Slashdot Mirror
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."
>"Cable TV Price Increases Have Beaten Inflation Every Single Year For 20 Years"
I don't think any of us needed a study to tell us this. Although my Interenet speed has gotten better, and I now have HDTV channels, the *quality* of the content and the selection of quality channels has NOT improved. If anything, it has gotten worse and worse.
This is unsustainable and why you are seeing people jump ship with other options just as soon as they could, and most of those options are only available due to Internet streaming (which is consuming TONS and TONS of bandwidth and increasing exponentially).
Cable monopolies are far too used to being the only game in town and raking in tons of cash doing so. They need to start offering lower-priced a-la-cart channel options and soon or their slide will continue. But don't think for a moment they will just suffer alone. Since they are still monopolies for Internet in most regions, they will start to try and make up for their lost profits by raising the prices of their Internet services. It is already happening.
It's like they don't know I don't have any real choices for cable or high speed internet and can't switch!
/sarcasm
Prices have gone up and the quality of the programming has gotten worse (which I didn't think was possible). The only thing keeping them in business at this point is that in many markets the cable companies are the only source of broadband internet. I would kick Comcast to the curb tomorrow if there was a broadband alternative in my town. The INSTANT there is one, I'm gone.
Pass laws that force cable companies to sell internet separate at capped pricing where they can not punish you for not getting cable packages.
recently moved to florida from the midwest and I get 4X the bandwidth for 1/2 the price and they cant charge me extra for not getting cable tv. a cheap antenna gets me about 18 channels if I really think I need to watch some stupid live sports event. or live news.
$39 a month for 100mbps/10mbps Comcast was raping me at $70 for 15Mbps/1.5mbps in Michigan
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In many school districts it's necessity. The last 4 years of my kid's public education all her homework was delivered online (the district couldn't afford books, budget cuts to go with the tax cuts).
Also given the number of alternatives (online games, video games in general and tons and tons of streaming) there should be _downward_ pressure. That's not a sign of a healthy economy. That's a sign of a monopoly without any regulation.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They don't necessarily think it is worth the expense, in some cases they simply have no choice. Where I live, I have no other choice for [real] Internet access, period. So it doesn't matter what they charge, I pretty much "have" to pay it. Not everyone has the option (or desire) to "borrow" (more like "steal"?) Internet access like you can do. In fact, most don't.
TV is somewhat less important [to most people, including me], but if you want quality content that is NOT on Netflix/whatever or over the air, again, you are stuck (think History Channel, Science Channel, NatGeo).
About sports- that is a perfect example of one of the several causes TV is too expensive. I call it the "sports tax." Like you (and many others), I don't give a F*** about *any* sports. And, yet, a sizable amount of my cable bill dollars go directly to ESPN's pockets for their exorbitant licensing fees. And the cable TV companies act like it is a wonderful thing for everyone that we have access to 26 sports channels, and the golf channel, and 20 home shopping network channels, and 30 reality-tv-junk channels, and 18 non-English channels, and etc.
Last time I complained to Cox about their latest series of price hikes, they had the nerve to tell me how wonderful a value their service is because it covers all the people in my house at no extra charge! I told them "Yeah, because, since I live alone, I guess should be terribly happy I am subsidizing it for all those multi-person households; such a great deal for me."
Explains why there are a lot of cord cutters. That, and about 75% of what you are forced to subscribe to is JUNK.
I'm just running on a borrowed internet connection.
How does that work? Do you return the bandwidth when you're done using it?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
(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
That was the whole point of paying for TV. No ads! And, boy, was it worth it. Now you've got the worst of both worlds, you pay out of pocket AND they crush you with commercials.
Frankly, the reason TV is being taken over by Netflix et al. has everything to do with getting rid of ads.
Hardly. Cable (aka CATV or community antenna television) started when people couldn't get good reception at their homes with Yagi (technically Yagi-Uda).
Because the market for original CATV was limited to folks that couldn't receive over the air and due to lots of regulations which prevented most out-of-area transmission (aka superstations), the CATV concept was pretty much saturated until non-broadcast providers came on board (like HBO which charged a premium but also drove basic cable subscriptions). Cable never meant no-advert TV. Your subscription paid for the cable infrastructure. The premium channels always cost more (even if you pirated them, you had to pay for your pirating equipment).
FWIW the advert model works great with a unfragmented audience (most people watch the same channels), but unfortunately as the programming becomes more fragmented, the infrastructure to broadcast all possible channels to your house and you pick the one you want to watch becomes less efficient and the revenue from untargetted adverts (e.g., the historical network broadcast and cable model) becomes less tenable and the extra subscription uni-cast on-demand model becomes relatively more cost effective. This is the real dynamic you are seeing today. As bandwidth becomes cheaper and cheaper, eventually is more efficient to just bill you instead of billing the advertisers and everything will become unbundled.
The downsides of this eventuality are that that high-bandwidth cable that serves most of America is likely to be come quite expensive as the cable companies collapse. In America, if you can't get high-speed internet today, you are likely doomed by this coming reality as the capital incentives to lay new commodity connections (w/o any premium service) is going to be pretty minimal (as Google Fiber has no doubt discovered and retreated from playing this game).
Housing, schooling, medical. It may not have gone up each year but averaged over any length of time their numbers are significant. Which makes one question the fundamental weighting of the inflation indexes.
My own personal inflation indexes are probably 3x what the published one is. Particularly if one breaks out the "wants" vs "needs". In the US its basically impossible to be a nomad or farm public/common land. So, I need a house, I need gas to drive to work, and I need to eat something that isn't McDonalds. If it weren't for the fact that I'm now one of the "privileged computer engineers" I would be living paycheck to paycheck unable to afford a new dishwasher when the old one broke. The particularly damming thing, is that because of this basic cost of labor/etc many things in the US have become so expensive that hiring someone to fix a car/reroof a house/etc can easily cost days of my inflated pay rates. (A new root installed by 4 guys on my house in two days can cost more than 2 months of net salary). Retail rents in front the wamart in the not so great part of town can easily exceed $15 a square foot.
There are people getting insanely rich from all this, its just none of us actually working for a living.