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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."
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. ..
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.
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.
That depends entirely on which websites you visit.
Sure, but at least you get a chance to see what happened instead of having someone else unilaterally say "Open wide, here comes the news airplane!". Some is worse, but there's the possibility that some will be better.
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.
Why was the parent comment modded down? It looks fine to me. It sure isn't a goatse troll or something like that. It's on-topic, and makes some pretty good points. It gives a plausible explanation for why cable subscriptions are down and Internet usage is up. It's one of the better comments that have been posted so far. When I see really good comments like that modded down without justification, it makes me think that I'm at Reddit or Hacker News or Stack Overflow or some other intolerant discussion site like those are. I can understand them modding legit comments down because those sites are thoroughly infested with Millenials/Hipsters who love to engage in censorship. But Slashdot was generally better than that. People posting good comments like the parent one would get modded up instead of being punished for daring to post something relevant to the submission's topic like seems to be happening today!
And this is what's wrong with our countries today. People all over the world fight and die for the right to hear and see news other than the officially approved ones, but we can't be assed to spend 10 minutes of our time to actually execute that right.
Maybe we'll only start to miss it once it's gone.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
They like paying 100+ dollars a month for it?
That is why people are ditching cable. Cost.
I moved into this house 10 years ago. The cost for internet AND cable was 40. To get the same service now is 120. Exact same service. Was inflation 300% in that time? Dont think so. To get the digital stuff plus the rented remotes and receivers you are pushing 160.
The cost ratio is out of wack for what it is . People realize they can rent crap from redbox for 1-2 bucks. Or get it from netflix for 10-15 a month less if you go with or the other service. The alternatives are wildly cheaper for the exact same service. The other services even have better service with low or no commercials.
Mark my words. Companies like comcast and tw and and att and verizon are just trying to figure out how to get their own streaming services going. That is where net caps come into play.
I have sat in meetings at one of the above companies where they talk 'our service will not cost against the caps'. WORD FOR WORD. Caps have 0 to do with network maintenance and everything to do with putting people back into the buy the content from them box. They do not get it. The alternatives are *cheaper* and have no commercials. I ask these questions to these execs and they *do* *not* *get* *it*. They are wildly out of touch with their customers. Their customers can not afford 200+ a month for service. They can because they make 250k a year plus bonuses. They are thinking 'let them eat cake'.
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.
What kind of sports do you get with Netflix and Redbox?
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.
All news sources are biased, but the online world offers a much higher diversity of bias.
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.
Can we please kill cable and it's dumb "channels" yet? Can we do away with traditional radio stations and their paid-for playlists?
Simple answer : NO.
Longer answer: Not everyone wants to burn mobile data time just to listen to local radio stations while they are out and about. Besides mobile data issues, soon home bandwidth caps will shrink down to ludicrous levels, unless you are consuming the ( extra charge ) content from your provider.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
None. And I like it that way.
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
But then you had 50 crap channels you never watched along with the 5 that you did. Now there are 240 crap channels to go along with the 5 that you watch. Oh wait TLC is all reality shows and Discovery is pseudoscience crap so there are only 3 channels you watch now. But hey you have over 240 channels with nothing on now.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Different protocol.
Comcast is the new Ford circa 1930, you can have any color Model T as long as its black.
That depends entirely on which websites you visit.
Fox News! I know Rupert would never lie to me...
unless someone offered him, you know, money,
or he had another vested interest...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Corporation
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
None. I watch sports sporadically. Maybe a dozen NFL games, and once in awhile a special event like the Olympics or World Cup. However, I'm old enough to remember when that content was paid for purely by advertising. Now it still has advertising, so for me, the perceived value of being able to see these sports programs is pretty low. Certainly much much less per month than I pay for Netflix.
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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.