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400,000 American Homes Have Dumped Pay TV This Year
redkemper writes "More than 400,000 American homes have cut the cord and ditched their cable and satellite pay-TV services since the start of 2012. The figure includes 169,000 subscribers shed by Time Warner Cable last quarter, marking the service provider's tenth consecutive quarter of customer losses. It also includes the 52,000 net subscribers DirecTV lost this past quarter, and 176,000 customers who left Comcast."
...and I haven't regretted 1 minute of it.
Now if only the giants would see this as a reason to innovate and increase competition and lower costs. We haven't quite gotten there yet.
So these numbers are about to get a whole lot worse.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Usenet + SAB + Sickbeard = I'm satisfied
Much better view without their worthless wires overhead in my backyard.
...but for some reason my cable/internet provider charges less for 10Mbps when it's also packaged with their basic cable than they do when it's by itself. So, I gladly accepted their $8/month credit to add basic cable, and I simply unplugged the cable from my TV as soon as the cable guy had left. Strange thing is, this isn't a special as part of signing up with a contract, since I have no contract with them.
I really don't get how they do their accounting, and I'm beginning to think they don't either since they're losing so many customers.
I really hope some of the companies out there (HBO especially, I needs my Game of Thrones fix) figure out other ways of getting money from customers. I wouldn't want to see the shows I like cut back or eliminated if the tv/cable networks go the way of newspapers. So, dear cable/tv companies: We have money, we want to support your art. Let's figure something out!
And yet, NBC will not allow you to watch the Olympics online without an active cable subscription.
Are the channels really that afraid of the cable companies? Or is there a lot of revenue sharing going on?
Is it really the case that it's more profitable for the channels to screw over customers than it is for them to screw over the cable companies?
something to do with these figures?
Each number is directly related with the number of people who began watching their favorite tv shows on the internet.
Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was the Chairman of the Board of the Union Broadcasting Systems, and he died at eleven o'clock this morning of a heart condition, and woe is us! We're in a lot of trouble!
So. A rich little man with white hair died. What has that got to do with the price of rice, right? And *why* is that woe to us? Because you people, and sixty-two million other Americans, are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers... This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA - the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new Chairman of the Board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the twentieth floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome God-damned propoganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?
So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth.
But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in *illusions*, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even *think* like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Easiest habit I ever kicked.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Call up the loyalty/retention department to try getting a better rate.
But cable companies should offer an Internet/Limited Basic Cable option so people at least have access to the Over The Air TV without having to worry about not getting a signal. I mean, a bundle not much more expensive than Internet alone. To make matters more tempting, they could throw in just one half-price DVR. There's some good stuff on Fox and the other locals afterall.
Don't let the door knob get wedged up your ass on the way out.
Sincerely,
A Happy Ex-customer
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Two mediocre shows I like packed with commercials (that i could torrent). All the rest stpid shit like that fat osburne kid hunting ghosts. If my parents werent paying the bill (and ive tried to explain) I would have dropped cable a long time ago. Its worthless advertisements and stupid reality/crime solving bullshit.
Charge as much as a car at $200 a month for basic backages for 2 or more TVs during the great recession when people's salaries are being cut or not moving since 2008 and they stop paying! Who would have thought?
I remember in the good old days when it ws $60 a month and people made more money a decade ago too.
http://saveie6.com/
....of the worlds tiniest violin? Do you hear its bitter-sweet sound?
I don't know anyone who has much love for the cable or satellite companies. The way they package channels means that force people to get hundreds of channels of crap for the few jewels that they enjoy. Then the best programing is split between the basic, which is all the network tv that you could get for free, but pay for cable for the signal quality...and the big premium channels like HBO that you pay even more for,.
My wife and I have pretty much given up TV, I think we watched an hour of TV since DR Who last went on break that wasn't streamed from an online video service.
We would ditch cable for all but net access if not for my mother.
I unplugged 32 years ago.
However, after watching a crew do the filming of a tv show here in Portland a while ago, I was shocked at how many people and how long to took to film tv shows. It takes several hours or even days to film what would be about a minute on tv.
Those people are all paid union wages
Those people are paid by advertisers and subscribers.
So, I can foresee one of two things happening if enough pull the plug like I did.
Either we will see worse shows (skimping on the costs of filming) or more commercials to make up the lose of subscriber revenue.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
DirecTV alone added a record 645,000 subscribers in the latest quarter. And they added 593,000 subscribers in Latin America during the first quarter.
...interactive.
Honestly, other than live sports broadcasts, paid TV is crap. HBO and Showtime have good shows they put out, but I don't need to see them first-air, and they don't play relatively-recent movie releases anymore on those channels.
Cable Television used to be the best thing ever. It used to be you would see amazing amounts of programming that were simply unavailable through traditional networks. This content existed because the major networks had frankly rejected a lot of good ideas. Well those great ideas turned into formulas in a mature industry, formulas that are now followed without deviation. The Discovery channel used to pick up all the untouched NOVA ideas and it was awesome, now when I turn on the multitude of science/engineering channels I'm left to try to not punch my television into pieces because it's telling me that Egypt was built by aliens. The comedy channel used to be almost 24-hour-a-day stand up routines, which was fantastic, it changed from that a long time ago. Thankfully the cartoon network is still the lone shining beacon of basic cable that still provides true entertainment, but it's the only one at this point.
Cable died because they got cheap, they went low-margin-formulaic on their content generation, and hence their content is essentially all crap.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
My apartment complex has some sweetheart deal with Time Warner, and my lease requires me to pay $40/mo to Time warner for basic cable (no DVR included, and analog-only for non-OTA channels). There's nothing worth watching on TV anymore, so I canceled my DVR last fall, and now I just use discs and streaming over the Internet. I also tried to get the apartment complex to let me opt-out, but the district manager wouldn't allow it.
So do I count towards these figures, or does Time Warner get to count me as someone paying for TV? Personally I consider that $40 part of my rent. (For a bit of perspective: I live in one of the 40 most populous metro areas in the US, and even with the bogus $40/mo fee for cable, I still pay less here than I would anywhere else in the metro area.)
Doesn't surprise me. ALL pay TV providers engage in near fanatical rent seeking behavior and try their hardest to force you in to an 80+ dollar a month bill. It's simply not a good value proposition.
I do have cable, because it's the best internet connection in the area. (It's actually very good! 100megabits down, 15 up. Never slows down, low latency, almost no down time) but I haven't turned on my TV for anything other than console games or netflix since I subscribed. I had to fight pretty hard to convince the company to take back their shitty power sucking non-hd set top box because I had no use for it. The service comes with basic cable regardless of price, but I don't watch it.
Also had an interesting conversation with a sales rep. The guy could not understand why I would not get a new plan that included their phone service, even if the cost was the same. I told him I have a mobile phone, and that their crappy VOIP phone would actually be a detraction because of their crappy hardware inserted in the network, and the power it drew. I don't know what moron thinks that selling phone lines tied to a physical cable is a good idea in 2012.
Cable is my internet.
And its almost as expensive to get no tv...
I mean heck... theres 3 channels out of the 90 some of garbage that i actually watch... or have on as background noise for other things.
The day they offer ala-cart programming. i'll be paying for 3 channels only.
Of course they know that 90% of their offerings are garbage... And wont let me get rid of it.
And lovely comcast boxes... you cant even program the fucker to skip the useless shopping religious nut shopping public access complete garbage shopping sports channels.
If i had another isp available... i'd have no tv.
And nothing of value was lost.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is there a site that aggregates all the available shows that one can legally stream on demand (e.g., from the show's site)? Having one place to go to find what's available would be nice.
Even better would be able to filter and/or tag preferred shows on that site. Or have things like, "viewers of this program also watch this other show."
That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year Two Thousand Forty.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Content providers keep adding more and more commercials to content, the content gets worse and worse, and they keep driving up subscription costs by demanding more $$$ from cable companies and demanding worthless channels to be bundled together.
TW charges too much, keeps pushing their prime channels to higher priced tiers, and refuses to offer als carte programming to customers.
Comcast is no better than TW, and to add salt to the wound they spy on their customers for the government and the MAFIAA.
DirecTV has poor service, fails to deliver product, and screws customers for cancelling services. I had them for 4 weeks with the promise of internet service. No one installed the internet service. After being passed around DirecTV phone support for 90 minutes, I cancelled my service because they failed to deliver. And I STILL had to pay a $135 early termination fee, despite not signing any contractual agreement.
The industry is getting greedy and corrupt, and consumers are tired of it. Very soon my parents will join the exodus.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
considering where unemployment stands at the moment, does this number really come as a shock ?
If I were to lose my job, I guarantee I would start trimming costs in any way that I could.
Cable would likely be the very first item on the chopping block.
Quickly followed by cellular, memberships / subscriptions, and ( gasp ) even internet.
If it weren't for sports I think that number would be at least 10x higher.
There was a thread about "cutting the cord" on one of the AV forums recently and sports was the primary argument for sticking with cable. ESPN and its ilk are well aware of the clout they have. Networks like HBO have influence too, but if you can wait a year all of the shows worth watching on those networks are going to be out on DVD/Bluray/streaming.
I ditched cable 5 years ago and I've had to make a few sacrifices. I used to be able to watch my local BigTen basketball and football games on network TV until the BigTen Network came along. Then ESPN took Monday Night Football. Yeah, NBC has Sunday Night Football, but there was something special about MNF. I just don't watch most those games now. I also don't get to see college football bowl games or march madness games unless I go out or to a friend's house. You do miss that a little but then you remember the 100 other things you could be doing with your time and life goes on.
I do subscribe to a number of streaming services and my over the air selection is pretty decent. So, I really watch about the same amount of television that I did before I got rid of cable. I just pay a heck of a lot less now.
Some retort, "Yeah, but you still have to pay for Internet access..." Like I wasn't going to do that anyway? Yes, of course, now there is no "bundle" deal. Fortunately I live in a town with multiple cable providers (yes, 2 different coax cables are run into my home) and DSL so Internet access is reasonable even without a cable TV package.
I also didn't /have/ to buy extra equipment for watching streaming video on my TV. I use my PS3 which was not bought for streaming video but, rather, for playing games. Now it gets more use as a media player than a game console though. The only device I /did/ buy that I might not have needed to before was a Roku for the bedroom TV.
If cable companies offered an a la carte subscription service I might actually sign up again, but I don't see that happening.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
HA and my managers at Time Warner Cable always said that cable tv was a recession-proof industry! They are really smart people.
Sure, cable TV packaging today involves both bundling up of channels as well as bundling of services.
In part, there is a reason for this. I'm not going to address the bundling of channels as we already know why that is done and what the financial ramifications would be if they stopped doing it. Instead, a far less obvious factor here needs to be mentioned. Cable Internet generally doesn't pay for itself. What? You mean there is a service that is being provided at a loss? Well, not really. You see, it was assumed from about 1980 on that if you could get cable TV, you would have it. The folks way out in bumble that could not get it were of course envious of their closer-in friends but the logistics and economics of wiring rural communities made it impractical. It still is impractical in many places.
So the pricing of cable Internet services was done for market-building reasons and for competitive reasons. The idea that someone would have Internet without Cable TV supporting the physical plant aspects of the connection was foreign to everyone. Nobody would do that. So cable Internet services were priced with the idea that the physical plant was supported by the TV service charge and the Internet could be priced really low to attract more customers - and bundling the services makes it even more attractive to just have all of them together.
Now you have people dropping the cable TV portion of the service and just going with the Internet connection. Admittedly, 400,000 subscribers nationwide is a drop in the bucket and isn't going to really affect anything. Should this number expand we might see some real changes being forced upon us. Changes like:
Now a lot of cable systems are going to be faced with capacity problems if more than a small fraction of their customers are trying to use IPTV streaming services. The systems were never designed for that kind of load and there is almost nothing that can be done without huge increases in bandwidth to the nodes that serve 500-1,000 homes at a time. Huge increases, like trying to deliver 10GB/sec. The other alternatives are replacing the entire cable infrastructure with fiber and eliminating the neighborhood node concept entirely. Both of these are extremely costly, so costly that it may seem foolish to embark on that course for any but the strongest players. Pushing back on IPTV delays that decision - because in many cases the decision will be to just turn it off.
So as more and more people move away from broadcast TV to IPTV services we can expect to see cable systems hit very, very hard and reacting in some unexpected ways. While the Internet of 1995 was interesting and a low-cost service to be provided, today's connections are pretty pricy for the cable company without a lot of payback. Tomorrow's Internet connections are going to cost them a bloody fortune to supply and many may simply choose not to make that kind of investment.
You can always get a T-1 connection anywhere in the US and probably anywhere in Canada.
Saving so much money and getting so much more time to do other things has never been so much easier for myself, or my family consisting of a stay-at-home mom and three children. We have a Win7 Media Center PC with a USB OTA tuner for recording basic stuff...which we don't mind watching commercials anymore 'if' we watch live as opposed to recorded. All our kids DVD's ripped down to the NAS. We've also got an XBMC system upstairs with OTA live for night-time viewing. The only negative side-effect in that time has been last Christmas we didn't know what to get the kids because they never say "I want that". (seriously!) Since they've seen all their shows before, asking them to stop or pause to go do something is rarely an issue... unless we are at Grandmom's when they go into Zombie mode in front of the tube watching the HORRIBLE programming. The money we've saved has paid for a top-of-the-line NAS with tons of storage, all the media centers, and everything. The great thing is, we're now on the positive side of the investment (had some trial and error purchases) but have assets to show for it rather than wasting hundreds or more per year paying for commercials.
Now with everyone leaving paid television, I'm just waiting for our 'Internet only' cable bill to go up!
400,000 people cut the cord, but that doesn't count the 275,000 subscriber increase for Verizon and AT&T's TV offerings. Doesn't change the overall trend, but it is misleading to say that overall 400,000 people cut the cord when it's really "only" 125,000.
and I don't regret even one minute of it. Recently I saw a commercial on television at a friends place. The funny part about it was that I got the feeling I should know this guy, because he was presented in a way that suggested he needed no further introduction, but really, I had NO clue at all who that was. My friends were surprised that I didn't know him at all. I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything really. :)
Would your life be incomplete without (for example) Jessica Simpson. Sorry Jessica. I have no idea who you are. I see your name in "news" headlines, but the articles are so easy to click away and forget totally
The news can be seen on the internet. YouTube has enough Discovery Channel and such on it.
But the best part is that I'm not bugged any more with those frigging ads every 15 minutes. The worst I've seen so far was watching 3/4 of a movie that was interrupted at that point for "light news and entertainment" (stuff like somebody that is well known, but I really give Jack Shit about bought a new pony) for half an hour.
For the last years, you get to know more and more people that live without television and it's really comforting to see many similar reactions here as well :)
Of course, I spend that extra time that I have now on the internet, but at least it's not interrupted with bullshit any more.
I'm not sure internet is any better than television though...
Privacy is terrorism.
In Latin America it is worst: Series come out late (months after it was released in the U.S), Mexican translations SUCK, in fact they interfere with the TV shows in such a way that make them lame (character names changed to mexican ones, scripts changed, mexican words that only mexican people understand)
And then there's ADS, lots and lots and lots of them, most of the people I know prefer to pirate/download their preferred TV show and watch them on demand, thing is this: I've seen 1.5 hours movies turned into 3 hour movies because of ads, I've seen cases like 4 minutes of ads followed by 2 minute of show then again 4 minutes of ads.
TV is going down the drain
Cable TV hit the market when I was a kid. There were two main selling points-- 1) more channels in rural markets than you could get over the air, and 2) NO ADS.
What happened?
READ MY LIPS-- subscription media companies, you have a choice. Either provide FREE content that is ad supported, OR paid content that is ad free. Period. There's no way I am going to pay you to spam me with ads. Your greed has no bounds, and it looks to be doing you in. I say good riddance. Other media sources have risen up to fill the vacuum you currently occupy in ad-free media.
In the meantime, I will continue to rent or buy DVD content that is not interrupted by ads.
The content proviers force the cable/satalite/phone companies to force packages on their customers. For example, if you want AMC... you have to get all of the channels that they force you to take along with it. AMC will not allow you to get AMC without also getting IFC, WE tv, Sundance Channel, and IFC Films. Why do they force these companies to carry these other channels? Becuase the content on those channels is very very cheap... But they are full of commercial revenue. AMC itself has all of their hit shows, which are expensive.
Because the majority of content providers follow this same format, we now have hundreds of channels, most of which are airing total crap... or decades old reruns. Sprinkled inbetween these channels are the core channels that people really want to watch. Unfortunately you have no choice in your lineup, and because the content providers force everyone to sign the same contracts, you don't have any choice in what you get to watch.
Sick of it all, everyone's turning to Netflix or outright piracy.
are greatly displeased at this development.
Without most of the public distracted by sports, sitcoms and stories of young doctors/lawyers/policemen in love they are likely to find time to think and question their place in life, politics, etc.
We cant have people doing that, it'll fuck up the economy.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I've been recording digital TV for 6 years or so. I build a PVR using a Dvico ATSC receiver (using Linux and VLC) and a simple DB-2 antenna. The Olympics look great in HD (but the constant commercials are a pain).
Ok, so almost half a million subscribers of several types have dumped various kinds of pay TV.
That sounds like a lot, right? But, there are an estimated 115 million households in the US. (via us census)
So those half a million, comprised of geeks who have found another way, and households who just can't afford both cable *and* food, are approximately .3% (point three percent) of all US households.
So... slow news day?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I dropped Cable over the AMC fight and haven't looked back. Frustrated that I'll have to wait to see Game of Thrones and Walking Dead but maybe this latest debacle will force the content providers to sell streaming services like HBO Go. The joke is Netflix streaming doesn't carry much current content but they have a ton of older stuff and they are adding faster than I can consume so at this rate I'll never run out. I mostly let it run while I work for white noise anyway. It's got the added benefit of no annoying commercials. It's why I stopped watching CNN, their ratio of news to commercials is 50/50. Completely obscene.
Waiting for HBO to pull their head out, read the winds and offer their service on Hulu+ or Netflix+. If Showtime beats them to it, they will be shamed for years. It's not like the cable companies can drop them! They are a serious source of additional revenue that can not be replaced. Now is the time to strike..
Even though my only current option for TV is satellite and my ISP is capped at 600 MB/day, my wife and I have seriously talked about dropping our TV subscription.
It's not Netflix or internet content. It's just shitty TV.
We use netflix and hulu. When we want to watch sports we go to a bar. We're getting out more, reading more and manage to talk to each other more.
Cable is a dead industry. They will try to lobby themselves into a protected monopoly but the people have already spoken.
No one misses bad customer service and 1000 channels of reality TV. Bye, Comcast. May your rotten corpse decay quickly so we can use it for fertilizer and find get something useful from you.
...then start calling in and demanding more. Corporations do not care about the customer, until customers start leaving in droves. Then it takes a while for management to get their act in gear and develop "incentives" to keep people around. Come Christmas time, we should be able to extract some decent concessions from these bums.
"I want a year of your fastest internet for the price I'm currently paying, or I'm going to DSL!"
Does that statistic about Comcast include people like me, who canceled their TV service and simply wanted broadband Internet, yet get charged for basic cable ($20/mo) in addition to my cable bill that I have no choice but to pay?
I'm all for shitting on the cable companies and their overpriced services, but I don't get the math in this article. The author claims the following companies lost customers: 52,000 (DirecTV), 169,000 (Time Warner), 176,000 (Comcast), and 10,000 (Dish) for a total of 407,000. The author also admits that Verizon and AT&T have added a combined 275,000 customers. Doesn't this mean that the number of people who have actually cut the cord is more in the neighborhood of 132,000. That's about a third of the number the article claims.
Since the new house (rural ranch small mountain/giant hill) can't get good/stable over the air (OTA) feeds, no DSL/FIOS in Verizon area, and still need a landline for phone services (e.g., Fax). :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
To pull their cock out of my ass.
Compare the run time ( i.e. without commercials) of TV shows from the 80s and 90s to the current crop and you'll find that today's shows are at least 5 minutes shorter (or have 5 minutes more commercials).
I was willing to pay for satellite premium when I could get commercial free movie channels (remember when) but those are gone.
Television is all about drugs I don't need, scam legal/financial services and propaganda purporting to be news.
Why bother?
The signal-to-noise ratio is too low.
I would keep cable with a decent channel selection at $40.
But regardless of the starting deal it soars to $90 to $120 very quickly.
Not worth it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
First world problems
I dumpted TV three years ago, I have a TV screen on which I play NetFlix or other services, I watch what I want, not what the mainstream media wants me to watch. NetFlix has a very nice variety of foreign films, comedies and documentaries. No commercials, I stop and resume when I want, who needs a DVR??
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But when they move together with a woman, they have to buy a tv to get "quality time".
Although I come from Finland I have noticed a trend with young people, they don't own TV anymore. All have computers that they use to watch stuff from the net but no TV. Now national TV channel is forcing everybody to pay license even though you don't own TV. I guess it was reaction to declining license collection rates.
I haven't paid for TV content (or my TV-license) since moving away from home in the late 90s. Most of that time I haven't even had a TV, and when I did it wasn't even connected to an antenna. For me it's baffling any time anyone talks about cutting the cord - I'm surprised people still have one. But then every now and then I visit a friends house. Just for example, this one friend, two income household, no kids, both into pretty much just tech, geekery, and whiskey... A fine combination... Well, they have more money than sense. They pay the cable bill just because they zonk out infront of the TV some nights, and can't be bothered to understand how to get say their PS3 to stream media, or anything like that. They also have a huge collection of DVD's. True story, some people still keep physical discs around. Unbelievable.
Now, on a sidenote, had there been a legal streaming option I could use here (netflix, hulu, all those fun things you guys talk so much about) then I might have paid for that, because it does sound mightily convenient. I bet my friends would have been all over that as well, since it's apparently easy on the PS3 and all that... But since that shit isn't accessible internationally however, we get our shows in other ways. They are rich and lazy so they pay for cable. (I think we calculated they spend about seven dollars US per hour they actually use the service. Not much, for some people.) Me, I torrent.
Now a lot of people say I have no right to do so, that if I'm not happy with the price offered I should just not buy the service... Well it isn't the price I'm unhappy with, it's the product. There's no way I could spend large amounts of money on a push service that tries to set my schedule for me. I'd have to get a DVR in addition to a TV (or build a media centre machine) and so on. I don't "zonk out infront of whatever is on". That's not how I work. So I'd have to pay them money for a service that is less convenient, where I had to spend more money on tools to circumvent their system anyway. That's not a product I'd buy, unless they damn near gave it away. Hell, I don't even buy it for free - if I just get a TV or a TV card there is over the air transmissions a-plenty...
Give me a pull service and I'll pay for it. Make it good enough to fit the price you demand and I'll be happy to. But you're not only competing with FREE - you're competing with FREE and CONVENIENT. A better service at a better price wins in almost every case...
I dumped TV a long time ago and found myself use more and more audio stuff. It's amazing how much better that works for me.
I don't just sit motionlessly on my sofa anymore. I go for a walk instead. I also listen while doing my house chores, when I drive, when I work out - simply whenever I'm doing any activity that does not require much thought.
I also don't have to deal with any of the MAFIAA shit - just buy an audiobook for a reasonable price in a format I choose from a number of providers on the internet, or download a free podcast or free radio content. No hassle, tons of high quality works.
Radio killed the video stars for me.
Like picking the channels YOU like only. Not the dumb "packages" they force-feed on you, for exhorbitant prices that comes along with 500 channels of utter CRAP you'ren ot interested in, like for myself, music video channels!
Now, no one can tell me "it can't be done" or "it isn't 'cost-effective'", because THAT is utter bullshit's that's killing them + driving buyers away once they get wise to this scam!
(That, along with the fact folks are trimming away non-essentials, because the majority are going through tough times because of greed causing outsourcing/offshoring as well as taxation fiascos like the stupid wars, & bank bailouts, etc./et al).
* They better "wise up", or things like NetFlix WILL kill them...
APK
P.S.=> YMMV... apk
Around 2005, I dumped my $50/month phone plan for a $20 pay-as-you-go phone that I refill every year. The minutes last 265 days on my "plan." Since that time, I've added $10/yr in minutes and only use the phone for real emergencies. I don't "chat" on it. Every year I work out the monthly costs for everything that I've spent on it, including adapters, memory cards, EVERYTHING. It is down to less than $2.50 since 2011.
Last yr, someone gave me a smartphone. I unlocked it, dropped in my pay-as-you-go SIM and used it for a few months without any data. It was nice, but not worth $600/yr to me.
Cable TV is the same. 2 years ago, was the ideal cable customer - TV, Phone, Internet at $160/month. I wasn't happy about it and the phone wasn't as stable. Every Thursday afternoon, the services would drop for 30 minutes. I don't really use the phone much, except for about 30 minutes every Thursday afternoon for a call with the company CEO. After the 6th month of drops and calling Comcast for a refund - yes, it was getting old - I dropped the service for a $6/month wholesale VoIP plan. I pay for outbound calls ... those costs are about $0.60 every 6 months.
Then I convinced the company to pay for my internet. I run a few virtual machines (ok, about 20) out of my house, so the $90/month business internet is a bargain. No more residential ISP - droppped.
That left just cable TV and Comcast has made it harder and harder to keep that. Digitial TV made my TVs and 3 VCRs worthless. I was pissed. Forced to buy an HDTV to get a ClearQAM tuner. For about 16 months, we watched the 70 channels on our subscription happily. I even setup a ClearQAM tuner on a PC and had a DVR, then Comcast decided to encrypt those channels - all but 10 locals, 5 pub-access, 10 religious, and 10 shopping channels. We watch about 12 of those channels - so there wasn't any need to pay $65/month for all the channels we didn't watch.
Comcast forced us from a $160/month customer into a $27/month customer.
I've been playing with OTA antennas and have built 3 of them. The best antenna is a DB4 with longer whiskers so the VHF channels come in. We're only 16 miles from most of the transmitters, but can't get ABC due to the frequency. We can't get PBS at all though there are 6 PBS channels in our metro area. Most of the other major networks come in just fine. I've decided that spending $300 on whatever antenna solution is needed will be cheaper than to keep paying for cable. A 1 year ROI is all that I need to justify it.
I've been "time shifting" cable TV for about a decade. From those TV recordings, we've amased a large TV and movie collection, so all the months and years of $140+ cable TV isn't completely for nothing. I haven't counted, but suspect over 1000 movies were recorded. None are hidef, but even at 480x480 resolution, they look fine on a 37inch TV. BTW, this is all perfectly legal.
This weekend I'll start asking for help on tvfool with my antenna design and placement. Hopefully that group can help me solve the ABC and PBS issues in a cost effective manner.
After the Olympics are over, I'll mount the antenna in the attic, run the coax to the HD-Homerun HDHR3 dual OTA/ClearQAM tuner and connect it to the network so any PC on the network can access it. Let the $300/yr savings begin!
... with automatic ad removal.
I dumped cable & broadcast television ten years ago and my children have NEVER seen a TV commercial in their own home.
This may be my greatest legacy.
It makes sense, when you look at the rising unemployment numbers. People have to cut out unnecessary expenses.
I never understood this. There are a few programs on TV I don't mind watching. But if you're paying for the television, why are there commercials? If there are going to be seven minutes of commercials for every four minutes of programming, you should not have to pay for it.
I haven't owned a TV in four years. I don't miss a single second of it.
I'd dump it today if it wasn't for sports, can't get by without the Sox, Bruins, Celtics.
Cable TV hit the market when I was a kid. There were two main selling points-- 1) more channels, and 2) NO STATIC.
Other than that, it was just more of what was available over the air.
Why is this fucking meme about cable having originally been ad-free so popular? I can only guess that, like most memes, a bunch of kids hear it, think it sounds entirely plausible, and thus repeat it as if it is the truth because, as far as their concerned, it must be the truth. After all, it makes sense to them, and they really have no means other than their own judgment to determine what is and isn't true.
So, I guess I might as well learn the new facts, because in the future, those of us old enough to remember the arrival of cable T.V. will be in the minority, and it will simply be truth that cable television was originally ad-free, just as it is presently truth that the word "hacker" originally simply meant "someone who is good with computers" and was distorted by television and movies to imply criminal intent.
It seems that reality's best feature, that it isn't simply some shit that someone made up, is slowly disappearing.
I haven't subscribed to cable television for almost 8 years now. However, I recently decided to hook up my DTV antenna to watch the Olympics, and it seems to me that the quality of programming has gone way down. Almost every channel that I get spews nonsense reality crap. It made me wonder if this shift in programming to cheap reality TV is turning off some customers.
And FiOS and U-Verse added 275,000 users.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
and upgraded my internet. (My old was 14MB/s w/80GB cap, new is 30MB/s w/175GB cap)
Sad thing is that my new internet costs like 70$. Would cost only 50$ if I got cable with it, which cost 35$.
So no, cable isn't even worth 15$ to me anymore.
I'd rather pay 8$ for NetFlix (and I still get a few channels anyway) and save the 7$ a month.
I will just leave my own experience here for posterity.
I canceled my Comcast cable subscription. When they ask, I say that I'm switching to broadcast television. That is mostly true. The over-the-air broadcasts come in clearly (I live just outside a city) and they are actually better quality than Comcast delivered digitally. Comcast salesman always have a competitor-neutralizing deal ready to go when they call me, but I can easily deflect whatever they have with "is it cheaper than free?"
The real reason I canceled is that there is nothing on TV! Every prime time sitcom strikes me as boring and stupid. The airwaves are full of crap with constant commercials. I can't stand it, and it just wasn't worth $100 a month. That's $1200 a year! I don't watch sports at all, and even if I did, I'd probably go to the sports bar.
I kept my high-speed internet subscription. This is what made the transition possible. The wife insists on having her collection of awful girly shows. As soon as I could prove that I could supply her fix using iTunes, network websites, or good old fashioned piracy, she was on board. I let her spend at will on iTunes -- it is still far cheaper than cable.
We also have Netflix, which is the other enabling product. The DVD by mail is key. We hardly ever use the streaming service. Nothing we want to see on a regular basis is available on streaming. I have serious doubts about the glorious future that everyone is predicting for that technology. Content licenses are a killer. Netflix needs to produce original content RIGHT NOW. HBO read the writing on the wall. Netflix had better follow suit.
For the record, Hulu is worthless. There is nothing worthwhile on that network. I may go as far as to say that anyone who loves Hulu is probably someone I'd not want to stand next to at a party. Also the commercials, while less frequent than cable, are maddeningly repetitive.
The Olympics could have brought me back to cable for a month. I decided against it because I get NBC in glorious HD over the air. However, NBC prime time coverage is just awful and I wish I could steam the events. The Olympics belong to the world. What the hell?!?
Anyway, I'm happy. I know that I'm never going back to cable. The cost is obscene and the commercial/content ratio is absurd.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
In response, Cable companies are throttling band-width and blocking streaming services (unless we keep pushing net neutrality) as well as creating a cable "scarcity" media campaign prompting users to call production companies to get their TV choices back. Evidently legal bull-shit is still more cost effective that progress or changing their product to match market demand. Isn't the Free Market a wonderfully responsive creation?
I was just tired of fucking paying for ESPN.
While I hate cable companies and wish nothing more than a slow painful death for them, I hate sensationalism more. While it is true that 400k people have dumped cable, the question that I don't see answered is how many did they add during that period? Surely a good deal of suckers desparately wanted 100 channels of sports, and 50 channels of Home Shopping Network.
...but I sure burn a lot of time on Slashdot!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If I was alone, I would have dropped cable long ago in favor of Netflix, Amazon and Vudu. So much online content now makes cable less and less valuable unless you want to see new shows on the day they premier. I can wait to save $70/month.
I read /. instead.
Cable and satellite TV are zombies. Dead, but still moving.
They can have (some) of my business back when they offer me a la carte TV. Until then,
they can go pound sand.
--Alanknkn
I haven't ever had cable and I'm 57. Think of all the money I've saved, the books I've written instead.
For twelve years, I used Netflix for movies, first by mail, then the last year by download. Now I even shut that off,
not enough to keep my interest, especially compared to reading.
I almost want to call Time Warner Cable and offer the same zero-package deal to their sales staff, after all, they were always so perplexed by how I couldn't understand the value of the ~150 incomprehensible foreign language channels, 1/4 of the channels being the same channel at different resolution and the hundreds of "channels" which are actually just on-demand listings.
How are these companies selling DVRs and STILL not understanding that the consumer is DONE with the old-style TV channel.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
You betcha. We need the cable bill cash to pay higher taxes for the obama's vacations.
in 1999. There was NOTHING worth paying for. We had an old LInux box hooked to the tv for years. Now we just use the Roku box. It's less hassle.
We went Roku, and watch a lot of the local digital channels - especially MeTV and Antenna TV.
And consumers, tired of the constant phone promotional calls, lousy service, and perpetual price increases for services, have had enough.
The execs mostly claim that the dumping of their services is because of the economy, and they'll blame the current political situation for that. This, rather than just admit that they fucked up and drove customers away.
We have Charter, and it's just a matter of time before we finally snap and just say fuck it, get rid of ALL their services entirely, save ourselves the 160+5 $ a month increases, and replace the cable internet with crappy cheap DSL.
In our house we've been talking about what it means to just tune out and turn off and drop back in to life - without any cable commercial media at all.
Yeah, we'll miss Walking Dead, high net bandwidth, and the cool HD programming. We'll miss the old movie channels, car shows, and the "science" channels..
But our experiment with turning the TV off for the week showed us what a massive time suck cable TV is; how much happier we are without it, and how much more stuff we get done around the house. Try it for a week and see for yourself.
Unplugging is starting to look pretty damn good. We don't need them, they need us. And I can't for the life of me think of anything all that great cable TV has contributed to my life, other than maybe making smoking pot a little more fun.
Maybe it's time for Americans to just turn off, meet our neighbors, and focus on reality for a change...
I don't watch sports at all, and even if I did, I'd probably go to the sports bar.
So what does that leave for people who watch sports with their kids? Or is that an edge case not worth serving?
Dumped my CATV years ago. Now I only have my Virgin Media 20Mb/s for £20 ($28) a month, soon to be upgraded for free to 60Mb/s !! Virgin don't mind you having just a broadband connection. And on a speed test, I am actually getting 18.8Mb/s at peak times. Not too shabby. Customer service is not too bad either.
I now have Freeview HD and Freesat HD in the UK and theres's LOADS of channels to watch.
Not looking back.
I got rid of cable but comcast offers the blast package that comes with cable and internet for 10 dollars less than what i was paying for just internet. i thought to myself that even though i wouldnt be using the cable part of the package ten dollars less a month for internet service was better than what i had before so i got it. my wife uses the cable but i hate coming home to see that she has been watching that crap all night and i partially feel a little hurt that she patronizes cable at all. she likes food network but it is the stupidest thing ever. if you are interested in cutting the cord, i like many others use xbox media center or xbmc. here is a little video that i made showing my system. http://youtu.be/mCSZ9xTzDj4