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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...
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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This also doesnt factor in connection cost. Thats 20 cents per hour for people that somehow have internet costs counted on a different ledger.
"His name was James Damore."
For netflix you need a proper internet connection.
For cable, you don't (technically).
5.38 hours per day
I doubt this figure; this is an absurd amount of TV to watch on a daily basis on average.
If you have a job, this figure pretty much means you spend all your free time on TV.
Is this just number the cumulative amount of hours of all TV's in an average family household turned on, or is this actually time spent watching TV by an average individual?
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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
So many thing wrong with this that it is hard to know where to start. Looks to me that it was more of an ego trip on the part of the author than a valid study.
First of all, cable is obviously a screw job. There is no way that I can pretend that cable has any merits. But still ...
NetFlix content is generally older than cable content. While Netflix is creating some new shows, it is unlikely that many people are signing up for NetFlix for their "look, we made a little show" content.
People who are watching NetFlix have to be paying for Internet too. And many pay for a faster speed than they otherwise would to watch NetFlix. So Internet prices should be considered. Once that is done, since NetFlix is watched less, it might even end up costing more per hour, but "per hour" is just stupid.
Computing the cost per hour is pointless. Both are unmetered. People turn cable on even though they might not be paying attention to it, it becomes just something that's there and might occasionally be interesting. The same isn't quite as true for NetFlix since you have to actively select what you want to see. But realistically NetFlix is likely watched less simply because there is less to watch. If NetFlix had live shows such as news feeds then it might get watched more in a month making its meaningless "hourly cost" less, but it does not.
All that you can really say is that cable is more expensive than NetFlix, as long as you are not getting screwed too bad on Internet access.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And how much should internet service cost? I was paying $80 per month for 40 Mbps down but only ever getting 20 and often getting about 2. As it turned out, they were willing to lower my bill to about $35 per month and no doubt they're still making a profit. So where was that extra $45 going?
That my friend is about the closest thing to pure profit in the known universe. It costs them essentially the same amount to provide you 1Mbps access as it does 100Mbps access once the equipment is installed. Like text messaging for phone companies they are charging for something that otherwise would be an underutilized asset. Worse, in a lot of places there is just one option for customers so they have little incentive to compete on price or improve service. Where I live my options are Comcast or MUCH slower service from Frontier Communications or to cut the cord and go LTE though my cell phone. Kind of a Hobson's choice really.
It's kind of like seats on an airplane. People have different willingness to pay for what in reality are very minor differences and so they charge different amounts to maximize profit.