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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."
>"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
Explains why there are a lot of cord cutters. That, and about 75% of what you are forced to subscribe to is JUNK.