Time Warner Deal Is How Comcast Will Fight Cord Cutters

An anonymous reader writes "This NY Times articles makes the case that Comcast's planned acquisition of Time Warner Cable is part of a strategy to fight back against the millions of people ditching cable subscriptions. 'The acquisition rests on the assumption that as people cut back on their monthly TV plans, the cable lines coming into their homes won't lose their value.' The idea is that switching away from cable TV will simply make consumers more beholden to their internet connections, and removing (i.e. acquiring) the competition will let Comcast raise rates without losing customers. The article concludes, 'The steady price increases in broadband rates cast a pall over any cord cutter's dreams. It's possible that you might still save money now by cutting off your cable. But if you plan to watch a lot of TV over the Internet, don't expect to save money forever.'"

Comments

The only thing they need to do...

[jafiwam]

Is not be messing with the price all the time.

Somehow, mysteriously, the price changes slightly every month and it's always up.

Once the promotions are gone, it creeps up a bit every month. (The promotion ending for '1 year sign up price" is a big jump.)

Eventually, people start looking at the bill trying to figure out how to reduce it. That act, is what kills them. You don't want people thinking about the bill, you want them to just pay it.

I'll be dropping the TV / Movie portion of my cable in a month or two (summer means outside, and moving to a single abode again). But I wouldn't if it wasn't $45 a month more than it was when I moved in.

Re:Cellular is the business model

[Karmashock]

Totally fine with that if allow anyone to lay cable.

Right now, only ONE cable company is allowed to operate in any one area. Which means they cannot compete with each other.

make it so that they can compete and they can try any program they want. Non-competitive ideas will get priced out of the market.

Nationalization

[Dcnjoe60]

If the government is going to allow for basically a single regulated entity to control the majority of cable and internet service in the US, maybe they should just nationalize it and cut out the middle man. After all, what is the difference between a single provider that the government says what it can and cannot do and the government just doing it? Didn't the US learn enough with the "too big to fail" model? This merger has disaster written all over it. If anything, instead of consolidations, they should be breaking up these megacorporations to have more competition, not less.

Re:what price increases?

[ImdatS]

Here in Germany, I pay for 100Mbps/20Mbps (Down-/Upstream) EUR 25 per month (at current exchange rate around 34 USD/month).

Well, at least the company selling the service offers the product as "100Mbps/20Mbps", but in fact when the technician came and connected it, we saw sync-speed of 100Mbps/31Mbps and his comment: "Yeah, we actually sell only what we can guarantee".

I have measured it many times, and it is really effectively 100Mbps/30 Mbps

While I was in the US from 2009 onward, I had the feeling that the US has the worst internet connection (to homes) of all the countries I spent time in (except emerging markets). And it was the most expensive I have seen so far.

The elephants in the room.

[plebeian]

As a so called cord cutter they way I see it is the cable companies are leveraging their cable TV monopolies to dominate the ISP/Telecom markets. The real anti-trust push should not be to stop the merger of comcast and time warner but to require separation of services in an area where a company has a monopoly. That is to say make them spin off their core networking and content distribution services into a separate company/corporation.