Slashdot Mirror
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.
Precisely! I stopped owning a TV since 2008, and haven't looked back ever since. I have 2 tablets, 2 laptops, 3 phones but no TV.
Maybe so, but that's only because I've voluntarily donated 40% more to my favorite private tracker.
sig: sauer
actually it looks like I may be paying a quintillionteen jillion percent more for TV than I was 5 years ago.
Since I haven't paid a television bill since 2004.
I most definitely am not! I do watch shows free on Amazon since I have Prime anyway and when I was in the US I also had Netflix which is under $10/month, while now in the UK where Netflix has less stuff I complement Amazon with the free catch-up service of BBC and ITV. Why would I pay the exorbitant amounts listed for TV, especially if we are talking about regular programming and not on-demand, even if I had no other choice, I'd probably just go without TV...
The only people I can understand having a reason to pay are sports fans. I do enjoy watching sports myself now and then, not enough to actually pay extra, but I guess others are willing to pay big bucks for that.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Electricity
Water
"Natural" gas
Sewer
Garbage
against TV
and what you get as net gain and how much abuse you have to take
is it really worth it?
I cut cable a long time ago. I pay 40 for Internet, and I pirate, so for 40 bucks a month I can watch whatever I want, and the good stuff I can hoard and watch forever.
That's great and all, but you can't talk about the benefits of pirating like it's a true cost savings. Many people could say things like, yeah I only spend 20.00 on groceries, and I steal, so for 20.00 a month I'm eating steak and lobster every night with high dollar wine.
It's still stealing, even if you don't agree with the costs.
Cable networks, partially out of necessity, sells in packages. These packages come because networks sell their channels in sets in order to maximize profits for their shareholders (more channels mean more advertising slots to sell). I would imagine that cable companies have a hard to negotiate against larger networks so those channel groups in packages represent an (almost) fixed overhead. As cable companies get few customers, they raise prices to keep their own margins up. Unfortunately (for them), this only accelerates the number of subscribers lost. In the meantime, streaming services, in spite of decreasing the breadth of their selection, are still providing more individual programs which is better satisfies the busyness in everyday life without requiring an extra fee for a DVR. If networks were able to sell individual channels to people rather than packages, I would assume that more subscriptions would occur. That said, cable companies might be better off ditching the idea of selling video services directly and spin off new companies from themselves that does video subscriptions separately leaving all of that bandwidth to compete with fiber.
So you have no ethical issues pirating content? Please no BS about sticking it to the media corporations--that is just rationalizing the fact you are just a cheap jerk with no morals.
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.
If you steal food, they no longer have the food. If you "steal" content, they still have the content. It took a lot of work to twist the English language around copying be "theft." It may still be a crime, and it may have some disproportionately stiff penalties, but it is not stealing.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So you have no ethical issues pirating content? Please no BS about sticking it to the media corporations--that is just rationalizing the fact you are just a cheap jerk with no morals.
Is it ethical to give your money to an organization that will do this sort of skullduggery with it?
I'm being serious.
It's theft if you download content and view it for free, sure, but you're not exactly morally in the clear if you do pay. Your money is lining the pockets of famously and spectacularly corrupt middle men, with only pennies on the dollar going to the artists you love.
The correct thing to do isn't as clear as you might suppose. Morally, it may be more correct to pirate their content then buy a t-shirt or something from them, because they'll see most of that money. Most notably George Lucas is wealthy because of merchandise, not movies.
I'm not saying what to do, what not to do, or what I do - I just want you to think about it a bit before tossing out moral absolutes.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Cord-cutting. My live sports is less-than-legit, but honestly, it is worth about $20/mo for sports, and nobody wants to offer me a decent legit alternative at that price. Worse, NHL Center Ice blacks out my favorite team's games in favor of cable coverage.
Otherwise, we went all last summer without turning on the cable box... why pay for it? We can't stand being tied to TV schedules, either.
So you have no ethical issues pirating content?
I have 0 ethical issues pirating content when the company won't take my money. Give me a (practical) way to pay for that thing I want to watch, either directly or through my Netflix sub, and I do. Companies are (finally) wising up to this, and beginning the fight against the legacy of region-specific distribution deals, culture of delaying release in some formats, and so on.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I dont think it 'defeats' the original intent. No more than converting from DVD mailer to streamer company did. Their intent has been to give customers entertainment at a reasonable price. Just because the market demands they start making their own instead of streaming rehashed dog turds does not mean they have strayed too far from their original goal. Hell the end result is a net win for consumers as DD and their other original content is getting better all the time... AND showing others that NO you dont have to bow down to big companies to 'get' good entertainment. IMHO the faster the dinosaurs dragging their feet die off and are replaced the better it will be for society.
There are many in the older generations who are anti-Internet and are seemingly afraid that if they even sign up for Internet access their bank balance will disappear and their grandchildren will get kidnapped. Others have Internet access but barely use it; you know the ones, they check email or Facebook and maybe one or two other sites and that's it; they don't do web searches or visit new sites regularly.
These are the people who will, most likely, NEVER sign up (on their own) for Netflix or cut the cord, no matter how expensive their cable/satellite bill gets, because as far as they're concerned, there's no alternative. They wouldn't know how to get Netflix on their TV and have no idea how to find out.
So, the pay TV companies are raising rates in order to milk these older generations as much as possible before they die off or figure out how to connect a Roku to their TV (or someone else shows them); or before they buy a smart TV that puts all these cord-cutting options on the screen they're looking at, accessible with the remote they're holding.
The older generations are also set in the "watching what's on" paradigm; while the newer generations have had access to on-demand, home video, and file sharing, allowing for "watching what you want". With Netflix, there is no mindless "watching what's on", you have to choose what to put on, at least a series to autoplay. If you don't like it, you can't claim lack of responsibility a la "these networks air nothing but crap nowadays. yep", it's all on you for putting that show on.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I got the HDHomeRun OTA receiver and paired it with some DVR software. That combination with a media server works really really well for 99.9% of what I would ever want to watch.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
His (and my) cost of "TV" went up 25%, from $8 to $10, when Netflix's grandfathering ended.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I have no ethical issues with the way the copyright system is set up. Until we sit down and talk about forming some ethical underpinnings as to if copyright makes sense and if so for how long, I take the position that it is a government law infringing on the normal operation of culture and free speech. The original intent of the earliest forms of copyright was to censor and I can only assume that is its primary effect today.
Same here...I stopped watching broadcast and cable TV more than a decade ago and I don't feel as though I've missed anything.
My son gave me one of his Netfix logins, but I don't use it much, maybe a few times a month. I spend more time searching for something to watch than I do actually watching whatever it is I found.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
they're trying to mitigate the damage cord cutters are doing (haven't had cable tv for more than 10 years; still have comcast for internet no good alternatives) and keep their earnings projections from tanking and taking their stock with it.
You can't watch anything without a DVR. From the Sony HDD 250 I used to have, to the lifetime Tivos now, to even the $40 homeworx box and cheapo disc connected, I never, ever watch any TV in realtime. Not only are the ads too many, they are obnoxious and repetitive. My teens don't know what a network is, what appointment or water cooler TV is, and don't care to. Most TV is watched on a laptop. I was in a hotel with cable recently. It took ten minutes to turn off, and realize how bad it truly is.
Again, I'm not telling anyone what to do. I'd just like the question to be explored a bit more.
Morally it's quite clear, you simply don't consume the content. Justifying theft because of (supposed) shady business practices is not remotely moral.
Well, what if you don't think of it as theft? What if the movie is an advertisement, and the actual product is the merchandise? That's basically how it is, at least from the point of view of the creators of the content.
Let's say you love Star Wars. A safe assumption. And you want to reward George Lucas for putting something in your life that you love. Which makes more sense to do:
A) Buy the latest remastered blu ray. It'll set you back maybe $15, and George will see maybe a nickle of that. Corrupt Hollywood middlemen will see the other $14.95. They didn't have jack to do with the movie, they have just paid lawyers and positioned themselves in the middle as a barrier that must be crossed to get to the stuff you love.
B) Pirate it online, then buy a Jar Jar Binks figure. It'll set you back maybe $5, but George will see a dollar of that, and the corrupt assholes in the middle get bupkis.
Again, I'm not saying what you should do. Pirating movies is illegal and can get you in some serious hot water. I'm just asking people to think about the actual dynamics of the situation.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.