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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.'"
What up to now has been unlimited data for one price over cable will become a set of plans with different rates for different data caps. For those who have been screaming about a la carte channels on cable, you'll effectively get them - you'll only pay for what you watch. But it will be on a GB basis, not a channel basis.
It's the shitty content. I got rid of cable because I don't actually watch TV any more. Call me a Luddite but I actually read books more then ever. I guess they better start investing in firemen and flame-throwers.
I wish they would stop misusing the term "cord cutting" for not subscribing to television while still getting Internet via cable, as it is confusing and stupid. The term originally came about as people stopped paying for land-lines and used their cell phones exclusively instead, and there it made sense.
In this case, as the article points out, "In most American households, the cable cord is the fastest conduit for broadband service. This suggests the canny strategy by which those once-inescapable cable providers might combat the rise of cord cutters: The cable giants will simply become even-more-inescapable Internet giants."
Well duh, it's been that way for a long time. You aren't "cutting the cord" by saving a few bucks by not paying for television but still getting Internet over cable. Even 10 year ago, it was like a $10 difference to not get basic cable. Where cable is losing the big money is on all the premium bundles.
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.
"and removing (i.e. acquiring) the competition will let Comcast raise rates without losing customers."
Nobody in America currently has a choice between Comcast and Time Warner. I hope the DOJ rejects the merger because the resulting company is too big. But the amount of competition in the cable internet market would not change at all.
the reason cable bills go up and no one has a choice of channels is because Disney, Discovery, Viacom and everyone else constantly raise prices and only offer their channels in one big bundle. and always add more channels.
when a channel is blacked out on their TV people always blame comcast or direct TV. they should be blaming the channel owner for wanting too much money and not giving any choice of channels.
comcast might not be a saint, but a bigger comcast will mean that any time a channel owner wants a price increase they risk losing more than half their revenue during the blackout. in the past they would pick a small carrier for the price raise since the effect on revenues was pennies
Cut my cord last year. At the rates they charge and the intermittent and barely-broadband service they provide, I can live without their content.
It wouldn't surprise me if these parasites quietly call cord-cutters "deadbeats", just as credit-card companies call customers who pay their bills every month "deadbeats". It'd jive with their big-business culture of greed and entitlement.
What happened to US antitrust law, anyway?
and costs are increasing with salary raises
Citation please. If anything salaries have been broadly flat. I don't know maybe salary growth has exceeded averages among cable providers, possible. As you say those not as many new customers, and more customers who already have cable tv don't need cables run and being more internet savy than 10 years ago do self installs. They should if anything be able cut staff. Both on the installer side and on the back office support provisioning end.
Upstream and transport network bandwidth is getting cheaper. So that cost should be going down for them too. I don't see much evidence to support them doing any cable plant upgrades to offer more bandwidth to the home. Most of them have little or no competition so they are content to make 50Mbps down / 15 up their max offerings most places and not splitting the segments up and doing more fiber home runs to enable them to offer more. The lack of incentives to continue investment in enhanced cable plant should also if anything be lowering their costs.
Looking forward if they need more IP bandwidth they can just start scaling back the television offerings that apparently fewer and fewer customers want. Again I don't see their costs going up.
Frankly this merger if allowed looks more like an opportunity for gouging than anything else. Normally I am laissez-faire type when it comes to markets. I'd say let them merge; but this is a case where these companies only are able to operate in the first place because of government granted rights of way. Either the rights of way ought to be reconsidered and property owners allowed to charge them rent, or we should just start regulating them like public utilities.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The only way I've been willing to deal with a price increase is when they offer me a stupid amount of extra bandwidth. Oh you want to give me 25/10 service for $5 more? Sure. Oh you want to give me 25/25 service for $1 more a month. Heck yeh! You are offering 100/65 for $35 more a month......FUCK YEH!!!!
Comcast's idea: we are raising your rates by $5 this year and we are throttling your connect to 7/1. Me: Go fuck yourself and cancel my account. Comcast: wait?! what?!
Just the past amount of bad blood I've had with cable companies would keep me from doing business with one again. When I bought my house, my real-estate lady thought I was nuts, I checked out all the houses she was going to show me to see if they had cable or FIOS for service (the area around Tampa is broken up into little monopoly zones with either one or the other) and refused to go look at houses that only had access to cable.
As far as having to "pay" things are moving so fast that in 10 years most of the new shows are going to come from any of the old broadcasters. Comcast doesn't represent so much as a horse buggy whip factory, but a store that specialized in selling and delivery horse buggy whips.
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.
time warner is rewiring most of their buildings in NYC now. they just did mine a week ago and the word is the base internet tier will be 50/5 soon
and then health insurance costs per employees always go up, they rent stores for customer support, stocking up the cable boxes and modems. NYC I always see their installers. people are always moving and install TV when they move in
very little new customers out there.
The customers are all 3 inches tall, or what?
Whence comes this bizarre aversion which Americans seem to have developed to the words "few" and "fewer" recently?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's technology. You pointed out yourself how the price per mbs has dropped over the years and then suggest for some reason it should now go up. Technology naturally drops in price because of advances regardless of how many people are using it. Unless of course you have a monopoly.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
When you get Hulu to replace it, you will notice it has the same amount of commercials. So I just torrent all my TV shows. better quality, no "buffering" and no commercials. I would pay Hulu 2X their subscription rate if they removed the commercials for me. But they have no plans on going commercial free for any reason.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
there are very little new customers so your revenue base will stay flat
meanwhile the costs like employees, support, equipment, bond payments for network upgrades, etc will increase
its like your electric bill, its always going up
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.
as a TV customer, cable cutter and back to TV there are two reasons to pay for TV today. Sports and quality kids' cartoons. Disney jr and Nick and some of the other cartoon networks.
otherwise as you said, the advertising ruins it. tried watching a movie and its horrible with all the commercials. Netflix is good for documentaries but they have gotten worse lately. got rid of some good episodes and series
True. On the other hand, when I subscribed to Internet service in the 1990's it cost about $22 (in 2014 dollars) for basic service. Now it costs $30 for basic service. In the 1990's you could 70 times the bandwidth when you paid 7 times the price. Now you will get 10 times the bandwidth when you pay 5 times the price. It's not the best comparison, I realize, but it should be enough to demonstrate that we are paying more for Internet service.
And in Lithuania I pay 23.17EUR/month for 300/300mbps advertised. I reality the speed drops to about 60mbps during peak time (but not every day), but the connection is very reliable and the ISP does not complain that I upload ~30TB/month.
What you guys need is something akin to what happened with BT here in the UK - Arms-length separation of the infrastructure and the service. Sure, you may only be able to have one cable provider in the city, but if they have to sell non-discriminatory access to other ISPs at the same rates as their own consumer division, then you get the healthy kind of competition. There's a thriving ISP market in the UK, only downside is the big boys keep hoovering up the smaller ones that do too well, meaning if you want to stay away from the big boys you have to keep finding and migrating to a new small one every few years. :(
BT has these rules because of its ex-monopoly status, but personally I think it'd make perfect sense to apply the same rules universally. BT Retail should be able to provide service over Virgin Media's cable infrastructure in an area if that's the most cost effective way of doing it - don't limit my service options to the infrastructure provider's.
Boo.
i'm at 15/1 now
50/5 would be nice for uploading photos to icloud or flickr
what's the point of gig-e? if i want a movie i'll buy a blu ray and my itunes and vudu rentals already look good.
Verizon is spending tons of money upgrading last mile to optic fiber. AT&T is already pitching cell tower to home connections. Companies who would be adversely affected if cable companies get too powerful in controlling the distribution channels will fund competitors.
But, in the end, instead of a monopoly we might end up with a duopoly or at the most three choices for home to internet connections. Still I hope this merger does not go through. Cable monopolies could do plenty of damage before viable competition emerges.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My broadband price has been increasing about 5% per year. Along with that I've also been getting regular speed increases. Right now it's 100/30 Mbps up/down.
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.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
and have 2 rate increases on internet services in the same year with no additional speed increase.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Why buy a blueray disk when you can buy the streaming version for cheaper, with the same quality, if we had the broadband the rest of the world has?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
multiple 4k streams?
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
It's a balancing act that I'm sure they would rather rectify for the consumer - but they cannot. The content providers are always going to want to have some form of tied in advertising; Hulu can guarantee that the advertisements are seen - as opposed to DVRs which can skip (or fast forward) through the adverts.
I haven't paid for Hulu yet (bing rewards points provide this to me for free for now) and I've enjoyed running through shows I wouldn't otherwise watch. As much as I would love to see no commercials, unless there's some other way to plug in advertising into the actual show - I don't feel it's going to ever happen.
Karnal
This!!
My internet price (from Comcast and acquired entities) has remained steady at $43 for probably 20 years now, while my download speeds have increased from 1.5Mbps to (today) 57Mbps over the same timeframe. Factoring in inflation and speed increases over that timeframe, my cost per throughput has steadily and dramatically dropped.
The article is FUD.
I think the issue for cord cutters us data caps. If the cable company had a steady 250gb cap then you went from 450 hours of full speed downloads to 15 hours of full speed downloading. So even as bandwidth has improved, your ability to use it has not. Just like how the cellular companies tout their fantastic super fast downloads to make you think you are getting better service but if you actually use that high speed data, you can hit your monthly data cap within a few minutes of downloading.
Comcast has 23m customers, the US has a population of 313m. There are few areas (not little) that are not covered by TWC, comcast, or charter, which combined have less than 40m subs, or less than 13% of the population. How does that mean there are few new customers when they dont have 87+% of the population?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
i don't buy a lot of movies but the ones i want to buy i only buy on blu ray because the quality is better. especially the sound on my TV with no home theater
even at a few $$$ like Gravity i'll still rather have the blu ray/dvd/digital combo since i can always play it OFFLINE.
and why would i care since there is no 4K content and no decent affordable 4K TV's now
in 10 years it will be affordable
Future cost of cable will be this:
$150 per month for cable TV + internet
$140 per month for internet only
Enjoy your options.
You missed the point entirely.. Why buy the physical disk if you can get the same quality, and access it anywhere you want and not be tied to the physical media? If you have a 1G/s connection you would not need the physical disk, but streaming should work for you. So your argument is why get better speeds when I can get the disk is an backwards argument, because if you could get a better experience if you had better speeds.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
As president of my HOA, I allowed Verizon to install FIOS capability to every unit in my complex, for free.
Now, we are not as a community beholden to Time-Warner, but can switch to Verizon as a provider of all things digital (internet, TV, and phone).
Both are desperate to sell you "packages" of services, rather than just internet. Screw them. I call once a year and threaten to ditch them for their competitor. The result is a rate reduced by about 40%.
I do not own a television, nor do I use a land-line phone. I just want internet. Well, that sort of logic falls short with their telephone salespeople. The only threat that works is, "I will totally cancel service from you and will go to your competitor."
"As we are going to suck you dry dear customer, and once we control all mainstream content creation and distribution, we will decide how much we screw you."
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem is the cable is not going to be the only fast route into your home forever. Some people with good coverage are already using a home-based LTE router as their only internet connection. As this becomes more widespread and 5G starts rolling out, the cable companies will have another contender to deal with besides FTTH offerings. The nice thing about wireless as well is typicallty a region is served by more wireless providers than cable companies, so more competition will help keep prices low.
internet connection is not perfect
i like physical disks because the quality is better. blu ray is up to 50Mbps
my blu ray player will always work and there will always be blu ray compatible players out there for sale. at least the next 20 years
i kind of trust itunes and vudu but the content is DRM'd and i need the special equipment for that store to play the content on my TV
unlike blu ray which is open
Where cable is losing the big money is on all the premium bundles.
Which they combat by slowly moving commonly viewed 'basic' channels to the next level bundle.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I didn't stop getting cable because of the price, it was mainly due to being sick of commercials and the fact that the little programming I enjoy is all online now. Money just wasn't ever a factor for me when doing this is my point.
Again you are not paying attention, the quality of the physical disk is better because the speed is not there are the internet to handle the sustained 72MB/s speeds required for full bluray quality playback, the best most areas can get is 50MB. At 1GB the quality would be the exact same, and the connection being perfect would not matter, as it would be made up for before you need it.. Secondly you got worse DRM in the disk itself, you can only play it on a bluray player, at one location, in addition there are other vendor neutral things like Google Play and Amazon instant video. You seem to want to lock yourself into an inferior product and ensure that everyone else is locked in with you, I am sorry but I reject that.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
networking and CDN issues have no effect on my blu ray collection.
itunes is also good since you can download a local copy to a computer and stream locally
vudu and ultraviolet i only buy ultra cheap when there is a sale
I'm not sure exactly, but the average household in the US is something like four or five people. At five people per household, that's 200 million folks. Also, there are something like 20 million college students. Is any 30,000 student university with a subscription a single sub, i. e., one bill a single sub?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
They have about 2.9m cable, 6.2m total subscribers, so we are still less than 15% of the population of the US. Cablevision about 3m and the rest are all about 4m, add them up and we are at about 52m subscribers, or about 16.6% of the population. With 83% not subscribing my point still stands, there are anything but a few customers to tap into.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
That population of 313m includes every man, woman, and child. Do you expect mom get her own subscription, dad get his, and one subscription for each child in the household? If you want to do that more effectively get the number of households in the country which as of 2010 was around 114,800,000. Now you're talking around 1 in every 3 households has a subscription to one of those three.
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.
And Germany has about 82 million people across an area 15% smaller than the size of California. California has about half the population (38 million people). That's just one state. The US is huge by comparison with a large part that has tiny population densities. I'm just pointing out that providers in other countries with much higher population density can lower their prices because it costs less per customer for infrastructure costs.
Don't get me wrong, the US prices are way too high. However, the US also has a much larger barrier of entry.
The only way, in my opinion, that broadband internet access prices will drop in the US is when the infrastructure piece is taken over by the government and then leases bandwidth to private companies. Its the only way that we will ever get competition parity for established players and new start-ups.
"But if you plan to watch a lot of TV over the Internet, don't expect to save money forever."
Let me stop you right there. If you live in certain areas of the country and pay for Netflix, it's likely you aren't watching ANY TV over the internet with the recent CDN/peering issues going on.
"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.'"
You certainly won't save any money by adding cable.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
And yes that still means there is 66.66% of the market that is still not taped by them, still a far cry from few.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
a lot of people get married and have kids so the average household size is around 3
313 million people you figure around 100 million households
There is currently not a push for 4K TV's and content because the current network throughout the US is largely incapable of transmitting 4K content. 4K requires around 15-20 Mbps while the average in America is 7.4 Mbps. This is pathetic and needs to be upgraded
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
How about Municipalities or States laying publicly owned fiber next to the publicly owned roads and then having private companies deliver services over those cables so we eliminate the natural monopoly?
We can run fiber to any number of "central offices" where private companies install their gear to deliver voice, video, data...etc.
Installing multiple cables to deliver the exact same service seems like a waste of resources.
i'm 40 and have been around since the very beginning of the internet
i've seen lots of fads come and go that i thought were awesome at the time
if you read the business and financial press you will know digital sales are in the impulse buy category. same as the supermarket check out aisle stuff you see. same psychological concept they mastered selling women's magazines to housewives 40 years ago. huge margins for the maker and seller. digital sales has nothing to do with being more high tech than blu ray. since there is no credit card to take out most people don't realize they are buying something since there are 2-3 layers between the sale and real money. its a way to make it easy to buy something right there and then at high margins than lose a potential sale because you changed your mind.
If Comcast is paying $1B to cover a region, and another $100M a year to maintain it, it'll pay that regardless of whether it keeps or loses 50% of its customers. And likewise a competitor will pay exactly the same.
The cost structure you assume is exactly the opposite of what actually happened when phone service was deregulated to allow competition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carrier Costs to maintain the shared wiring infrastructure were split amongst each operator (ILEC, CLEC) rather than multiplied by each additional operator as you suggest.
So, I attended the Streaming Media West conference last month, and one of the things I came away with was how the existing players (Hollywood, cable companies, etc.) are adamant about ensuring an "orderly transition to IP-based delivery." That is an exact quote from one of the over-the-top (OTT) sessions I went to, where over-the-top refers to content delivered over IP directly to the user from someone other than the broadband provider (e.g., watching a movie from Netflix instead of from your cable company's video-on-demand service).
This is very much the point of the "TV Everywhere" systems by which you login with your cable or satellite credentials in order to watch cable/satellite content on a mobile device or set-top box (iPad, Roku, etc.). It's basically a rear-guard action against the cord-cutters: we'll let you watch the same content on any device, provided you pay the same price for it. Keep paying your cable bill, even if you don't watch cable.
I wrote a long blog about the show here. But taking it back to the Comcast / Time Warner deal, the competitive issue is not in individual markets (where, indeed, there's usually only one cable company), but in the power of a combined Comcast / Time Warner to keep creatives in the old system, by using caps, throttling, predatory pricing, and other dirty tricks to hamper genuine Internet TV.
Presumably, once the Justice Department comes to understand the antitrust implications of this deal, they'll immediately launch an investigation. Of Apple.
why should i care as long as the goal is to see content at the best quality and price?
what difference does the transport medium make?
streaming kills it on selection and access to a huge catalog but its not a reason to pay more money per month for faster internet when i can just buy a physical copy. even then with itunes i can download a copy onto a hard drive and even then its not the best quality and over compressed
google play and amazon are not vendor neutral and worse than itunes/ultraviolet
What salary raises? Unless you're in the 10% salaries have been dropping for 30 years, just not as fast as the value of the dollar.
If my salary last year was $60k, and inflation dropped the value of the dollar by 5% while I get a 4% "raise" then I haven't actually gotten a raise at all, I've had my salary cut by 1%.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I just signed up for Comcast's 50mbps package. Got it hooked up and saw it was only getting to 15 at best, yet they still sell that (when they also have a 25mbps package that I switched to). The line's probably just overloaded, but it seems almost fraudulent that they'd sell two services that provide the same thing except one advertises higher and costs more.
The focus of your concern should be the delivery of UHDTV which has 4x the resolution of HDTV if I recall. As I know, there isn't even a physical media format for it. Yet, I'm hearing more and more buzz surrounding UHDTV. I guess that's because it's still consumer experimental razor edge technology. Effectively an expensive technology demo that makes for an interesting conversation piece for the wealthy class. Just as with HDTV before it.
HDTV 1080i (maybe 1080p too) is already broadcasted over cable and dish, and has been for over 7 years now. There are differences in compression techniques due to bandwidth constrains however. So different CODECs are used along with VBR to match whatever bandwidth is deemed applicable and available. Though I do agree wholeheartedly, nothing beats the raw bandwidth of a spinning BD. Though the differences between HD broadcast and physical media is subtle that your average consumer wouldn't notice the difference unless you provided pointers to tell the difference between the two formats.
Life is not for the lazy.
You do live in cities right? No need to cover the wast empty space between them.
What's really needed is a system of universal connection to the Internet in the US. Virtually every building in the US is connected to the power grid or to copper telephone wires. It would be great if either of these could be used for Internet connections but it appears that physics seems to limit it's use for really high speeds. In my neighborhood with DSL I might get 1.5 Mbit/s down and 0.7 Mbit/s up. No way could this be used for HD video streaming. Electric utility lines as a carrier seems to have other limitations such as RF interference in some situations. Not sure about speed. The solution must be some kind of universal connection which may require a new technology.
As a side note: I was talking to my 93 year old mother-in-law who lived in rural Iowa and when she went to nursing school in the"big city" in the late 1930's she had just gotten electricity in the farm home. She didn't know how to plug things in or turn on a switch which upset her instructors. It wasn't until REA, a government agency, electrified rural America that rural folks got electricity. That's around 40 years after Edison electrified a small part of NYC. Indeed, we need a RIA - Rural Internetification Administration to do what the Rural Electrification Administration did in the 1930's. If that could be done in the 1930's in the midst of the Great Depression, it can be done today in an era of economic plenty.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
very little new customers out there.
The customers are all 3 inches tall, or what?
Whence comes this bizarre aversion which Americans seem to have developed to the words "few" and "fewer" recently?
It's like the people who write "loose" when they really meant "lose", or the ones who can't distinguish among "their", "they're", and "there".
It does serve one useful purpose. It immediately indicates whether you are dealing with one of the sheople. If you are, they will thoughtlessly and unconsciously make the same error because so many others are making that error. Such errors suddenly become more and less trendy in a very observable manner. That is, after all, what makes them sheople: they are unable to be very aware of their actions and decisions, preferring to operate in a sort of zombie autopilot state of consciousness. Thus, almost overnight, you see these errors everywhere despite no central authority coordinating everyone involved.
If you try to correct them, they will resent the implication that they should be asked to think. They will focus on the lack of damage from such grammatical errors, calling you "grammar nazi", and miss the actual point. The actual point is about mindlessly going through the motions with no real awareness, something that causes real damage in the world (consider how many car accidents could be avoided if people routinely considered what they were doing prior to acting, how much propaganda would not be believed, how many elections could have ended differently).
No, there is no push for 4k content and tv's, because the customers see it is the same scam that was blueray.
Barely visible quality increase at big costs, no extra convenience or anything.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Your blu ray player can only decode content from the disk if:
1) It has access to the internet
2)The key has not been revoked
Either of these things do indeed affect your blu ray collection. Said collection can be rendered into so many drink coasters at the will of the DRM people.
They have about 2.9m cable, 6.2m total subscribers, so we are still less than 15% of the population of the US. Cablevision about 3m and the rest are all about 4m, add them up and we are at about 52m subscribers, or about 16.6% of the population. With 83% not subscribing my point still stands, there are anything but a few customers to tap into.
None of that matters if potential new customers aren't interested.
This is like the fact that the vast majority of adult Americans do not currently smoke cigarettes. You might say that's some serious growth area for the cigarette companies, right? Except, that vast majority doesn't want to smoke.
It probably doesn't help that Comcast has such a bad reputation in terms of customer service and in terms of throttling and otherwise manipulating traffic. It only encourages people to do without if they can.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Most of them have little or no competition so they are content to make 50Mbps down / 15 up their max offerings
And THIS is exactly why I don't want the merger. Time Warner HAS been doing the upgrades and I currently get 113 for the same price I used to get 15 for. I really don't think Comcast would do this.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
No. In California we live in a giant suburb that contains everything from 50 miles north of LA to the Mexican border and about 20-30 miles inland all that way. In that area, the only "cities" in a European sense are LA, maybe Irvine and San Diego. So, no, we don't live in cities. There is no empty space. There are endless blocks of residential neighborhoods for miles in any direction.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I had the opposite experience on Time Warner. They added 2 tiers above me (topping out at the same I was paying for the highest for "new users only"). They actively began throttling me lower than I had been. I called and complained and since I have been a good customer for a long time, they raised me up to the highest tier for the same price. It's advertised at 50 Mbps but I get 113.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Please. My cable internet bill has been increasing about $1 every other month for the last five years. Sure, it's faster, but my data cap hasn't increased. If I don't make use of that speed, then it really doesn't matter that I have 57Mbps or 1.5. The constant incremental price increases are maddening. What other industry does that? They know that if they just raised my bill in one lump, I would consider alternatives.
Sorry, but giving you more throughput shouldn't really factor into a standard price anyway unless that throughput is significantly above the average (FiOS). It would be like comparing price/throughput to phone modems in the early 80's, or hard drives from the same period.
And if you're getting 57Mbps for $43 through Comcast, then you're definitely getting a significant deal (a bundle perhaps), because that's nowhere near what they are currently advertising. Not even close.
Maybe dish and directv should join up as well to be able to take on comcrap.
You're forgetting they've been getting additional taxes and fees from every land line and internet user in the nation since the 90's with the express purpose of improving the US's infrastructure.
As I have already pointed out in the post directly above yours that means they control 1/3 of the market, leaving 2/3, that is not a few people.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I had a client with a 50/10 package at two sites on the same property and we connected them with a VPN. Never could get more than 2 Mbps between sites, despite the VPN devices rated for multiple 10+ Mbps simultaneous IPSec tunnels (new models, crypto accelerators, etc). I should have been seeing 7+ but that fact that two nodes on the same head couldn't do it leads me to believe there's something broken or inherently dishonest about the advertised rates.
I think if there was some kind of audit where you looked at the upstream connectivity of every cable subscriber you would find a fair number where either the area head end had less actual capacity than what they were selling to end users or where the utilization and oversubscription essentially made it impossible to see the advertised speed.
I know they cover themselves with fine print and asterisks on their offers, but it does seem like it is functionally false advertising.
Not for me. Without a $35/month phoneline, it costs me $45. Not significantly cheaper than my Comcast bill.
I don't normally reply to cowards and I never mod them up, even for a great post like this unless they have a real reason to be anonymous.
I see your point about the mindless zombies in today’s world. At least in the USA in the area I live grammar is horrible and driving is worse. They run stop signs read lights, and if no lines on the road will drive on the wrong side. On line marked roads they have rumble strips on the middle line to stop the head on accidents from people crossing over.
Personally I don't think this is because they are just driving and writing the way everyone else is, I think the problem is that people are lazy and don't want to expend the energy to do things correctly.
Because you didn't bother to log in you will probably never read this reply, but since I am not lazy I thought I would write it anyway.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
Why is a company 'fighting' its customers desires? It would be one thing if the idea of reduced cost internet service was financially impossible to support, but that just is not the case. Witness the comparison to broadband pricing in other countries. To make things truly silly on that front there is a lot of talk about the service providers double charging bandwidth... that is charging the consumer for access and the content creator for delivery. Absolute madness in terms of what a healthy market for cable and/or broadband service should be. Also, I have never quite understood the cord cutting phrase for internet service. It makes sense when cutting landline phone service in favor of cellular but not with regards to internet service and it never has. LTE is the first wireless technology that might be a viable alternative but it really doesn't have the capacity to absorb a mass migration. Serious population level uses of bandwidth is still entirely reliant on landline connections. Instead of cord cutting I'd say it is more about rejecting the entire TV model of content consumption in favor of a more customer oriented experience. The scheduled commercial broadcast model made sense prior to the advent of the internet. Now there is a much better solution and the old way really needs to adapt to the new realities of technology. Instead of fighting services like Areo, Netflix etc... these companies should be embracing them. They will win eventually.
As for the issue of Comcast or Verizon choking services like Netflix, The FCC needs to get off its keister and fix the debacle it made of net neutrality. There are some days I really wish Google/Apple etc... would band together for a hostile takeover of the last mile trolls and reduce them to dumb pipe service providers to lower the access bar for all the content they aggregate. For them a low margin dumb pipe ISP environment would seriously pump up their content distribution capabilities because more folks could afford more access. It seems pretty obvious the telecom industry still holds to much sway over the congress critters to think government will ever roll back their current 'entitled' last mile troll position on its own. In fact they will likely end up being a puppet used by telecom to fight tooth and nail against any such attempt... witness the growing body of legislation directly hindering google FIOS efforts. Someone seriouly want to defend those actions as being 'in the publics best interest'?
Unsurprisingly, I am one of the folks that ditched cable TV. Even when I realized it was an insignificant price drop I still insisted on internet only service. I believe cable TV is broken and has been since they introduced commercials on top of paid subscription. Even so I got a cable subscription once I started living on my own pretty much because it was what you did. Then I realized at one point I hadn't turned on the TV in several months (Everquest) and when I did it was almost painful to try and sit through a typical broadcast. It became absolutely galling to me to pay 90+ dollars a month to be bombarded by advertisements. Even premium channels like HBO now bombard you with a significant percentage of advertisement (of their own materials, but advertisement no less). Back when they started you paid your fee to have movies movies movies and more movies. These days any given channel is dishing out something like 20% advertisements and that is if you do not consider the product placement sequences that are now common and unavoidable through any medium. An example of that method is on Bones when Booth and Bones talking about features in Ford vehicles while they 'drive' to or from something on the show. In and of itself I have little problem with that. But when they then break to a ford commercial it is enough to make me want to put a fist through my TV. Arrrrggghhhh.... Charge me, use commercials, or do product placement. Pick ONE. Using all three is just greedy.... worse than that it is a deal breaker. It made it such that it was no longer something I wante
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Maybe where you are. For me, at three miles south of a state capital's downtown core, DSL can't be had at any price.
Time to reregulate telecommunications. Private enterprise has essentially left us Comcast as a sole "choice" in large cities for cable/ internet and Direct TV as a satellite provider. Competition is gone and monopolies are born. So much for a free market.
Comcast/Xfinity and Time Warner cable service territories don't overlap much. So if you want cable, which ever one is in your neighborhood is the one you would have signed up for.
What will be stomped out* is the ability for each company, particularly Time Warner's content partners to access Comcast's customers via streaming services rather than a direct cable connection. The content owners are effectively trapped behind one network operator who can demand a bigger cut of the business.
*Assuming the FCC doesn't defend network neutrality, that is. If customers can bypass the cable TV service and stream whet they want over their broadband, competition will continue. By 'defend network neutrality', I envision rules that would have the likes of Verizon answering to the DoJ over issues like Netflix throttling. How this issue will be settled will say far more about content pricing for the consumer than who runs the cable up to my property line.
Have gnu, will travel.
California has all its population on the coast. Germany has a lower density of cities. California should be cheaper. Just don't wire in every house in the desert like it's in LA.
Learn to love Alaska
Most of the US doesn't consist of California. There are a great many areas in the US with urban density close to that of German towns/cities.
Lucky you. In the Sacramento region I have to pay Comcast $50 a month for 6 Mbps.
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I haven't seen anything 4k, but to say the difference in quality between blu-ray and a dvd is 'barely noticible' is silly unless you have seriously deficient eyesight. Plus, the additional cost is not really that much if you buy what you want intelligently.
Now no page and says flooding when I go there.
Cable companies don't compete with each other, they have their own territories. There's nothing stopping them from raising rates without hypothetically losing customers now.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
And if it did happen, it wouldn't last. When cable started, people paid for the channels, so they were funded by subscriptions. That eventually ended when they realized they could put in the ads too. So they were funded by subscriptions and adds. Why use one when you can use both?
Learn to love Alaska
What was the Blu Ray scam? I'm not aware of this.
I've lived through the VHS, DVD and Blu Ray eras and each technology has significantly higher quality than the last. These days I tend to download my movies for free instead of buying the Blu Ray and when I do I always look for the highest quality 1080p version because it is so much higher quality than even upscaled DVD versions.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
You don't need any in-depth analysis to figure out what's going to change.
Look at Time Warner's internet service prices:
http://www.timewarnercable.com...
$15/mo for 2Mbps.
Then look at Comcast's internet service prices:
http://www.comcast.com/interne...
$40/mo for 3Mbps.
MORE THAN DOUBLE THE MONTHLY PRICE, FOR JUST ENTRY-LEVEL INTERNET SERVICE.
The competition between cable and DSL has kept prices down for years. But now, with Verizon switching to FIOS with even more astronomical entry-level internet prices, you will have NO CHOICE in the matter, but to pay much more than you do now, for slower service. How many people are going to just go without internet, when they only occasionally browse the web, and their cheapest option is $40+? Comcast is trying to rape my mother...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The obvious solution to that is regulation that alows for CLECs in cable and Internet just they way they were allowed for in phone service. This whole stupid mess is just the result of a bunch of Ayn Rand cultists thinking that the market would magically sort itself out if we let all of the jack*ss corporations run amok.
Los Angeles had multiple competitive DSL providers 15 years ago and it's WAY more spread out than New York City.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Comment is full of wrong.
Time Warner has not owned Time Warner Cable for several years. Time Warner is some ongoing licensing royalty from the "Roadrunner" intellectual property "beep beep", but otherwise they have no connection at all. Next month it will be 5 years since TWC was fully independent of Time Warner. Try to keep up.
In fact, "Time" likely won't be part of Time Warner before long either, in that they're looking to spin off that group. But the Cable Company is already long gone away from Time Warner (oh, and AOL isn't part of it either, in case you're still confused). Thus TWC, which Comcast wants to buy, does not own any cable program networks at all. No CNN, no TBS, no Cartoon Network, no HBO. That's all part of the "Warner" part of "Time Warner", not any part of the cable company.
You're equally ignorant about the scope of Comcast's fully-owned NBC Universal, which is ridiculously larger than "NBC/NHL/MLB". I assume that you meant NHL Network and MLB Network, not the actual sports leagues. MLB network is only partly-owned by NBC Universal's NBC Sports Group; Time Warner Cable (OK, that's Comcast too if this goes through), DirecTV, Cox Communications are the other minority owners, while Major League Baseball itself is the majority owner. NBC owns 5.44% per Wikipedia. On NHL Network (USA), NBC is the only minority owner, but has just 15.6% with the National Hockey League owning the rest.
Meanwhile you ignore: USA Network, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, NBC Sports Channel (formerly Universal Sports), Oxygen, E!, SyFy, Esquire Network, UniversalHD, and a bunch more networks that are both on -2, -3, etc. OTA digital subchannels and on cable like Chiller, Cloo, Sprout, etc. That's just the NBC Universal Cable Group. Don't forget all the OnO (Owned and Operated) NBC TV stations - far fewer than the overall NBC broadcast network total affiliates, but the big-market ones like LA, SF, NYC, and many more are owned by NBC itself. Which means owned by Comcast.
Plus, Universal Studios.
Oh, and Jay Leno just left NBC. Yes, again. Try to keep up.
Even more wrong, with your: "the fight has... been with... Viacom..." in that the big recurrent CBS fights are with CBS, which is way more than CBS old-people-TV network. Viacom and CBS split apart years ago, which means all those "Viacom" TV networks and properties? They belong to CBS (which also owns CNET, ZDNET and lots of online properties too). In fact, CBS now owns "Star Trek". Which is why my paragraph-opener sentence should be read Shatnerized. Yes, the network that turned down Star Trek in the 1960s, saying "We have one of our own we like better - Lost in Space", now is the owner of the "Star Trek" intellectual property. Paramount, which is part of Viacom, has absolutely nothing to do with "Star Trek" other than having some remaining rights to it as a motion-picture-only property. Many of those "Viacom" channels you're thinking about? They're now CBS. Such as the "Showtime Networks" group of channels. The MTV Group is still Viacom.
You really need to follow what is actually happening rather than that outdated Facebook "meme" infographic of "These Six Companies Own All Our Media".
The whole thesis is a remarkably stupid idea. Time Warner and Comcast are NOT direct competitors. They are MONOPOLIES in differet markets. They already have the ability to screw with you if you are trying to cut the cord. You probably have no where to go.
PERHAPS you can flee from your local cable monopoly to your local phone monopoly. MAYBE.
All this does is increase the number of cities where Comcast has a monopoly. Ultimately, the real impact of this will likely be with negotating with content providers. Comcast might be able to go all Walmart on Disney.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Why buy a blueray disk when you can buy the streaming version for cheaper, with the same quality, if we had the broadband the rest of the world has?
The streaming version is almost never cheaper than the physical media version. Even if it is, it's probably not cheaper enough to offset the total lack of any real ownership you have in a streaming copy.
Plus physical media is subject to all of the other aspects of physical property. Supply cannot suddenly be completely eliminated and the media obeys the laws of supply and demand.
For the price of cable, you can quickly get to the point where you can distract yourself without paying for cable or streaming or even more media ever again.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Why buy the physical disk if you can get the same quality, and access it anywhere you want
1) It is NOT the same quality
2) You can NOT access it anywhere you want
Chances are, you won't even be able to access it on any device you want. The only way to really ensure what you are describing is to buy physical media, rip it, and have a copy stored on your mobile device.
We have to deal with the world the way it is, rather than pretending that we live in some fantasy version of that world.
Neither the land line nor the mobile network operators are interested in accomodating your fantasy. Your fantasy is never going to come into being so long as the status quo remains with the current telecom incumbents.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What he said. The truth is, I never had cable TV for those reasons, and this: Remember, the deal was commercials = free TV. Cable started out with no commercials (yes, it did - except for the network channels), but they slowly began adding them in, until now, where there are more commercials on cable channels than on network television. Of course, TV watchers are a docile group to begin with...
When was that ever "the deal" as opposed to "what you wanted to be the deal"? Cable used to be called CATV, for "Community Antenna TV" and was primarily a way to bring television programming into areas that were geographically un-served by TV, usually due to actual geological / topographic reasons. Places like Ithaca, NY, or Breckenridge, Colorado, where no way in hell is a TV signal from Syracuse or Denver is getting into them through the hills down into the valleys. Later, urban canyons like NYC where not everyone had the ability to put up any kind of outdoor antenna - not because of regulations as much as real estate realities, and indoor antennas suffered from horrible multipath. I've lived in all three of the places I mentioned, laughably tried to get OTA TV in them, and have been a cable subscriber in all of them at one point or another. Getting "content" without commercials was never the deal - it was getting content, at all.
Later, the idea of "cable channels" started taking off, and what we now think of as the "basic tier" of cable stations began to show up. Watching "USA Night Flight" back in the day, then the launch of MTV with actual music videos. Along with the "Arts and Entertainment Network" that had plays, classical concerts, opera, not dysfunctional yahoos. Whether or not these extra stations had commercials, there was never any "deal" that "your cable bill pays for the content", CATV was a distribution method. Then the "pay tv" channels like HBO became popular. You can't pay for HBO without paying first for the "CATV" distribution subscription. In 2014 that's a dumb idea, but back then it wasn't - you were paying for the pipe, and now that you had the pipe, you could also pay for premium content. Given that "pay tv" is either "pay by having commercials" or "pay by having a CONTENT fee", I don't see a difference.
Your strawman argument against cable is flawed. You never understood the deal. You weren't paying for the pizza, you were paying for the delivery of the pizza.
Comcast doesn't offer low or fixed pricing on bundled television and internet services to long time customers. They charge you a higher rate after six months to a year, and most bundles include a premium channel that they will charge your for once the deal window expires. They also charge for each additional line into a home receiving a television signal, and a rental fee for the box required to receive their signal.
This type of marketing strategy coupled with increasing prices for services is what has caused "cord cutting". In most cases, new customers will find themselves paying only a few dollars more a month for television at first. Give it a year or maybe two, and those customers will find themselves paying double just to receive the same service. Comcast purchasing Time Warner isn't going to offset "cord cutting" because they will continue to use the same unsuccessful marketing gimmicks they have for the last decade. I would rather order a pizza or two than continue giving money to a greedy company for an overpriced television service that I don't watch anyway.
First, my immediate response, as a Time Warner customer was, "well, we're canceling then. I literally would prefer to deal with Satan than Comcast." That's not an abuse of the word literally: I mean in all serious that the Morning Star, enemy of man, font of lies and evil has a better business track record than Comcast, and I would be more likely to extend him the benefit of the doubt. This means we're ditching cable, internet, and phone from Time Warner.
Second, AT&T still sells internet connections. As do others if we really need to move to a smaller firm. And that's just because we've so far been too lazy to set up either of our devices as a cell modem or link it to a larger screen. Mobile phones make the land line and the cable lines have a lot less value. Comcasts' proposition -- that cable is inherently valuable even with shitty service provided to relatively few true television-viewers -- is already on very shaky terms.
Third, the wife and I immediately re-evaluated how much TV we watch. We quickly came to the agreement that we DVR more than we ever watch, that most of those could have been received over-the-air from networks, and that we really aren't that interested in most of them anymore. Most of the time we ignore the DVR-ed material to binge on classics and series on Netflix, new releases on Red Box, or just plain, old-fashioned, 3-seasons-on-sale-for-$15 DVDs. We can do with a lot less in terms of cable.
In the short run, people who will be most affected are families that can't imagine ditching the Disney Channel. In families without adolescents yet, I think a lot more people will just be too cheap to ever -start- on the Disney Channel. Their strategy, like every Comcast strategy, is short-sighted.
Blu-ray is not an inferior product. It has one chief advantage that streaming can never match - permanence. You will always be able to play the Blu-ray, but you have no control over whether your chosen video streaming provider keeps the content available for streaming.
FC Closer
No, the solution is to invalidate all the exclusivity agreements and allow anyone with a sound business plan to get a permit to run their own fiber/coax/copper/whatever (including municipal governments). The reason the market isn't sorting itself out is *because* of regulation.
That would drive consumer prices down.
I won't subscribe to cable, but I'll gladly pay WWE $10 a month for access to all their shows, Pay per Views, and back catalog of stuff.
While there is other stuff I like on TV (I download it anyways), I find the price of Cable TV to be horrible. But I'll gladly pay $10 a month for access to the few shows I like to watch, plus the PPV's that I never could afford (but downloaded the next day), and I'll get them in HD that is way better then any HD Cablecast has ever sent.
This is how we fight cable companies, when the various shows/networks decide stream it to you for cheap.
Be seeing you...
From ADSL to dsl2plus, now my phone company has upgraded to VDSL and its a small south east phone company that so far has never had usage caps or filters anything.
I've tormented 250-400 gigs per month which includes torrents as well as hosting a storage server for friends and family.
VDSL I have 22 megabit down / 2 megabit upload
I'll never switch to cable, one reason is in my town there is no cable alternative. The only cable TV is analog cable offered by city hall billed on utility bill, or satellite TV.
I chose neither my VDSL plus landline is $55/month. I dont own a cellphone as none of them will let me get one as I ruined credit when I was 18. I'm 37 and it strangely still follows me, sprint wanted $1500 deposit/ we dont have any AT&T towers nearby and verizon wanted $600 deposit.
But my town offers free 3 megabit wifi on 5 old cell towers so I use my nexus 7 and Skype for mobile calls, landline for all else.
I love VDSL and even if a cable provider came in town I'd still refuse to switch, as on VDSL I got 5 static IPS for 5/month and I've ran my own servers and connected my old ham radio repeater auto patch to my home phone to use as my own personal VoIP to landline service :-)
This is where I'd like too see the defacto monopoly of cable companies broken by making them common carriers. Basically, do what the gov' did to telecos creating the iLEC and cLEC system. This way other carriers can buy fiber and get on the wire.
for many cities, the cable lines are actually owned by the municipality and managed by the cable company, so this would be a somewhat simple transition. DOCSIS already has the ability to allow this explicitly in the standard.
Not much worth watching on TV these days anyway. Hasn't been much for a while.
Between Redbox, NetFlix and Hulu I have enough entertainment on demand and don't waste my time watching crap by 'channel surfing'.
False equivalence detracts from whatever point you are trying to make. Hulu absolutely has far fewer ads than regular network TV. They're not gone, but they are a tiny fraction as long or frequent.
I'd go for Hulu Plus if I was so far out that I couldn't possibly get TV over an antenna, yet had internet access, but otherwise an occasional show here and there is all I want, and isn't worth the fee. But more than that, I'm still angry they stopped developing HuluDesktop, and recently went out of their way to break it...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You don't need to be an AV geek to see why Comcast's complaints about Netflix et. all burdening their lines is utter bull.
What I find the most interesting about government corruption is just how cheap these bastards are! $89K??? Really? This is the 21st century. You aren't even gonna get a phone call from me until you give my secretary $89K! Comcast alone has a market cap of 139.5 BILLION so unless I start hearing offers ending in million, you can just go the fuck home :D Congress really is full of cheap ass whores. You can't even buy a decent Maserati for $89K.
I am certain he was referring to CxO salaries- not the installers/techs/admins. Everyone knows the blue collar guys wages have been flat for quite awhile but every quarter from most every segment of industry we hear about all of the cash those big boys rake in while they cut quality, service, or quantity. Golden parachutes and all that. Otherwise, I like your post!
You know which internet fad has NEVER went away? Pirating. Before the internet we swapped disks with the bandwidth of a station wagon doing 100mph down the freeway and when the internet really took off we got Napster. The Man may have smacked it down, but it popped right back up with a different name so many times now. Right now the big name is Bittorrent. That'll eventually change but it will never go away. The illegality of it is based on the same flawed logic that makes consuming weeds grown in your back yard illegal. Namely the fact that the guys at the top can't make money off of it. Correction: the guys at the top can't make the amount of money they want. For some reason, just making a profit isn't good enough. You have to make stupidly high profits. There's never enough money even when there is!
I don't think he meant scam. When I hear people hatin on blueray, it's usually because they sided with HD-DVD back during the Format Wars and lost. Bitter it makes them, yes. We've seen the same thing with Betamax vs VHS and even now after all these years, I wouldn't be surprised if I get at least one post from someone crooning about how superior Betamax was. Obviously neither were superior- they both ceased to exist. Also someone who just can't see the quality difference between a 480 DVD & a 1080 BR is just being blind out of stubbornness.
The term is SHEEPLE and just like the idea you espouse regarding said sheeple being zombies, when I see a poster use the term sheeple as an insult (is there another use?) I instantly know you're a conspiracy theory loon.
This is the part of the post where we should discuss the color of pots and kettles, about the strength of glass versus thrown stones, and looking to one's own before worrying about others. OR you could simply admit that we are all humans who make mistakes, that autocorrect is a total bitch that needs to DIAF, and that the usage of words adapts to the culture of the times (see 'begs the question'). I am not immune to this and probably have a mistake or two myself- someone will surely point out the incorrect usage of OR as the first word of the sentence.
Thanks for seeding my torrents bro!
Why the excuses? We claim to be the biggest bestest greatest country EVAR and yet when stuff like this pops up, the excuses about being too big, too spread out, or whatever just start flying! The answer is simply economic greed. How many times have you been told that your neighborhood won't be getting broadband because you aren't profitable? Cable companies have done this to me countless times because I always move to the country. Since Europe doesn't seem to gorge itself from the trough of capitalism, it is my understanding that no area is left un-serviced (well maybe the top of the Alps). There are all kinds of areas where the same excuses are used. Mass transit trains for example. Haven't you heard statistics about how we could power the entire US from solar panels covering something like a quarter of New Mexico? Then why the hell haven't we done so? The answer is: UNPROFITABLE for certain people. I say we put up or shut up about being the Greatest Nation the World has Seen(tm) (it was probably Rome anyway) and just fucking do it. Lay nationwide fiber. It is something that needs to be done just like the Interstate system. They probably shouted that down too back in the day. Doesn't change the fact that it helped spur along a massive increase in commerce all across the country. We couldn't live without it today. The Internet also spurred massive revolution as you know since you're using it right now! If we expanded that to more areas, just like we did with the telephone, that is that many more ad impressions, amazon clicks, or whatever metric of the day the moneymakers want to see. It would be a win-win for all I say. DO EEET!
LOL I must have been really tired when I wrote that. Actually the type of Grammar mistakes I was talking about are the "they need to do way instain mother" types. In the car forums the "bad breaks" posts always make me cringe but at least I can understand what they are trying to say.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
I actually haven't had hd-dvd, and i can see fine the difference side by side.
But compared to the huge convenience step from vhs to dvd and the quality increase, especially over time, blueray was unimpressive.
Dvd quality is good enough for just watching a movie, it doesn't detract really from the movie, unlike vhs's lines, speckles and broken tape.
The scam was that we traded in a ok system with a broken one, terrible copyprotection and other mess.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Yeah, I had no idea what you said in the quoted part :)
:D
And the breaks! Egads the breaks! Our education system has failed us all!
I guess I don't worry about those DRM schemes any more because I don't value movies, TV, or music like I once did. I guess it's a side effect of me aging and the MAFIAA constantly waging battle against us. Unlike their intended goal of forcing their BS down my throat they simply lost me as a customer. There is also the problem of everything is crap but that could be me aging again. I am pushing 40 after all.