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Subscribers Pay 61 Cents Per Hour of Cable, But Only 20 Cents Per Hour of Netflix (allflicks.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the this-or-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes from a math-heavy report via AllFlicks: The folks at AllFlicks decided to crunch some numbers to determine just how much more expensive cable is than Netflix. They answered the question: how much does Netflix cost per hour of content viewed, and how does that compare with cable's figures? AllFlicks reports: "We know from Netflix's own numbers that Netflix's more than 75 million users stream 125 million hours of content every day. So that's (roughly) 100 minutes per user, per day. Using the price of Netflix's most popular plan ($9.99) and a 30-day month, we can say that the average user is paying about 0.33 cents per minute of content, or 20 cents an hour. Not bad! But what about cable? Well, Nielsen tells us that the average American adult cable subscriber watches 2,260 minutes of TV per week (including timeshifted TV). That's equivalent to 5.38 hours per day, or 161.43 hours per 30-day month. Thanks to Leichtman Research, we know that the average American pays $99.10 per month for cable TV. That means that subscribers are paying a whopping 61.4 cents per hour to watch cable TV -- more than three times as much as users pay per hour of Netflix!"

4 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Netflix v. Cable? How about Netflix v. HBO by speedplane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seems like a false comparison. Netflix lacks news, sports and the vast amount of programming that is available on Cable ... it better be cheaper! A much more interesting comparison would be Netflix and HBO.

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    Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
  2. ..doesnt factor in connection cost. by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This also doesnt factor in connection cost. Thats 20 cents per hour for people that somehow have internet costs counted on a different ledger.

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    "His name was James Damore."
    1. Re:..doesnt factor in connection cost. by houghi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It also does not count for the time you are spending watching ads.

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      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    2. Re:..doesnt factor in connection cost. by Maxwell · · Score: 4, Insightful

      OP's point was that Neilson can tell when your TV is on, but they can't tell if you are actually watching it. The morning news on mute with no one in the room counts as 'watched'. With netflix, generally, you have to explicitly turn it on and pick a show so you are more likely to be actually watching the content. That might explain the huge averages - the average american watches 5.4 hours of TV every. single. day? more likely they have TV on somewhere, but not necessarily watching it