Slashdot Mirror
Cable Companies Hate Cord-Cutting, but It's Not Going Away (Video)
On May 29, Steven J. Vaughan Nichols (known far and wide as SJVN) wrote an article for ZDNet headlined, Now more than ever, the Internet belongs to cord-cutters. A few days before that, he wrote another one headlined, Mary Meeker's Internet report: User growth slowing, but disruption full speed ahead. And last December he wrote one titled, Reports show it's becoming a cord cutter's world. SJVN obviously sees a trend here. So do a lot of other people, including cable TV and local TV executives who are biting their nails and asking themselves, "Whatever shall we do?" So far, says SJVN, the answers they've come up with are not encouraging.
NOTE from Roblimo: We're trying something different with this video, namely keeping it down to about 4 minutes but running a text transcript that covers our 20+ minute conversation with SJVN. Is this is a good idea? Please let us know.
NOTE from Roblimo: We're trying something different with this video, namely keeping it down to about 4 minutes but running a text transcript that covers our 20+ minute conversation with SJVN. Is this is a good idea? Please let us know.
Give me the transcript or just audio. The videos are mainly 2 people with headphones on talking to each other via the computer. And the person asking the questions seems like they are reading the questions for the first time.
Cables companies will primarily become internet providers and satellite companies will provide programming to the peeps in the boonies.
Personally, I say "freaking awesome". Both industries treated their customers like crap for decades. Reap what you've sown you jackasses.
but running a text transcript that covers our 20+ minute conversation with SJVN. Is this is a good idea? Please let us know.
YES, thank you!
I can read all the transcripts I want at work, but unless the video starts with the Microsoft theme song and immediately proceeds to Mark Russanovich telling me how to make Windows its bitch, I'll pretty much never look at anything requiring sound.
Cable companies originally offered a larger seclection of channels which wre commercial free. I cut cable when they drove me nuts with time/life commercials and raised the reate from 12.95/mo. Haven't subscribed since. Netflix is eating their lunch for programming.
The truth shall set you free!
They thought cable guaranteed them an income without them having to provide any additional value, or even any value.
They are slowly - very slowly - beginning to get a dim idea that that might no longer be the case.
I do not feel sorry for them. I will continue to boycott them no matter how much they may pretend to change.
I used to pay Comcast $39.95 a month for Internet and TV service bundled for basic TV, which I barely used. So, I dropped the TV service which saved me all of $5.00. When I moved to New Jersey, Optimum Online now charges me $54.95 a month for Internet only. Thinks $119.95 for "Triple Play" is a bargain (I already get a year of Skype for $60 which works out to $5.00 a month), and I could get Netflix or Amazon Plus for much less for the differential between $59.95 and $119.95. If they don't want people to cut the cords. LOWER PRICES! This is marketing 101. It's obvious that people are cutting the cord because we can get a lot of the same content cheaper over the air with an antenna, over the internet, or by some other method without paying such high prices. Cable companies have to make money by VOLUME, not by trying to squeeze every penny from a dwindling number of subscribers. You charge LESS to MORE users, not MORE to LES and LESS users. What business school did these geniuses go to? They used to offer me triple play at $89.95 a month. You mean to tell me rhat yers later, with more users to spread the costs out over, you need to charge $119.95 a month to keep doors open?
Video interviews are a pain in the keyster to watch. The more you can do to get rid of them, the better. Videos should only be used when you actually need to show the audience something visual. Watching a web cam pointed at someone's face for 20 minutes adds absolutely zero value whatsoever to the story. And cutting it down to 4 minutes doesn't necessarily add much value if I have to go and read the transcript anyway. If I have to read the transcript anyway, the video serves no purpose.
Trouble is, transcripts of interviews aren't much better anyway. Reading an interview is a painful process. It wastes too much time because I have to sift through a bunch of conversation to glean the useful information out of the transcript. And far too often the signal to noise ratio in an interview isn't very high. I much prefer articles where a journalist takes the useful information out of the interview and presents it in a clear and concise article about the topic.
So yeah, the more you can get rid of interviews on video, transcripts of conversation, etc. and replace them with well written articles, the better.
Of the latest buzzword bingo - what are 'cord cutters'?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Steven J. Vaughan Nichols (known far and wide as SJVN)
who the eff is SJVN? I dispute the assertion that he is known far and wide.
Been without TV for more than a decade now and have zero regrets. More time to waste on things that are actually fun. TV has gotten so bad, the only thing it does for me is getting my blood-pressure up on the rare occasions I am exposed to it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hey cable companies. Try selling your customers something they want instead of force-bundled 50+ a month packages designed to squeeze you if you want more than a full line-up of religious programming and HSN.
uh, are you expecting a cable company to read this? Lots of people have your exact same complaints. But then They who make decisions are from another planet.
mfwright@batnet.com
For me, "cord cutter" still means people who drop all PSTN phone service and just use cell phones as their only number.
..and you can lose the video altogether for all I care.
I'm unlikely to watch any internet video while browsing/surfing, especially "news".
I'm in Canada and I've been moving away from cable. I've managed to get the wife down to basic cable. We still have Internet from our cable provider though.
Here's the thing though. The price of our internet has gone up. Even with Netflix, our Internet usage is barely 100 GB / month.
It's almost like they want their $130-$150 a month for cable/internet/phone. It almost doesn't matter if you from one, they'll just jack up the rates of the other eventually.
Such is the power of monopoly.
As the title says, they suck. Hate seeing this recent change at slashdot, the only change on any website that I frequent where I've actually taken the time to email the admin for feedback about anything. Love this site, but hate the videos. Give us a filter, where those of us who hate seeing that crap on the front page can weed it out by default.
Chances are, your cable company and your ISP are one and the same. I have Earthlink through Brighthouse and they just raised the bill by $2 last month. It's now up to $45.95/mo, for 15Mbps down/1Mbps up. It seems the more people cut cords, the more the cable companies will push back by raising prices on "Internet only" service. I'd be thrilled to tell them where to stick it and switch to a less expensive competitor, except there isn't one. AT&T is the only other local broadband provider (very slow DSL) and their limited-time promotional rate only applies if you're signing up for bundled services.
It's foolish to think cable companies are just going to roll over and get used to lower profits. I'll bet a couple years from now, we'll all be paying about $90-$120 just for broadband and then paying Netflix/Amazon/Apple for TV service. We'll reminiscence about the good ol' days when that amount of money used to buy broadband access and cable TV service!
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
People talk about cutting the cord cause cable it pricey. But then they turn around and get Netflix, Hulu, Amazon prime and maybe some others. Each of those have a monthly cost. When you start to add all of those together + your ISP it comes out to about the same amount you were paying for cable.
Duh - OB/GYNs, obviously.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
More and more cable companies are either requiring you to buy some sort of "basic cable" TV service or they are pricing things such that "internet + basic cable" is cheaper than just internet service.
They are doing this so that they can artificially inflate the numbers of cable subscribers they have.
Cut cords all you want. As soon as it starts effecting their bottom line they'll just raise the isp rates to compensate. I can't believe this isn't more obvious to people.
No, DICE. I will not watch your videos. I don't care how long (or short) they are.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Sports needs to be in it's own HBO like package.
Maybe even Disney channel as well it's cost is about X2 the price of nickelodeon.
As for sports in most EU sat / cable systems / Foxtel / sky (NZ) sports is it's own add on pack.
canadian systems have pick and pay tv soon (and some older plans have theme packs where you don't have to take sports I think you can still have them if you keep them on bell sat tv)
canadian systems also let you buy the box / rent to own without the $8-$10 outlet / mirroring fees that we have in the USA.
Cable card flopped hear and systems still hit you with $6-8 outlet fees + cable card rent fees on them as well. BHN even used to bill you to rent the SDV tuner.
The problem is that sports are what most of the people who opt for something other than basic channels want. ESPN knows this and charges a fortune. The high prices aren't all the fault of the cable companies. ESPN has been what's kept even more people from cutting the cord.
we (customers) have been asking to eliminate bundling for years
i hate that we are starting out on a bad foot with sling tv bundling channels...i wish they had at least attempted real a la carte pricing before going to this ship
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Triple Play = How to charge people $49.95 a month for low volume "VOICE" service, padding the profit margins. We cut everything but INTERNET. Comcast will be internet only here shortly, or it will die trying to stay the same as it is now.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
another brilliant idea from the editors of Dice/Slashdot
Look, if you're going to do an interview, please try to stay on topic. You don't need to veer off into a discussion about some local wing restaurant, or some long extended rant about your local ISP choices, and how you decided to pick one versus the other.
Nobody watches, listens to, or (in my case) reads an interview to see what the interviewer has to say about random topics. They watch/listen/read the interview to see what the interviewee has to say about the topic on hand.
Maybe I read too much into the transcript, but it seemed too much of the time SJVN was just saying "Yeah", "Right", or "Got it" -- when what he really meant was "Can we get back to the part of the interview process where you ask me questions on the subject at hand"?
That interview transcript is five minutes of my life I'll never get back.
Yaz
Robert Murray Wilson, talking about transparent superconductors he's developed.
Chris, from ClickSpring, talking about building a clock.
Myfordboy showing how to cast aluminum at home.
Kevin Karsch et. al. rendering synthetic objects into legacy photographs
It's no great effort to find interesting and informative videos on the net. If you have the time to tape someone talking, you have the time to seek out things that nerds might want to see.
Also, there's really no feedback from the slashdot submission process. If a video doesn't meet your requirements, it's impossible to tell *why* they don't meet them, so that submitters could modify their selection process.
But this is beside the point. I'm not suggesting that you show other peoples' videos, I'm suggesting that *you* use the medium properly when making your own videos.
These same points were made back when Slashdot started video'ing people, to no great effect. Vinegar is needed to catch your attention. You have the perfect opportunity to use "directed practice based on feedback" which would turn you into a world-class videographer in a couple of years.
viz: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
Seriously. You have access to high-end feedback you could leverage to improve your technique. You should use it.
The channel that cut out to show the same bloody basketball highlights repeatedly and make me miss an important play during an NHL game?
Yep. I had just an antenna and was happy with it. And then I started following a local sports team. And for that reason alone I got cable TV. I would give it up tomorrow if I could just buy the games I wanted to watch a la carte. You can usually buy a special sports package for out of market games and then use a VPN to convince the servers you really are out of market, but I don't want to have to fool with that. Can't you just let me buy the games? Please????
That is really the last reason to have cable TV -- live sports.
Yes I and only I have had a revelation on how cable companies can gain audience shares. In a flash of inspiration it all came to me. Better programs and lower prices ! Wow they should pay me a fortune for diagnosing their problems.
Try showrss.info A fantastic resource combined with Vuse torrent client and a Plex server an awesome combination. I get the latest episodes automatically downloaded and Plex decodes and pulls down the metadata and puts in a format that is just like Netflix and all I have to do is select what i want to watch.
Don't want them, don't watch them.
-- Fuck Beta
You charge LESS to MORE users, not MORE to LES and LESS users.
That's true if most of your costs are fixed infrastructure costs. But the big TV networks charge a royalty per user.
Frankly I don't give a shit about your videos. I watched one once and it was amateurish and painful.
The transcript, that's what I want, and now you've provided it. Make the video as long or as short as you want, just keep the transcript.
Graham
We did it last year and honestly, the toughest part was making the decision to do it. We're using Hulu and NetFlix mainly.
my 86 YO father decides he doesn't need the cable company for anything but internet access.
Just this week my father told me he wants to put antennas on two TVs, switch to prepaid cell phone only, and shut off the TV and phone service he gets from the cable company.
I live less than 25 miles away from a large city's towers, and I get maybe 5 channels out of a total of 40. And that's WITH a powered antenna. Local channels availability is probably the last thing keeping us on a Concast Triple Pay. I'm sorry, what I meant to say was Concast Triple Pay.
Dropping the bundle boosts the internet-only portion a good bit but it would still be cheaper. Even with $18 / month for Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
The weird thing about that is that Disney would need to be in your Sports package. As will your local ABC affiliate. Disney is evil and they require ESPN and Disney channel just to air the local ABC affiliate.
Nice improvement adding the transcript, please to keep.
I'm going to be a total asshole and say that this entire interview could have been put into a transcript format and done away with the video. I do not want to watch two doddering geezers make puntastic quips while one drones on through his dentures and the other is nasaling his way through the topic with the occasional grainy video.