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Cable TV Price Increases Have Beaten Inflation Every Single Year For 20 Years (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: The pay TV industry is losing customers, but prices continue to climb. In fact, for U.S. cable TV in particular, price increases have outpaced inflation for every single one of the past 20 years, according to a recent FCC report surfaced by CordCutting.com. Every one! In 1995, cable cost $22.35 per month, on average. In 2015, it was $69.03. Now, it does makes sense for prices to go up for goods like cable as long as there is inflation. But cable's increases are more than double that of inflation. On average, cable prices went up 5.8% yearly for the past 20 years. Inflation clocked in at 2.2% per year, on average. Though there has been grumbling about the high prices of cable for quite some time, it has lately taken on a more serious air. That's because there is evidence that the pay-TV industry is experiencing a hiccup -- or the start of a long-term decline. The pay-TV industry lost 800,000 subscribers last quarter, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. "About 82% of households that use a TV currently subscribe to a pay-TV service," Bruce Leichtman of Leichtman Research said in a statement last month. "This is down from where it was five years ago, and similar to the penetration level eleven years ago."
(I don't live in the US but have seen prices go up as well)
Our HOA runs owns the cable in the ground for distributing cable TV and I am managing the contracts, technical aspects etc with the cable companies. This enables us to get a better deal for all who wants cable than what people get from their listed prices. The explanation we hear every time the prices go up, are because of the channels that have sports programming included that are responsible for the price hikes. These channels have a few popular TV shows, mixed in with very expensive soccer matches.
So it is sports that costs the most, even when you leave out dedicated sports channels.
More and more people are switching from the full package to the medium package or the small package(where people really should consider just getting those channels over the air). And people are also dropping the extra channels that you pay for individually.
Personally I haven't had cable TV for 4 years(iirc) because I don't have any interest i sports and so cable tv with all the commercials are not really worth it for me.
In economics and in public-choice theory, rent-seeking involves seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through poor allocation of resources, reduced actual wealth creation, lost government revenue, increased income inequality,[1] and (potentially) national decline.
Attempts at capture of regulatory agencies to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for the rent seeker in the market while imposing disadvantages on (incorrupt) competitors. The idea was originated by Gordon Tullock and the term was coined by Anne Krueger.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not just good ideas, they're the laws of economics