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Subscribers Pay 61 Cents Per Hour of Cable, But Only 20 Cents Per Hour of Netflix (allflicks.net)
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!"
Most Netflix content has been off the air for years. It's cheaper content. Other than their original shows, which is admittedly increasingly growing in size and value, generally cable offers more valuable access than Netflix does.
Netflix costs $3 per person for 4 people to view it, but that includes 5 profiles. So realistically it's rare all 5 people want to watch at the same time. So it's quite easy to pay less than that. Cable is usually at least $30 to $40 per month for a household. That's 10x as expensive for the cheapest plans available. Not to mention Netflix doesn't have commercials... You can't compare the average hours per user for cable and netflix. They aren't equal... At best you can compare the cost per person. The number of hours is highly variable, and not to mention it doesn't change the monthly cost anyways...
How much does Netflix cost again? $10 per month? It's so insignificant that I'm not even sure. I look over my credit card bill every month making sure all the charges look legit and I don't even usually notice Netflix.
It might not work for all customers, but I would still pay for Netflix if it was $25 a month. I would complain at that price, but I wouldn't cancel my service.
cable TV? Screw that. People complain about the paucity of things to watch on Netflix, but have you looked at your cable TV lineup? That's even worse and I used to pay close to $150 per month for that
it ALSO doesn't account for when people watch netflix, they're WATCHING NETFLIX -- actively logging-in, selecting a program, and starting its playback, and then sitting down to watch it.. netflix also is in a position to have very detailed statistics on viewing habits..
neither of these is true for 'regular' television...