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Cable TV Prices Rising At Four Times the Inflation Rate
An anonymous reader writes "A new FCC report (PDF) has found that U.S. cable TV prices are rising at four times the rate of inflation over the past two decades. 'Basic cable service prices increased by 6.5 percent [to $22.63] for the 12 months ending January 1, 2013. Expanded basic cable prices increased by 5.1 percent [to $64.41] for those 12 months, and at a compound average annual rate of 6.1 percent over the 18-year period from 1995-2013. ... These price increases compare to a 1.6 percent increase in general inflation as measured by the CPI (All Items) for the same one-year period.' Equipment prices rose faster than inflation, too. The report also found that the price increases weren't helped by competition — in fact, the prices rose faster where there were competing providers than in areas where the main provider had no effective competition."
The quantity of programming has increased with the prices
......yet the quality of programming decreases......
so (quality/quantity) * price is constant?
Has there been a corresponding increase in service? By that I mean the number of channels delivered for the given tier, since cable companies usually pay the broadcaster a certain rate per channel.
(I don't subscribe to cable, so I don't know how things have changed over the decade since I've left home.)
I want to know how come my telephone line has gone from $7/month in 1997 to $32/month today, with no change in service.
There will be 5,000 channels and absolutely nothing to watch.
Outside of the baby boomers generation most individuals in my age bracket (28 here) gave up on cable/satellite television due to hyper-aggressive advertising policies, price gouging, and providing little to no value over services that frankly the internet does a better job of. It is simply undesirable to watch/use in favor of essentially anything else.
The truth is there are a lot of cable cutters. The basic subscription is only to get a break on Internet. DSL and basic phone service is the same thing. My home phone has no long distance plan at all. It is redundant and expensive compaired to my Cell or VOIP which include all of US and Canada as a local call.
WIth Netflix, Hulu, etc, unless you want the sports package, why would you even have cable at all, other than to get a break on the Internet package.
Intenet without basic TV is often higher in price or not offered at all, so the basic TV added is close to zero additional cost.
I've cut Cable TV long ago. I'm not an armchair quarterback.
When working nights, and infomercials plug up the daytime TV, there is little to watch, except on Netflix. TV seasons, science, etc shows can be watched at your convience commercial free. Cable companies hate that. To keep profits up, with cord cutting, they soak the sports junkies that need real time program delivery.
The truth shall set you free!
The rate is meaningless because since 1995, cable companies had to upgrade their system from analog-only to digital, and then also be able to support HD, develop and implement cable-card, develop and implement voip, develop and implement on-demand services, mobile apps, etc.
All of those things don't have an industry set price, so they pass the price onto you, the customer.
Said it before, I'll say it again. The worst thing the cable company ever did was refuse to give me free TV with my internet. Been well over five years now and I am more productive and lively. Sure, there are some shows I like. I can watch them online when I want to see them. I don't need TV for anything. Let them raise rates until they fail. We don't need them.
No they don't. They're just somewhat efficient collective resource allocation systems.
Exponential growth appears to be a requirement because populations grow exponentially.
If an economy can't keep up with the exponential growth of population, then there is less produced per person.
Not just that, but 40 years ago, basic cable wasn't much more than a community antenna offering better reception of OTA channels. No CNN or MTV or HBO (well, they're technically 42 years old, but had maybe 10,000 subscribers then).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I've been weaning myself off cable in stages. Six months ago I realized that I wasn't watching Starz enough to justify the $40/month charge, so I dropped it.
Now I'm coming to the realization that I watch Hulu+ and Amazon Prime as much if not more than cable, so now I'm on the verge of cutting my cord to Comcast and just steaming through my pokey old AT&T DSL line. It's not quite fast enough for a 1080p stream, but it looks acceptable to me at standard def on my 55" plasma. So there you go. Comcast has just priced themselves out of my life.
"90% of Everything is Crap".
This applies to everything, including cable TV.
The remaining 10%? Well, 90% of that is crap too.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Cable tv is loaded with useless channels that the consumer is forced to pay for. Channels that most consumers never watch and/or never heard of come with the package and contribute to the cost of monthly access. Cable providers will never allow the consumer to pick what channels they want so the only solution is to cut the cord and subscribe to services like Netflix and Hulu. The other(not so legal option) is to torrent your favorite shows.
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You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968.
It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?
plus any shows that you don't want to wait months, years, or never to see on Netflix, Hulu, et al.
One interesting side effect of my cheapness is that I've fallen so far behind on TV shows that they are all new to me when they hit Netflix. Because I don't see the commercials, I don't even know about current shows, let alone miss them. I hear about shows a little from co-workers and friends, but honestly TV just doesn't unite the culture like it once did - there are far too many choices for everyone to be watching the same show.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968.
It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?
Fox news, Sean Hanity, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, a million Facebook posts about evil socialists taking jobs and voting Tea Party is the way out etc. Fox news is number one rated and tens of millions listen to right wing radio. They really believe that 50% of Americans all are welfare queens who make $45,000 and get free iPhones which they call Obama phones. Members of government believe the hype too which is why they are so anti Obama.
http://saveie6.com/
The inflation rate as reported by the federal government is complete shit. It's likely closer to 10%
The equipment they're talking about is vastly different than the equipment in the previous year. How many people switched from SD to HD in that time? That was one of the peak years for HD adoption.
Internet speeds across the industry jumped drastically in 2012 due to DOCSIS 3 rollouts. I, personally, went from 15mb/s to 50mb/s over night with no cost increase to me at all.
In 2012 most cable companies introduced the new pay as you go plans which allowed you to pay a slightly higher rate in exchange for no contract.
An antenna is tuened for a frequency band. Nothing special about a "Digital" antenna. A good antenna that could reduce or eliminate ghosting from multipath will work just fantastic for "Digital" TV. I never upgraded to a digital antenna.
The truth shall set you free!
That article pretty much does say that the plans are very similar at their core, just that the heritage foundation plan had a bunch of other details to it that would have been much worse that the ACA. Basically, the ACA is bad, but it could have been worse. It could have been better, as well.
Or you can make sure your wife likes the same college sports as you... then have epic battles over the professional level...
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Stop watching TV. It's amazing how much more productive and well informed I am once I cut the cable....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Given the price fluctuations in commodities like precious metals and oil, you would see the cost of cable (indexed to one of these commodities) show similar wild fluctuations. Its cost would seem to increase rapidly in some years and decrease rapidly in others.
As an exercise, I looked up BLS price data on various basic food items and calculated the annual inflation rate from December 1995 to December 2013. This is the period in which the linked article claims the official rate was 2.4%. Here's what I got:
Bread, 2.837
Beef, 3.744
Chicken, 2.712
Eggs, 3.147
Milk, 1.848
Apples, 2.682
Bananas, 1.485
Tomatoes , 0.760
Orange Juice, 2.448
Coffee, 1.549
So if the official rate is a gross underestimate, what gives w/ these annual rates? Or do you just assert that the historical price data is fudged?
Yeah, but we're not talking about the future. We're talking about the period 1995-2013, in which you seem to be claiming the official inflation statistics are bunk. Don't change the topic. Either the official 2.4% stat is legit or it's not. If you're going to claim its not legit then you need to explain the relatively modest inflation rates for a relatively diverse assortment of basic food items.
1. We were working to send a man to the moon (300,000+ people involved) which was NOT just some guys in "bunny suits" prepping astronauts and rockets in clean rooms at the cape... there were facilities being designed and built and staffed in many states. (it takes far fewer to maintain and use the stuff in later years)
I don't think you understand what "government employee" means. The vast majority of those 300,000 people worked at private companies that were completing government contracts related to the space program.
2. We were doing major construction on the creation of the interstate highway system (passed by Eisenhower in 1956, activity was very high in the 60's) It takes lots more people to plan and build such a system than to maintain it later.
Again, it's not as if the government went out and bought a bunch of backhoes and bulldozers to do the construction itself. Those highways were built by people working at private construction firms, not government employees.
3. We were fighting in Vietnam and at a very high Cold War strategic military posture with lots of HUGE highly-staffed bases all over the world; The US military used to do all its own work for things like base security, base food prep, grounds keeping, supply chain operation, troop transport, etc .... but now days many of these things are "outsourced" to civilian firms, and even the military itself is FAR smaller (the US navy, for example has fewer than HALF the ships it had under Reagan in the 80's and while THAT was higher than under Carter it was still historically lower than at many points).
You just proved the point of the Atlantic. You said that since the 1960s the military has vastly cut down the number of people it employs by outsourcing to private contractors and eliminating inefficiencies. Isn't this exactly what it means to have a small government?
4. Technology was SUPPOSED to reduce the workforce. Where Social Security checks required armies of federal workers to do the processing in the 1940's, it's now largely a computer task now with the payments often handled by automated "electronic funds transfers" (so the workers on-staff handle the human-interface functions and SHOULD be fewer than the number who used to work at SS). Given that much of what government does involves paper, records, and money, a big bloated government SHOULD require a fraction of the workers of decades ago, since all the work of computing numbers, moving and storing money, data, etc should be done my machines now.
This has happened. Today, Social Security Administration expenses as a percentage of the trust fund are less than one third what they are today. (source) But that doesn't fit into your pretty little narrative, does it?
Also, I'm sorry, but anyone who uses the Park Service as an example of big government is a fucking idiot. The Park Service gets .06% of the US federal budget. But wait, it adds up, doesn't it? What if we closed 500 agencies like the Park Service? We would cut government spending by 30%. Oh wait, no we wouldn't. Because the total of all non-defense, non-debt, non-healthcare, non-benefits spending adds up to 9% of the federal government. That's right, even if we shut down every "dispensable" agency -- from the FCC to the FAA, the DoE to the DoJ, the National Park Service to the Internal Revenue Service, the USDA, the USPS, the NIH, the NSF, the FDA, the FHA, NASA, the State Department, SCOTUS, POTUS -- we would only save 9% of the budget.
This is what all republicans conveniently ignore when they talk about big government. Big government isn't caused by all the agencies they love to complain about.
At least Obama was trying to chip away at the real problem with health care reform. No, it isn't
Hmm, let's look at gas prices (which are one of the basic indicators of US lifestyle and affect cost of most things)
http://www.randomuseless.info/...
Year 2000 - 1.4-1.6
Year 2014 - 3.80
Factor of 2.4-2.7
Beef prices
http://www.criticalissues.us/B...
Year 2000 - 285
Year 2014 - 480
Factor of 1.68
There were just two first things I have checked out of 'americal lifestyle' pseudo-basket. Then we have cable tv prices, as described in original post with factor of around 1.6.
CPI suggests difference of 1.34 between year 2000 and 2014. Shadow stats suggest around 2.26 as you say. Probably one of only importnat things which are following CPI data over this time period are apartment rental prices and this is just because of 2008 crash.
I will agree with you that shadowstats is reporting too high inflation index - they are not trying to provide real numbers, rather to show the difference in creative accounting after 1980. But do you really think that CPI is valid measurement of what is happening? Why almost every report is complaining that XYZ is raising faster than CPI?