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Cord-Cutting Still Doesn't Beat the Cable Bundle (wired.com)
I'd like to cut the cord, writes Brian Barrett for Wired, then, the very instant I allow myself to picture what life looks like after that figurative snip, my reverie comes crashing down. From an article: Cutting the cord is absolutely right for some people. Lots of people, maybe. But it's not that cheap, and it's not that easy, and there's not much hope of improvement on either front any time soon. Not to turn this into a math experiment, but let's consider cost. Assuming you're looking for a cord replacement, not abandoning live television altogether, you're going to need a service that bundles together a handful of channels and blips them to your house over the internet. The cheapest way you can accomplish this is to pay Sling TV $20 per month, for which you get 29 channels. That sounds not so bad, and certainly less than your cable bill. But! Sling Orange limits you to a single stream. If you're in a household with others, you'll probably want Sling Blue, which offers multiple streams and 43 channels for $25 per month. But! Sling Orange and Sling Blue have different channel lineups (ESPN is on Orange, not Blue, while Orange lacks FX, Bravo and any locals). For full coverage, you can subscribe to both for $40. But! Have kids? You'll want the Kids Extra package for another $5 per month. Love ESPNU? Grab that $5 per month sports package. HBO? $15 per month, please. Presto, you're up to $65 per month. But! Don't forget the extra $5 for a cloud-based DVR. Plus the high-speed internet service that you need to keep your stream from buffering, which, by the way, it'll do anyway. That's not to pick on Sling TV, specifically. But paying $70 to quit cable feels like smoking a pack of Parliaments to quit Marlboro Lights. You run into similar situations across the board, whether it's a higher base rate, or a limited premium selection, or the absence of local programming altogether. It turns out, oddly enough, that things cost money, whether you access those things through traditional cable packages or through a modem provided to you by a traditional cable operator.
Seriously, the majority of people cutting the cord aren't looking to ensure a 1:1 replacement of all channels they may or may not have been watching previously, and the industry damn well knows it. A lot of people are perfectly happy with general internet news, available content on youtube, and maybe 1 or 2 streaming services (netflix, hulu, hbo go, amazon, etc).
Given that people are unlikely to subscribe to cable but not internet, the cost of internet is a non-factor making cord cutting very reasonable to a huge number of people.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Bad assumption.
We bought cable as part of a bundle with Internet access when we moved two years ago. We've never used it - not even once. Next house we won't bother, no matter how cheap it is. Lifestyles change.
Broadcast TV was always annoying, and gradually better forms of entertainment have emerged.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Right now, you can still bundle Netflix with Amazon Prime and an HBO subscription to get a good bit of the market for a reasonable monthly outlay, but as industry watchdogs have suggested, Netflix only works if there aren't too many Netflix-type providers bidding for content.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
That looks like Cable Company Math, talking about the number of channels per dollar.
That doesn't at all reflect what I've observed people doing when they cut the cord. Most of the time, they realize that they may have a hundred channels for their money, but they only watch two or three of them (and usually only a couple of shows on each).
On a per show cost, for those people, cable is crazy expensive, and it's really easy to bring that number down.
"Assuming you're looking for a cord replacement, not abandoning live television altogether ..."
How'd we go from a title that talks about cord-cutting, to one about replacing the cable with just another form of getting the same crap?
DaveyJJ
I think this whole article misses the point that many cord cutters enjoy saving money, but more importantly they enjoy minimizing dealing with cable companies. Sometimes it is not about just money.
Just stop watching TV and you save the full bill. Seriously, cable cutters aren't doing it because they are getting an equivalent service for cheaper - they are opting out of some or all of the service because they don't see value in it. In fact, I would say cable provides negative value for many people, because it's time that could be better spent doing something a lot more rewarding. Seriously, when was the last time that you spent an evening flipping through channels on cable and felt like it was a worthwhile use of time?
Us cord cutters aren't looking to retain all the crap we weren't watching anyway, so the article seems kinda moot.
To those of you thinking about cutting the cord, let me give you some advice; you don't need to waste your days glued to the TV. You can actually, you know, go outside if you're bored.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
you should downgrade your connection. The only thing you're getting at 150mbps is your speed test. The damn equipment has a SFP (not SFP+) port in it which means the 48 other customers are ALSO bottle-necked by the same 1gig uplink. Even 4k streaming only consumes 10-15Mbps. Thats still 4 simultaneous 4k streams at one time. Do you actually own 4 separate 4k screens and simultaneously watch actual 4k content on all 4 screens? Spectrum is doing 60Mbps for around $50/mo
If what you want is cable, get cable. Don't expect to be able to replace cable with "internet" cable and save money.
You cut the cable when you are no longer interested in very many TV shows, and cable no longer fits with your media consumption habits.
If you watch regular TV shows all the time, like ESPN, Bravo, FX, HBO, etc., then what you want is a cable package. That's what they excel at. Get a whole bunch of shows produced for the masses*, you're just not going to beat the mass market model that is cable TV.
However a lot of people no longer fit that mold. In my case for example, I have a ~$60 cable package for literally one show that my roommate likes to watch. He's moving out, so I'm dropping cable completely, because 99% of my media consumption has nothing at all to do with Hollywood. I'm only interested in a handful of shows, and I'm more likely to look up sports clips than I am to sit down and watch ESPN, so I can drop the $60 a month cable bill and just spend $100 a year on full seasons of shows I like instead. There just aren't that many of them.
But if my nightly habit were to sit down in front of a TV and watch a couple hours of TV, then cutting cable is almost certainly not going to be better in almost any way.
*I'm not disparaging shows produced for the masses. That's how they can afford to create large amounts of high quality content. It's just economics.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller