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Cord-Cutters Are Ditching Their Cable Packages At the Fastest Rate Ever (axios.com)
Sara Fischer, writing for Axios: Cord-cutters are ditching their cable packages at the fastest rate ever, opting instead for cheaper, bundled digital TV options, according to the latest Magid Broadcast Study. The trend reflects consumers' preferences to ditch bundled cable packages for more affordable, niche bundled services that can be accessed on TV box tops or on mobile. For consumers, there are more bundled packages than ever, all popping up around similar price ranges. YouTube TV and Hulu TV launched within the past two month, joining the likes of SlingTV and DirectTV Now -- all at a roughly $40 monthly price point -- a bargain considering the average American pays $92 monthly for cable.
They'll just keep tightening the data caps in their favor. Keeps me from watching 4K streaming which I can't even get on cable.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
There are significant costs to produce TV shows. You cheap bastards are ruining TV and driving networks out of business. All cord-cutters are cheapskate assholes who are ruining TV for the rest of us.
Unfortunately for the industry, fewer subscribers will mean fewer revenues. Fewer revenues will mean higher allocation of the costs to the existing customers. There will be an inevitable increase in both internet and cable service rates. Cable service rate increases will further discourage more customers to cut the cord.
Just wait for the internet to come forced bundled with crap the drives costs up like. So basic Internet starts at $70-$90 or you can take a very limited web that may have local stuff and big sites blocked off unless you move up to full web.
CBS online and you must have it to buy SHOWTIME GO.
Di$ney online
E$PN / ABC WEB
NBC Online
FOX Online with fox news
CNN Web
NBCSN WEB
YOUTUBE Basic
You better hope that HBO NOW can still be gotten with any web ISP with out having take an basic Web Entertainment package.
and web Entertainment package is not part of the any $700+ DIA Fiber lines. Other then the hotel packagers
I want more TV choice and be able to buy hardware with out outlet / mirroring / per device fees / per stream fees.
$8+ outlet / device fees are the real killer. Why not make it per stream so you can have 3-4+ rooms but only 2-3 streams being paid for.
The internet streaming services I want are already forced-bundled with cable. Hell, even PBS interrogates me as to what my local PBS station is when I use their website. I don't have one. You can't get PBS with an antenna here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As someone who grew up watching far too much TV, I had a hard time bringing myself to get away from cable. It finally got to the point where the content offered just wasn't worth it to me and noticed that the bundle I subscribed to with Comcast had crept up to $150/month for a pretty barebones package (modest internet speed and a minimum on channels). A couple months ago I made the decision to drop TV and go internet only, I'd pick up SlingTV if I really missed it and still save money in the end. I figured they might offer me a discount to keep me on a bundled package but had done my research, $75 for internet alone and $25 for SlingTV. I didn't expect them to offer less than $100 so was ready to turn down any offers. It was a big surprise that they were willing to go down to $80/month by dropping the TV service to an even smaller selection(which I didn't know existed, it wasn't on the website last time I checked) but made up for that by throwing in an HBO package and faster internet than I had before. They're so desperate to keep people with TV, having subscriber numbers to tout is more important than any direct revenue.
Oh, about 10 years ago now, I think. Glad to see that people are getting the clue, finally. Now, if we can get them to understand that paying for 'streaming' is just a different kind of 'cable', and get them to put antennas on their roofs, they'll enjoy not having to pay anyone for anything.
Not true- many of their deals with channel providers require per subscriber fees.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If I ran Comcast, I wouldn't give a crap if you cut the cable TV cord. Where are you going to get your streaming video, pal? Over my internet line, that's where. So I can charge you whatever I need to charge you for internet access to keep my revenues the same.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I'd love to be able to get FiOS, but I've never once lived in a building where it was available. I've lived in buildings all over Chicago and Los Angeles, and none of them were able to receive it.
Which I think a lot of companies are forgetting especially cable. I pay $70/month for internet only (300down/20up), Netflix ($20/month), Music ($15/m), Kindle unlimited ($10/M). So $115/M for more entertainment than I can consume in a lifetime plus all the endless free stuff on the web. I can get focused entertainment which I find good and on demand. I am already considering downgrading my netflix package and even my cable speeds because they aren't giving me as much value as I am willing to pay for.
Why would I want to pay for shows that I don’t find valuable (or can get elsewhere), pay for a cable box, pay for DVR service, etc. that I don’t find valuable? This same applies to an earlier topic of Hollywood that was on Slashdot. They don’t produce things I find valuable so why would I pay for it?
And when I do have to call the cable company cause they raised my rates and I have to do the song & dance with them to get it back down they try to upsell you on everything. No I don’t want package XYZ, I don’t watch sports at all (that blows their minds), I don’t need your VoIP I have cell phone service, etc.
The biggest issue is not cost per-se, but that the whole idea of "channels" is obsolete.
Why would I wait for a specific day or time to see the content of my choosing? Worse, even when what I want to see is playing on a given channel, 1/3 of the content is ads. Yes, DVR can ameliorate this, but it's really a crutch because I have to choose content I'm interested in advance and then wait. When I moved, I was given "free" cable for a year along with my internet package. I think I may have watched it for 30 minutes the entire year. I go over to friends/family's houses who still watch live TV and I feel like I've been transported back in time to the 20th century.
No cable, TV for news and other stuff, Netflix for series, Internet, and that's it. BTW, I've created this Android app to find out which TV stations are available around you: https://play.google.com/store/...
No it's not, "cord cutting" specifically refers to people ditching cable TV. That's all.
Megid Broadcast Study drops a Meteo on the cable industry.
Oh, Magid. Carry on...
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The marginal cost to the cable company of providing you with TV service is exactly $0.
So the cable companies are pirating all of their content? It would seem that they are even more evil than we thought.
They can try that. They can also lose the business of people like me, who will not tolerate having things forced on me that I do not want and will not use.
There's only ONE device in my house that needs Internet to operate, and that's my DVR, which receives it's Program Guide updates and software updates that way. Of course it's got a modem built into it, and if necessary I'd ditch my cellphone in favor of a landline so the DVR would keep working. Or just stop watching TV entirely. There's plenty of other things I could be doing with those few hours a week.
Of course they won't try shit like that, they know if they piss people off bad enough, they'll look for alternatives. ISPs would pop up that don't force anything on you, and use that as a selling point.
Forget wires. When we have Gigabit LTE (100 to 300 mbps in the real world) and 5G (which will be actually at gigabit) we don't need cable. We can just have services like Netflix. Soon as we ditch the cable monopolies and get into the wireless oligopolies the better. Granted the wireless oligopolies suck but at least there is more competition. Kind of a sad thing. Cable could have had played nice and allowed things like Cable Card 2 etc. but instead they had to allow their greed and emotions to control them.
I want more TV choice and be able to buy hardware with out outlet / mirroring / per device fees / per stream fees.
$8+ outlet / device fees are the real killer. Why not make it per stream so you can have 3-4+ rooms but only 2-3 streams being paid for.
This is in part why I went with my own "DVR" solution instead of using the crappy hardware the cable company provides. I use HDHomerun Prime with cable card as the tuner, run that through TV Headend which acts as the DVR/PVR TV Guide and proxies the live TV Streams to all of the TV sets in the house.
I can pause a program in 1 room resume in another. Watch on any TV set in the house for the $2/month CC rental instead of $6/month/TV set-top box rental from the cable company. And I have multiple TB of disk available for recordings. Add to that comskip to strip the commercials from the recordings and the 1hour programs can now be watched in 45min without having to fast forward.
I can add more tuners if I wish/when I wish, currently the 3 in the one home run is fine for us. Have setup Kodi on each of the TVs as the front-end STB solution talking to the TV Headend server.
Yes it's geeky, but it's about as close to legally watching the content on your own terms as you can get. No worries if there is enough internet bandwidth available when you want to watch something in prime-time without jittering, pixelating, or not working altogether. But most importantly it passes the "wife" test, as it's easy to use with Live TV, ripped movies, CDs, DVR recordings from a single UI and remote.
Do you live in a house and not an apartment? Get an antenna on your roof, get TV for free. You'd be surprised at how little it hurts in the long run to not bother with 'streaming' anything or useless cable channels. You get over it quickly enough. It's like sugar addiction: for a while you crave, then you get past it to a healthier place.
Did you do business with Comcast?
I just thought I'd mention that for me personally, not only do I not do cable, I don't do netflix. Between stuff like youtube, crunchyroll, and miscellanious sites like gooddrama.to, I can't imagine where I would get the time to look at anything else.
I expect that I could spend the next ten years trying to cover what happened with asian television in the last year, and by then there'll be another ten years of material.
Plus there's the project of looking over the (admittedly low quality) versions of 60s television up on youtube ("The Champions", "The Persuaders", "Colonel Bleep", "The Green Hornet"...), and the various random movies from the 30s/40s (e.g. Charlie Chan).
On the other hand, if anyone has a good source of bollywood material on-line, I'd be interested in hearing about it...
They used to be terrible but the last couple of years I have had good service, including a move a few months ago that went flawlessly. My monthly usage is low and I have been able to negotiate good rates for high bandwidth service.
love is just extroverted narcissism
24 hours a day of the ACs ravings...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
And in Seattle we can only get dialup. We know the story.
and some set the copy flags in away that really hurts non cable co hardware for stuff like multi room.
http://stopthecap.com/2016/10/...
At least with Charter, if you don't have a "bundle" with TV or Phone (who uses land lines anymore anyways), your Internet rate goes to almost $50 a month; now add $40 a month for Sling or DirectTV Now and where is the savings? Not to mention only being able to watch TV when the bandwidth gods are in your favor. It just doesn't add up to any significant savings.
ISPs would pop up and how will they get to you cell based?
When the cable co owns TV content and when ATT / Directv owns HBO / TW (NOT TWC) and they are your only choice?
WIll systems like WOW go Internet only? drop TV channels that say you must have our on line system as part of basic web for non TV subs?
I'm really glad I don't live in your imaginary totally dystopian future, if I did I'd've slit my wrists by now.
Really honestly I don't even care much about this subject. I have OTA broadcast TV that costs me nothing and that's all I care about. OTA broadcast isn't going away anytime soon, probably never, or at least for as long as I live. Even if it did I wouldn't be too broke up over it, I'd find other things to do with my time.
as long as you're still getting Internet from a cable company. They're not stupid. They'll make their money one way or the other. Fortunately, I live in a city that offers municipal-run, gigabit internet with no data caps. More cities need to do the same if they really want things fixed.
There isn't really any "cord cutting" solution for people who live outside the US or just those who don't speak english.
I would love to get my mother to switch to online services over expensive cable, but unfortunately, she doesn't understand english and we live in Canada. So our choices are even fewer. The only choice worth talking about in our language... isn't even an alternative at all since it's a service by one of the major cable provider AND require the expensive cable subscription on top of the $10 fee for this on-demand online service... Not only that, but because they are competing with Netflix for rights for shows, they get all the "good stuff" in our language while Netflix gets the rests... and the rights to those shows OUTSIDE of Canada.
Does anyone else get irrationally irritated by this, wishing that these slow-adopters would somehow be required to pay more for taking this long to figure this out? They've been keeping the cable and traditional broadcast television industries in business all this time, to the detriment of all of us. I know I should see this as a good thing, and I'm not *really* serious. I just wish they had to pay some kind of penalty (aside from having had to pay for cable all this time).
"So there is no logical reason that Internet-Only should be cheaper than Internet+TV."
Costs are not prices.
I am finally getting my wish. :)
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
My folks have 100/25 Mbps fiber for $40 a month. Mine is more, but it's also faster.
A few years ago, I lived in a house where there were two separate buildings on the same property: my house which was very old and another newer house on top of a garage they managed to cram onto the same lot. The two houses were rented separately.
The property had both Comcrap and Verizon FIOS available. I opted for Comcrap because it was a little cheaper. The guy in the house behind me got FIOS.
Comcrap was terrible when I tried to unsubscribe after living there a couple of years, and it was also annoying I had to pay for a service visit to get it installed when I moved in, but between those two days, everything worked just fine.
My neighbor, OTOH, had constant problems with FIOS. The box on the side of his house constantly needed to be reset, and he had to come bug me about it because part of that box was in my garage (I had one of the two garage bays in that building as part of my lease). It was really quite annoying. I think his internet service was even out for a week at one point.
the sad part is you think that's a 'good' deal.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
This. I got rid of cable TV a little over 7 years ago. Had AT&T DSL until early last year, then switched to Comcast Business. Both my son and I are heavy internet users, and the 6Mbps AT&T DSL maxed out at wasn't fast enough for us to use the internet at the same time. The Comcast Business plan we now have is 50 down / 10 up, with NO CAPS. Most of the time we get closer to 60 down / 12 up. Rare for the internet to slow down or go out.
With my outdoor antenna, I get 22 channels FREE, with all the major broadcast networks. With that, along with Hulu, CBS All Access, Warner Archive, and Britbox (all less than $40/month total), we have more than we have TIME to watch.
I don't have a use for services that stream cable TV channels over the internet. It's the same lame channels I wasn't watching back when I had cable TV, just delivered a different way.
"A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
Why would I wait for a specific day or time to see the content of my choosing?
Because said "specific day or time" is when "the content of [your] choosing" is performed live. In households that I have observed, the most common live programming is sport matches, political talk shows, and entertainment industry award shows.
> And still leaves you with 1/4 of what you'd be getting on cable.
I do not want to pay for "the 500 channel universe".
Some people don't want sports. They're leaving ESPN (and/or cable altogether) in droves. ESPN has dropped from 100 million subscribers in Sep 2010 to 88 million in Feb 2017 https://seekingalpha.com/artic... Other people want only sports. MLB / NHL / etc have streaming subscriptions.
The music industry is a good analogy. They were doing well financially in the 1950's through 1970's. Their biggest market was teenagers, with limited disposable income. Their hottest product was "the 45 rpm single" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with 1 song on each side.
Then the music industry got effing greedy, and dropped the $1 single in favour of the $25 CD. Teenagers with limited disposable income stopped buying due to sticker shock. Music sales plummetted... well... like... duhhhh.
The RIAA blamed piracy, but it was actually their own fault. Apple revived the concept of "the single, for $1", in digital format this time. Sales took off, and the music industry is making money again.
Going from a dozen bundled songs, most of which were crap, to a-la-carte, revived the music industry. If cable is smart, they'll follow the lead of the music industry, and unbundle channels so that people pay for only what they want.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I agree Comcast Business has been good to me. Now, of course, much of my downloaded is source code from the Kernel (www.kernel.org), which I believe is smaller than video and streaming.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
The next time I move, I seriously plan to demand a demonstration of high speed internet connections from two different providers (ideally three or more) on premises before I put in a bid for the property or a deposit for the rent. And not just, "Yes, it's available on these premises." But actually, "Here is the connected, active FiOS connection and the connected, active Comcast connection. You can plug in your laptop to each one and use traceroute and independent speed tests to verify the two connections don't have the same hops, and have different connectivity speeds."
...unfortunately, I expect a lot of other tech-savvy people to make the same demands, which means the prices on well-connected housing will be even crazier than they were before.
I've had Comcast internet service on my property for fifteen years. The billing and sales department of Comcast comes from the seventh level of hell. Maybe the eighth. But service? Rock solid. I've had two service outages in the past five years, each for less than two hours. Consistent bandwidth, too.
This is for residential service.
love is just extroverted narcissism
You should move to northern Indianapolis then. Fiber all the way to the box baby! No caps!
The FiOS wall-to-box connection is actually kind of a pain though, because the FiOS cable cracks whenever the kids mess with the tangle of stuff behind the TV. Every once in a while we have to call the provider out to replace it.
people lucky enough to have google fiber get 1000/1000 and no cap for 70$
Yeah, I only had Comcrap for 2 years, but I had the exact same experience: the internet service was rock solid, but billing and sales were utterly demonic.