISPs with same speed (cable vs. DSL, etc...)
When such competing ISPs do not exist, such as 25 Mbps cable when the competition is 3 Mbps DSL or 10 GB/mo satellite, does this price include the cost of moving your family and finding a new job?
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The most recent time I was already on an introductory rate ($45/mo for 30 megabit) but found an even lower intro ($34/mo for same) rate at the competing ISP. Person1 had the audacity to say "I think you're already getting a pretty good rate". I was tempted to not even give them the opportunity to keep my subscription at that point.
Maybe he was right. And if another company was offering the same for less, maybe you should have taken them up on it instead of giving your business to the ones that make you wait on hold for an hour every year. Never price-match. Reward the companies that are providing the lower price to begin with.
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My experience is much the same as yours: The folks on the phone don't know their dick from a screwdriver, but the local guys (especially the local boss-man) can be very competent with excellent attention to detail and who refuse to ever give up on solving a problem.
It's too bad that the brass at AT&T are so insistent stifling their service from the top down.
Try focusing on keeping subscribers (Score:5, Insightful)
If they spent their time keeping subscribers happier rather than cannibalizing subscribers of other types of service they wouldn't be losing so much.
The NUMBER ONE difference in cost between services comes from moving from one to another.
If my monthly bill didn't slowly creep up after a couple of years, I wouldn't be forced to move to something else. Instead of whoring out for "new bundles", just offer a lower price. 99% of the people moving service don't want to or have to because of coverage, but do because they can save $60 a month with a new "introductory" bundle somewhere else.
Also there is this strange resistance to allowing users to pick what they want to watch and pay for only that. Believe it or not, some people don't want four channels of QVC, and they'd rather pay the $8 for the weather channel (or whatever) instead of $22 for a bunch of shit along with the weather channel.
Re:Try focusing on keeping subscribers (Score:5, Insightful)
The entertainment industry has a long history of ignoring their customers and trying to dictate what is popular.
For a short time, relatively speaking, they've been able to figure out how to do that and reaping a huge profit while it was happening. The amount of money was so big it blinded them to how the world and their markets were changing. Instead, these industries focused and focused again on how to industrialize (for lack of a better term) popularity of a few things. That is to say the popularity of "Boy Bands" in the '90s wasn't a complete accident and that yes, if you thought there was a formula for them there is indeed is.
At this point, much of the upper brass in these companies are so entrenched into these methods of profit that they can't see how to get out and maintain their power structures. It's not just the profits that they've become used to. It's also their position. Which is only human. They perceive that they've worked hard to become VP or Pres of their current company and their actions aren't going to disrupt that even if it means long term their industry will survive.
For what it's worth, these companies will continue to discount the success of Netflix and others simply because to do otherwise would likely imperil their current position. Change, will only occur when the companies are facing complete ruin, if it happens at all. Until such time that we see TW or Sony winding up their studio arms, I don't think we'll see them adapting.
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The entertainment industry has a long history of ignoring their customers and trying to dictate what is popular.
That's what happens in industries with government-granted monopolies. What are their customers going to do? Go to one of their competitors when they want to watch Game Of Downton Abbey? Oops, copyright, you lose.
Sometimes substitutes are not exact (Score:2)
What are their customers going to do? Go to one of their competitors when they want to watch Game Of Downton Abbey?
Worse comes to worst, they'll watch a show that isn't Game of Thrones or a show that isn't Downton Abbey. Sometimes substitutes are not exact.
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Downton Abbey is on PBS. All you need is an antenna, and you can have it for FREE!
I have gotten pretty good as reducing monthly expenses. I built a home theater PC with four tuners connected to an antenna. I pay for basic Netflix streaming + 2 DVDs per month. My internet is naked DSL from a company that does not throttle bandwidth (CenturyLink), and I use MagicJack for phone ($30 per year). My total for everything is under $60/month for phone, internet, and TV. Comcast would happily sell me something
Re:Try focusing on keeping subscribers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Try focusing on keeping subscribers (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is a thought exercise. What if every channel was like Netflix? If you thought they were making good content you would simply subscribe. Netflix has shown that you can make good original programming on a relatively modest monthly price, and they're paying for a whole lot of licenses on top of that original programming. Imagine if there was a Sci-Fi service that made only Sci-Fi series and you could subscribe. Imagine a food/cooking service. Or a history service. Or even paid 24 hour news. Would you still spend $100 a month on traditional cable with hundreds of channels stuffed full of worthless reality programming? This is what disruptive technology looks like.
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I subscribe to Netflix for one or two months a year, when new episodes of House of Cards or Daredevil are available. In those months I can watch basically everything Netflix exclusive that I am interesting in.
Current TV networks couldn't survive on that. They are built around offering 90% shit and 10% good stuff that gets released at a rate of one episode per week to keep you paying out for the rubbish. What we really need to do is get rid of the networks, and instead have companies that just provide TV sho
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I think it's a whole series of things. Like you said, they keep trying to push up the monthly fee one way or another, and they don't let you do a la carte. They also pretty much force you to get their cable boxes and DVRs, which they also charge you a monthly fee for. And those cable boxes and DVRs suck. They feel like 15 year old tech, and they constantly break. They're big and bulky, and make a lot of heat and noise for something that seems slower and less powerful than my mobile phone.
And you have
DVR patents and DRM certification (Score:2)
[DVRs] feel like 15 year old tech, and they constantly break. They're big and bulky, and make a lot of heat and noise for something that seems slower and less powerful than my mobile phone.
I wonder how much of this is caused by two things: skimping on hardware in order to pay incumbent DVR patent holders such as TiVo, and continuing to use obsolete hardware because it happens to have been certified by the DRM division of CableLabs.
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How do you design your broadcast and delivery systems to continue to support legacy hardware in a sustainable manner without [rolling] trucks
Self-install kits. Comcast used this a couple years ago when it switched its expanded basic SD service from analog to "Digital Transport Adapters" (the small decoder boxes) so that it could compress all channels to make more room for DOCSIS channels to deliver "Blast" Internet. Give a few months of notice that service on the old protocol will be going away, ship boxes that can handle both the old and new protocols, transition the higher tier channels first so that you at least have their revenue if you abso
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"The greater part of the cost is the delivery infrastructure. There is a significant economy of scale when it comes to content."
The QUALITY of the delivery infrastructure is a significant part of the problem. It's a lot easier to deliver fast internet over cable than it is to deliver tolerable video content. My rural cable provider has endless problem with TV channels that freeze, lose audio, and pixilate. A little winter snow clogs the dishes over which the company receives its feed, and so do summer storm
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The QUALITY of the delivery infrastructure is a significant part of the problem. It's a lot easier to deliver fast internet over cable than it is to deliver tolerable video content. My rural cable provider has endless problem with TV channels that freeze, lose audio, and pixilate. A little winter snow clogs the dishes over which the company receives its feed, and so do summer storms. Through all this their broadband service over the same cable plugs steadily away ay 80M down, 8M up, 28 msec ping. I'm moving toward cord cutting because the technology itself works better than receiving the same content as cable video.
I.e., if they could get the TV shows over the same wire/fibre that delivers the Internet, or another such wire/fibre, cable video would work fine for you, so the delivery infrastructure with the quality problems is the infrastructure that delivers the TV channels to the cable company?
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I can't assume that delivery of the channels to the cable company is the whole problem.
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I can't assume that delivery of the channels to the cable company is the whole problem.
So what might be the rest of the problem?
I'm guessing from "pixilate" that it's digital cable, so you're probably getting the DOCSIS MAC layer for Internet access and your TV programs multiplexed over MPEG-2 transport, and maybe whatever's running on top of IP (TCP, whatever's running on top of UDP) can cope with a bad cable infrastructure from the head end to your home than can the MPEG-2 Part 2 for the TV, if that's another part of the problem.
What's The Problem? (Score:2)
I still need Internet Access. I killed HD TV and all extended channels a couple of years ago and increased my bandwidth. Most recently I turned in the TV box itself and stuck with the tiny descrambler. I'm still charged about $100 a month for access to the 'net. I could go to $300 a month for fiber but I'm not really using the extra bandwidth I have now.
[John]
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I moved two months ago and learned I had an option between AT&T Uverse and Charter Digital. AT&T was 25Mbps for $50 a month with a free phone number and I didn't have to buy television services if I didn't want them. Charter was (reportedly) 600 Mbps (right...), forced you to include phone and TV, and cost well over $100 a month. Both companies wanted install fees nearly $100. Both companies report you to the copyright cartels if you torrent shit.
I went with AT&T. Why? I know from experien
Clearly, the solution is to show more ads! (Score:2)
Re:Clearly, the solution is to show more ads! (Score:5, Insightful)
NCAA (Score:2)
I'd much rather wait for it to come out on DVD or arrive on netflix than suffer through all the advertising.
Does the College Football Playoff ever get to DVD or Netflix?
Re:NCAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? The lack of spectator sports on Netflix is a feature, not a bug.
Re:Clearly, the solution is to show more ads! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Advertising is part of my gripe also. I have Cox, and they have a service called On Demand where you can watch previous episodes. So, I wanted to watch a specific Daily Show a while ago and used On Demand to do it. First, they don't offer brand new episodes, I think the most recent one I could watch was 2 weeks old. Then, while watching it, they show commercials that are unskippable. The Daily Show has 3 commercial breaks. During one of the breaks they showed me 11 commercials (yeah, I counted).
Compar
No kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who'd have thought that treating your customers like scumbags and cash cows might eventually cause them to leave?
This is my surprised face.
EAT MOR CHIKIN (Score:2)
Last time I checked, cows said EAT MOR CHIKIN [chick-fil-a.com].
good (Score:2)
fuck the cable companies. may they all die for being the abusive, government corrupting oligarchy they are
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telcos and cable companies, fuck them both
replace them with state owned equipment, that private companies lease fractionally to provide services
genuine capitalist competition, rather than oligarchic corruption
as with many issues today, there is a problem in what people identify as the market in question, and what needs to be regulated for the market to work
where there is a natural monopoly: the cables in the ground, the state owns that. who pays for it? any company that wants to fractionally lease the cable
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they depend upon most people just accepting their malice in order to succeed. your cynicism is what they need. congratulations, you're part of the problem
there's always people with bad intent in the world. what always blows my mind is the spineless self-defeating sort like yourself that simply accepts it when they rape you. you never put up a fight
i'm not asking you to man the ramparts. i'm simply asking you to say "this is wrong, and i don't accept it" rather than your current state of "there is no help co
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i never understood people who come at this problem from the point of view of the corrupted, and never from the point of view of the corruptor
you can always find corruptible people
the point is to go after the corruptors
i'm not saying that's easy now or that we have that legal framework now. but that is what is needed to solve this problem
maybe with a big enough stink- which is coming, considering what unchecked corruption is doing to the usa
Magic: TV through the air! (Score:5, Informative)
Finally (Score:2)
I'm not unconditionally hostile to the status quo media distribution business model. My problem with them is that they tend to make content X exclusive to service Y when I am most interested in using service Z.
You see this with lots of media outlets. You see it on consoles a lot in games. They pay publisher of X content lots of money to make the game exclusive to Y console when I use a Z PC. And here's the thing... while I'd love to play that game and would be happy to buy it... I am not buying Y console. I
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My NHL GameCenter subscription is some of the best entertainment money I've spent. I refuse to subscribe to Comcast, and it was getting tiring having to go find a bar to watch Hawks games (and some of the other teams I follow). Hockey is a very screen-friendly sport, and extremely exciting with this notion of armored players with sticks chasing each other on a very low-friction surface while balanced on stell blades. When I say it like that, it sounds pretty godda
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Should be, "steel blades".
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PC sales are a lot stronger than the console people would like to admit. Roughly about as strong as any of the consoles... and that is just counting console ports.
There was some interesting sales information that showed the xbox one was having a very hard time... the PS4 is doing pretty good... and the PC is generally identical to the PS4 merely accounting for ports. If you include all the things that are on PC and not the console, the PC game market dwarfs the PS4... and likely the entire console market co
Taking turns on the family PC (Score:2)
"but I like to play on the couch"... then get a gaming laptop and plug it into your tv when you want to do that. You can plug game pads into a PC as easily as anything.
But will the average PC-native co-op game necessarily support gamepads, plural? A lot of PC games require a separate PC per player so that they can sell two to four copies of a game to a single household instead of one copy that works in shared-screen mode.
What is more, the cost of a gaming PC is not the cost of the entire machine. Because you're going to have a PC regardless. Who has a console but doesn't have a PC at all?
People who get by with a console and phone, or people who live in a household where another member routinely hogs the only PC.
So the cost of the gaming PC is not the cost of the machine but rather the cost of turning the PC you're going to buy anyway into a gaming PC.
In other words, wait three to five years until you would have already replaced your existing compact or office-spec laptop with a
Can't wait for the day people abandon the Internet (Score:2)
Well maybe. (Score:2)
Maybe they should do what we the customer's have been begging them to do for years!
Its simple its called à la carte. It means you sell us the channels we actually effing want! we don't care if you say the extra 30 home shopping channels are free we don't want them!
And maybe you could do something about the %50 advertising %50 show problem. I don't know how I ever put up with it now after using netflix for over a year.
No I don't care how much it costs for you to do this. You are either going to do this
Extreme A La Carte (Score:2)
I'd rather pay for just the shows I watch, rather than picking an entire channel. For channels like SyFi (which is about 25% science fiction), I'd be buying 10 shows per week. For channels like The Documentary Channel, it would be more like 2.
The Learning Channel? hahahahahahahaha what learning? Honey Boo Boo taught me nothing.
Just a though but for you cord cutters (Score:2)
Cable does not suffer (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure the satellite companies suffer when customers quit. They don't sell much in the way of internet to replace those lost TV customers. But cable, now that's another story. Cable actually charges me more for broadband since I do not carry TV package too. In fact my next door neighbor just cancelled Comcast and went to a DSL provider just for the fact she wanted internet only broadband and Comcast told her she had to buy a basic channel package too. I pay for broadband only and have for years! The thing is,
Not the beginning (Score:2)
The beginning was a while ago. When they started increasing commercials from two minutes two seconds up to three minutes, then three-and-a-half. I was trying to watch "Ray" on BET a few months ago, commercials were running past six minutes. A season of a TV series is 8-13 episodes now, not the 20-26 from decades past. There are no more real news programs. A few channels continue to pump out some good to excellent content, but you're paying a minimum of $100/month because you have to take the 80% of the bund
Cable has gotten... (Score:5, Interesting)
...too expensive. People are voting with their wallets. Time for the time honored appropriate response to a shift in the demand curve where the amount demanded at every price is less: time for price cuts.
Everybody in the industry has gotten fat: producers, actors, athletes, sports leagues, coaches, college athletic programs, on air talent, etc. (I'm mostly interested in ESPN, I almost never watch anything on HBO etc, but the same logic applies). You can't pay billions to televise a single college football conference, raise your prices to astronomical levels to cover same and expect your customers to keep shelling out.
There will be a blood bath, especially in the college sports world. The days of $5mm/year coaches, $1mm/year AD's and $750mm stadiums with lavish locker rooms, indoor training facilities, etc, are going to quickly come to an end.
The NFL will feel the pinch as well.
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Instead of being happy with consistent profitability in their business, modern capitalism says that these companies have to increase profitability every quarter - all in the name of increasing shareholder value. They couldn't increase profits as quickly the old fashioned ways as they could by cutting production costs and raising cable rates, so we got the latter.
I made the cut about 2 years ago, and aside from having to find pirated streams of occasional sporting events I haven't missed it at all. (I'd rath
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OTA TV (Score:2)
In my area, I get free OTA TV. Subscribing to the bare minimum cable package, which is *JUST* the same channels as OTA provides, is $18/mo. The only advantage I would have is a more reliable signal, as with bad weather the OTA sometimes drops in and out a bit. A "standard" cable package, the next tier up, starts at $53/mo. Now, let's compare this to Netflix, which starts at only $8/mo.
So, why is cord cutting huge? Because we all want to save a buck or two... or $40! Really, look at the difference there. It
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More Scissors Please! (Score:3)
Hallmark Channel (Score:2)
Jon Stewart (Score:3)
Re:Jon Stewart (Score:4, Informative)
I watched Jon Stewart on Plex for free. Although, I think he was also available on Hulu.
Aww... (Score:3)
What? The performance is covered by a copyright and I'll get DMCAed? Fuck.
Here is NOT a performance of a cat playing the world's smallest violin for the cable companies.
Pay TV != cable (Score:3)
People may be cutting the cord, but they are still paying for TV. Now they are just paying Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Sling, instead of Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter. Oh, wait, they still are paying Comcast, Time Warner, and Charter for the Internet service so they can also pay for streaming services. I'm not sure the total bill will be going down much.
espn is a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Poor Value (Score:5, Informative)
I did this for a long time. I actually ended up buying the "season passes" for shows on iTunes and "multi passes" of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. All told, i'd spend about $400 a year buying the HD versions of the shows on iTunes. The show's would be available to me the day after they aired on Cable. But I would own them, be able to watch them anytime, and they'd be commercial free. All for about half of what I was paying for cable each year.
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Do you really own what you "purchase" on iTunes, though? What if their authentication server permanently goes down?
Re:Poor Value (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that I can only watch the stream of Cable TV for as long as I subscribe to cable, I would say that I own them much more so than the product I got from Cable TV. If I decide to stop buying new shows, I can still go back and rewatch the old ones as many times as I want. If I stop paying for cable I can't watch anything.
Sure the authentication server could go down permanently, but at this point i've already watched and rewatched most of the shows multiple times over the last 5 years i've been doing this. I've also spent half as much doing this as I would've spent on cable. And I haven't had to deal with commercials.
So far, I also don't see the sun setting on the iTunes store any time in the foreseeable future. If it did, however, I would expect to see a MUCH bigger outcry over the "purchases" people have done on iTunes disappearing. To the extent that it would actually bring the topic up to mainstream news and actually spark some debate and possible change to the laws about what is required to ensure that you can continue to enjoy your purchases in perpetuity. I would also expect people to work much more diligently about then cracking the iTunes DRM.
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"I would say that I own them much more so than the product I got from Cable TV."
No one ever makes the spurious claim that people "own" shows via cable TV. That's not the right word to use here, either, so you should stop doing so.
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Well then, that's just part of the bargain. As long as the consumer has informed consent it's all good. Of course people are notoriously good at kidding themselves or just plain not caring.
Alternately you can view it as a system where you stockpile things that you like that can be watched on demand versus all sorts of garbage that's scheduled whenever someone else wants.
Paying less for option A is still better even if it is a false sense of ownership.
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But they have DRM and if apple's itunes can't auth, you can't watch. If you don't believe me, try to play it on a new computer or de-auth your existing one. After awhile, the authentication on the devices dies.
I cache iTunes content locally because I've had music disappear in the store before that I bought. (prior to them going drm free on that) The album still plays with my files but apple doesn't have it anymore. I've never seen that happen with video, but it's certainly possible.
If you have Disney c
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Your not coming remotely close to the limits of external hard drive enclosures. See http://www.promise.com/us/prod... [promise.com] and http://shop.promise.com/index.... [promise.com]
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Not even accounting for the advantages of streaming it's still
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I think the hard thing is making the leap into a situation that appears to cut you off from something you have now. That cable bill is a certainty that comes with a certainty. Ditching it means losing that... and there is ample evidence that people tend to optimize for avoiding loss more than for gain.
In fact, with a little careful choice of scenarios its actually quite easy to demonstrate that majority opinion can be influenced simply by presentation of the same facts in terms of gains or losses. People c
Re:Poor Value (Score:5, Funny)
We must have different cable companies.
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I did this for a long time. I actually ended up buying the "season passes" for shows on iTunes and "multi passes" of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. All told, i'd spend about $400 a year buying the HD versions of the shows on iTunes. The show's would be available to me the day after they aired on Cable. But I would own them, be able to watch them anytime, and they'd be commercial free. All for about half of what I was paying for cable each year.
Not to mention they are in a better quality then you'd see if you had HD cable, mainly Comcast.
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No. It was $400 per year for ALL of the shows I decided was worth my time to watch. It ended up being full seasons of 9 shows, including The Daily Show and Colbert Report.
Sports, politics, bundle discount (Score:2)
When I can get Netflix for $8, Hulu for $8, and HBO for $15, why do I want to spend $100 for 1000 channels I don't watch.
Two reasons. One is that they're bundled with live sports or politics channels that you do want. Sport leagues' online streaming services tend to black out games shown on national or regional pay TV. The other is that the discount on Internet service for also having TV through the same company is sometimes larger than the price of TV.
Re:Expect the Republicans to stop this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, if the recent FCC decision to regulate Internet providers like they regulated telephone companies to fight against the ISPs' attempts to extort fees from content providers sticks, as a common-carrier designation the cable companies might find themselves required to provide Internet access even if that's the only service the customer wants.
Re:Expect the Republicans to stop this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides - consumers today change over from watching TV at decided times to use Video on Demand like Netflix and YouTube.
In many cases they can at the same time avoid the annoying ads injected into the TV programs that are on broadcast. On the web - well, there you have adblock to clean up the crap.
We are in the middle of a media transition phase where people changes their habits to do cherry picking and only pay for what they want to see.
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It has nothing to do with "liberal" or "conservative". It's that they're all family. They all share the last name, "Inc.".
Re:Expect the Republicans to stop this... (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with "liberal" or "conservative". It's that they're all family. They all share the last name, "Inc.".
Seriously, what idiot thinks corporations give a crap about liberal or conservative? If anyone was paying attention to the Republican debate, Donald Trump (of all people) broke it down for them. He gives money to everyone. He explained, on national TV, that he buys politicians as a matter of course. Left, right and center they take his money and are available when he needs something. And people still think I'm extreme when I say that this country is an oligarchy.
Re:Expect the Republicans to stop this... (Score:5, Insightful)
You've fallen into the trap. The real struggle should be corporate control of the country versus control by the people, but the corporations have convinced too many people that there's a left vs right fight going on, or a liberal versus conservative struggle. It is distracting you from the real enemy. If you think Disney or Comcast are "liberal" then you have drunk their lemonade. Corporations are not political, they are instead impersonal hive minds. They follow the winds of change without any loyalty to any political brand except for money. American has been deluded into thinking that if they're anti-abortion that they must always be anti-tax at the same time, and if they're pro-gay-rights that they must automatically be pro-union. It's stupid, there area million different political stances that any voter could have and yet we're being fooled into thinking that there are only two: us versus them.
Don't hate Disney because they have different political views than your tribe has, but hate them because they're replacing "we the people" with "we the stockholders".
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Hmm, you haven't noticed the corrosive right in the country which despises anyone who doesn't share their opinions?
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Way to totally ignore the fact that there is a corrosive Left in this country which DESPISES anyone who doesn't share their opinions
I'm curious. Do you have examples of people or instances, or it is just a general vibe you get from people?
Left of Jeremiah Wright (Score:3)
I'm easily to the left of Jeremiah Wright, but I certainly don't harbor the bitter venom he has for the US.
As for leftist views, Individual liberty exists as long as individuals are equal. Once one group amasses more power, they tend to overrule the weaker side. I'm not sure if that makes me a leftist or a libertarian though. But Atheist and against the death penalty probably makes me more aligned with the Left than the Christian Right or Neo-Conservatives.
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...except that's your state. They're allowed to do that.
The federal government is not.
It's f*cking amazing that a site full of IT geeks can't understand separation of powers or a default rule of deny all.
When were you forced to buy a car? (Score:3)
In my state, we've been forced to buy auto liability insurance since, well...forever.
I don't buy car liability insurance. Here's why not [summitcitybikes.com].
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If you choose to own and operate a motor vehicle, there are certain laws you have to follow, including carrying enough insurance to cover the damage you may do to someone should you make a mistake. But you do have a choice in the matter, because you don't have to own and operate a motor vehicle. If you walk, ride a bike, take mass transit, ride with uber, etc, you are not forced to buy any products... you had to opt in to t
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In my state, we've been forced to buy auto liability insurance since, well...forever.
But *only* if you own a car and want to drive it on public roads. For health insurance, you are required to ether give money to corporations or pay a large tax just for breathing. That's a big difference.
Technically the tax isn't for everyday breathing, the tax is meant keep you breathing, and as a society we've chosen to keep people breathing even if they can't pay for it.
Find a way to opt out of guaranteed emergency healthcare, then you can opt out of paying for it. But it's unfair to say "I don't need no stinking health insurance!" knowing full well that if you are in a serious accident or contract an expensive disease that no one is going to let you die because you can't pay for it.
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1% drop does not mean dying but they have reached the peak. The broadcast medium, like cable and satellite, is very suitable for high-bandwidth content like HD TV shows and movies compared to the resource intensive unicast model of the internet TV.
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Which of the following is more efficient?
A. Requiring all users to purchase a DVR to store scripted shows between time of broadcast and time of viewing.
B. Serving them on demand from a CDN box colocated in the ISP's datacenter.
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Option (A) is definitely cheaper. It just needs much bigger capacity hard disks, say 5 to 10 TB for the DVR.
Option (B) would require all ISPs entering the TV industry. What if your ISP was small and did not provide TV content? Having local CDNs would also be a huge investment, but you would be able to get any content you want, when you want and perhaps at a higher resolution than cable/satellite. Can the ISP transmit separate 1080p shows to all customers at the same time without taxing their equipment?
What
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Once you cut the cord, you start cutting back on other things. Those initial plans to pay ala-carte vanish when you're thinking "is it worth $1.99 for this one episode"? You learn to wait a year instead of seeing the shows when they first run. You learn to watch older TV instead. The "must watch" list shrinks.
The only problem though is lack of a good DVR, as streaming wants you to stream on demand (even if high peak hours). No DVR means there's no point in even bothering to watch broadcast TV even if y
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I dropped them last year, even though they were still a good service. But $70/month was hitting my limit while the number of shows I felt I wanted to watch was down to 4 at times.
I was planning on going with Netflix+Hulu, but stuck with Netflix only because the two shows I wanted on Hulu+ were changed so that they were delayed until they were also on Netflix anyway. So I really don't see the point of Hulu+, and I haven't even tried out the free month of it. There's so much to see on Netflix that I don't
Go away, you're not 21 (Score:2)
I will just go to a bar if their is a sports event I want to watch.
People under 21 are forbidden to enter bars. So what should people do if they want to watch the game with their kids, such as the parent of a high school student whose older brother's school is in the ESPN-exclusive College Football Playoff?
Cable authentication (Score:2)
7) Downloaded Fox Sports app for cell phone
Now what happens when the networks you mentioned in 7-10 start saying "Please log in with the username and password issued to you by your participating cable or satellite television provider"?
Saved $145 per month by lowering my Time Warner Bill from $210 to $66
How much of that was absorbed by the upgrade from a flip phone to an Android phone? Major cellular carriers tend to charge more for service on smartphones than on dumbphones.
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https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
For instance:
"...ESPN has lost 7.2 million viewers in the last four years, and a little more than three million in the last year. Since ESPN is annoyingly force-bundled with most basic cable subscriptions a lot of these users are cord cutters."