You're Paying 40% More For TV Than You Were 5 Years Ago (businessinsider.com)

According to data from Leichtman Research's annual study, pay TV subscriptions keep going up and up. So much so that in the last five years, they have gone up by 40 percent. In 2011, subscribers were paying an average of $73.63 for cable or satellite, but now that average stands at roughly $103. From a BusinessInsider report: And it's not helping subscriber growth. "About 82% of households that use a TV currently subscribe to a pay-TV service," Bruce Leichtman said in a statement. "This is down from where it was five years ago, and similar to the penetration level eleven years ago." The pay-TV industry lost 800,000 last quarter subscribers last quarter, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. Putting that on a personal level, NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke recently said his own kids don't even pay for TV. Burke has five "millennial" children, ages 19 to 28, and exactly "none" subscribe to cable or satellite, he said at a conference last week.

Comments

Re: I am?

[HumanWiki]

If you steal food, you go to jail.

If you download media, nothing happens. Distributing is the crime. No one has ever gotten in trouble for downloading, it's that when you're torrenting you're uploading at the same time, which is the crime.

So no, they're not comparable.

Actually, that is incorrect. They are both considered crimes. People actually don't always go to jail for stealing food, so you're also wrong there. Some have had things happen for simply downloading.

Man, you're just full of wrong.

Re: I am?

[Jason Levine]

People think that downloading is legal because people don't get prosecuted for it. The truth of the matter is that downloading is hard to prosecute. The MPAA would need to either operate a honeypot or get access to a torrent server's log files to get a list of IP addresses. Then - for each one - they'd need to get a court to agree that the ISP needs to turn over the information. Finally, they would sue the individual. However, all of this effort would likely be for a single count of copyright infringement. ("He downloaded this ONE movie and that's it.") It's a waste of the MPAA's resources and even they know it.

Thus, they go after the uploaders. Not only do you get multiple counts of infringement for one individual ("he shared a thousand files") but removing the large uploaders leaves the downloaders with nothing to download. (In theory.)

The big trouble downloaders get into is when they don't realize that their software is uploading as well. They think that they're invisible when, in reality, they're telling everyone what they're up to.