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Broadband Subscribers Eclipsing Cable TV Subscribers
An anonymous reader writes: High-speed internet has become an everyday tool for most people, and cord-cutters have dramatically slowed the growth of cable TV, so this had to happen eventually: broadband internet subscribers now outnumber cable TV subscribers among the top cable providers in the U.S. According to a new report, these providers account for 49,915,000 broadband subscribers, edging out the number of cable subscribers by about 5,000. As Re/code's Peter Kafka notes, this means that for better or worse, the cable guys are now the internet guys. Kafka says their future is "selling you access to data pipes, and pay TV will be one of the things you use those pipes for."
It doesn't matter which channel you watch, all cable content is total crap these days. You have basically four choices: "sports" involving obscenely overpaid multimillionaires, ultra-liberal "documentaries", "reality" freakshows, and manic "newscasts".
At least the Internet provides content that has some value. The recent nonsense in St. Louis is a great example of this. Cable news channels have gone out of their way to make the rioters appear to be "victims", to portray the guy who got shot as some sort of an "angel", and to refuse to acknowledge that the guy who got shot had just robbed a convenience store, assaulting somebody in the process, and most likely attacked a police officer.
The Internet coverage of this incident has been far better. It doesn't just give one side of the story, but instead provides as much information as possible. Intelligent, and even unintelligent, people know that they're better off getting the full picture from the Internet than they are watching cable news and getting a sanitized version of the events.
So of course cable viewership will drop off, as people get tired of the crap that's on there, and move to the Internet where the content is better.
Unless you live in a city, in a major market, the odds of there being any competition are almost nil.
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That's why the governments should split those companies in two: ISP and TV/media providers. Otherwise, their TV/media half will just try to choke its own ISP half. With dinosaurs at the head of the cable companies, we already see it happening every day. They still firmly believe that "Internet" is just "interactive digital cable".
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Most shows are available online via Netflix, prime, on demand, etc... Cable companies are behind the tech on purpose... To make money and screw people lol.. It's just a matter of time before they are forced to update. ..
The internet has long since made cable and over-the-air broadcasts redundant avenues of data transmission, as the cord cutters know.
Can we please kill cable and it's dumb "channels" yet? Can we do away with traditional radio stations and their paid-for playlists?
I'm for keeping important over-the-air broadcasting such as weather and news via both TV and radio transmissions in case of emergencies, but regular tv and radio just aren't needed anymore. With the internet, you can search and pick exactly what you want, when you want it.
Do we want to listen to a morning/talk show, my favorite music, an audiobook, a 'podcast' or some other audio form of entertainment on my drive to or from work? Let US choose.
Do we want to watch a traditional tv show, a movie, a user uploaded video, a video-webcast, or some other form of visual entertainment media at home or wherever we have a TV or computer in front of us? Let US choose.
We the people no longer want or need your schedules or playlists. We can make our own.
Damn the cable and traditional radio/tv systems for continuing to try and hold back progress by refusing to upgrade speeds, trying to maintain too much control, and screwing with our laws to favor their outdated practices. It's coming anyway, but it could've been here a whole lot sooner if it wasn't for these clowns.
That's all we're basing this declaration on? That feels like it would fall within the margin of error for one of these reports.
We've been saying this here since at least 2001 and they've been fighting it tooth and nail every step of the way. We're still right, because it's obvious if you understand the progress of technology.
Internet service is far cheaper to provide than television.
Wholesale cost of 1TB of network data is under $4 and if historical trends continue will be below $3 by 2015 if not sooner. The math is a little fuzzy because its priced in bits per second, not increments of bytes, but close enough for slashdot. And, of course, there are fixed costs like infrastructure and manpower. But television service also has significant fixed costs.
Most shows are available online via Netflix, prime, on demand, etc...
Not until years later, after which they're already irrelevant for water cooler socialization. Besides, good luck getting sports this way with the maze of blackout policies that the leagues impose.
Fixed costs are a huge part of it. Internet service requires installation of wires, permission to install which costs the provider a lot of money. It also has the cost of physical wire maintenance, which involves support calls and may involve truck rolls for certain kinds of problem. These costs don't scale per megabit per second, unless you refer only to the ISPs' rationale for caps.
regular tv and radio just aren't needed anymore.
Regular radio and OTA TV can be received without a recurring fee beyond the electric bill, unlike Internet. Listening to FM or AM radio in the car doesn't incur a bill payable to a cellular provider.
Cable TV shows are already sent over the cable, so the marginal cost of providing you with cable TV is precisely zero.
I thought cable companies had to pay "retransmission consent" (that is, royalties) per subscriber to the networks.
The leagues' online services tend to impose a 48 hour delay if a game was shown OTA, on national cable, or on regional cable in your area. For non-sports programming on the network's web site or Hulu, this delay can be 8 days. Even this much delay renders a game irrelevant for the socialization that forms a part of office politics.
Couldn't happen to a nice industry. From their overpriced content to their monopolistic channel bundling requirements imposed on cable providers, the sooner the media companies die the better for all of us. And then maybe our cable bills will stop going up at 4x the rate of inflation.
Cable television has to compete with OTA and satellite television. Cable Internet doesn't have to try as hard because cellular and satellite Internet have longer pings, slower throughput over a second, and far slower throughput over a month (often 5 to 10 GB/mo) that makes them useless for over-the-top VOD services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, and YouTube. Cell and sat ISPs are considered last resorts for areas not served by any wired ISP.
Many U.S. radio markets carry only conservative political talk shows on free radio, and people are willing to pay beaucoup bucks for a progressive counterpoint. And I wish you wouldn't use profanity in every single one of your replies to me.
If it were not for the fact that my wife is a sports nut, I would have cut the cable long ago. As time goes on, the quality of the programming slides further and further downhill. Undoubtedly driven by the need to create cheaper and cheaper content.
Sports kind of ticks me off. Virtually everyone with cable has to pay for some of it, and yet if you *never* watch sports you still subsidize those who do want to watch it. My feeling is that sports is in a sort of bubble - costs have just risen too far, and eventually there will be a day of reckoning when those leeches will no longer be able to con the populace into continuing to support it.
It will not be too much longer until programs such as "Ow! My Balls" would be the most popular programs on television.
It will not be too much longer until programs such as "Ow! My Balls" would be the most popular programs on television.
Given shows like America's Funniest Home Videos and Ridiculousness, I'd say that ship has long since sailed.
The broadband monopoly arises from exclusive rights to land, as the physical layer of the network has to cross non-subscribers' land to reach subscribers, and exclusive rights to radio frequency spectrum, which are put in place to keep a subscriber's signal from being drowned out by non-subscribers' nuisance signals. TV networks' monopolies arise from copyright, which a country can't just up and abolish without incurring severe trade sanctions from other WTO members. How would you recommend to get "the monopolies [...] out of the way of progress"?
The difference is that proponents of traditional mutichannel pay television can no longer assume the conventional wisdom that TV subscribers greatly outnumber Internet subscribers. So the news is that they're tied.
Here's to hoping that IP TV will finally takeoff and we can just choose the channels we want. I only watch 10 or 15 channels out of the 500+ that I'm forced to pay for.
Not all channels are owned by NBCU, and even after the proposed merger with TWC, not all cable TV systems are operated by Comcast. So Comcast still has to pay retransmission royalties to other networks. Besides, cable channels themselves have expenses, and NBCU has to pay some of those out of retransmission revenue from other cable TV systems as well as what it would have received from Comcast. So on paper, Comcast probably pays NBCU the market rate for retransmission to make the books balance.
We're being hurt by the profit over anything else business model . Yeah, I have huge bills for TV and net, a land line and two cells. I used to have a antenna on my house to receive free TV and my RV has one so I can get local news and weather while on the road. Net access is not a luxury but a necessity. As a bonus, my electric company has the highest or nearly highest electricity rates in the US of A.
NOT. Not since 2007 have we paid for TV or watched TV.
How is it all you computer experts can get plenty of free porn but pay for sports?
TNT and others still have good non sports shows
basic TV used to clear QAM on just about all systems and so the basic TV fee was kind of part of Internet on it's own. But when you buy tv it's lower as part of the promo price
Different protocol.
Comcast is the new Ford circa 1930, you can have any color Model T as long as its black.
I cut my "regular" cable TV more than 10 years ago. Thanks for getting with the times, n00bs!
Unfortunately as the Internet becomes more popular my bill keeps getting higher. I used to pay $30/mo for 30 mbps 15 years ago. Now I pay $60/mo for 15 mbps. What the fuck is wrong with this picture?!?!? Everybody is ripping me off.
That they can do more than TV: Phone, Internet, etc. Imagine if they couldn't. They would be dead!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Congratulations, Leichtman Research Group you have figured out something that has simply been common knowledge among everyone else since 2005.
I pay $150/mo for cable for one reason only, live streamed sports. For everything else, even if it's on cable, I have my system set up to download high quality encodings to my DVR automatically the moment they become available. Movies, everything coming up that I want gets put in the system and the moment a high quality release becomes available, automatically downloaded to Plex which turns my collection into a meta data filled netflix. The system even meshes high ratings on IMDB and rotten tomatoes with things I've liked in the past and makes suggestions or automatically downloads new movies for me. Music as well, I get suggestions based on my library and new albums from artists in my collection appear automatically generally in lossless FLAC.
Imagine a world where the sports networks, tv networks, mpaa, book publishers, and the riaa banded together to provide a single legal content source where you could get all content in multiple formats and the middle men are all cut out. Live events and movies are unchanged by this and remain the primary money makers. You pick which forms of content you want and maybe pay as much as $50/mo per content type. But at that price point you have unlimited access to all content from that source in a DRM free and metadata rich form that couples nicely with a personal multimedia system at the quality you like be that a lower quality yiffy type rip or full 4k or 1080p blu-ray quality encode. At lower price points maybe there is a cap based on data like 250GB/mo for $25. The distribution of that money and royalties would be determined based on what you actually downloaded. Someone who watches 30 movies a month on their unlimited hollywood package might contribute a smaller royalty to their 3D LOTR download than someone with the same package who watches 10. You could even use my user ratings to weight those royalties. Sort of like how a new deck hand might get a quarter or half share on a fishing boat while most crew members get a full share and someone really good might get a double share.
... it's noise.
More accurate to say, 'the number of people with broadband subscribers now approximately equals ....'
Very sadly, I know that I will shortly hear someone in the workplace trumpetinng the /. title.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.