Slashdot Mirror
AT&T, Dish, Comcast All Raising Cable TV Rates To Counter Cord-Cutting (dallasnews.com)
AT&T's DirecTV, Dish, and Comcast are all planning to raise their rates again in the new year, "a move that could boost revenue but risks alienating subscribers who have been ditching their traditional TV subscriptions in record numbers," reports Dallas News. From the report: Cable and satellite providers are hoping to squeeze more money from consumers who remain loyal to their packages with hundreds of channels, Philip Cusick, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst, said in a note this week, even though "this strategy could accelerate video sub declines." The latest price increases come as cord-cutting accelerates. In the third quarter, the TV industry saw its largest ever rate of decline, with subscribers shrinking by 3.7 percent, according to MoffettNathanson LLC. Consumers are dropping traditional TV for lower-cost online options like Netflix Inc. and slimmer TV options from Hulu and YouTube.
DirecTV is raising rates on all English-language video packages by $3 to $8 a month while hiking fees for regional sports networks by $1 to $1.90 in most markets. Dish said it's increasing prices for English-language video packages by $3 to $5 a month. Altice USA, the fourth-largest cable operator, recently raised rates by 3 percent on Optimum subscribers. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, is raising its fee for regional sports networks by $1.50 on average and its fee for broadcast channels by $2 a month, according to Cusick. Charter Communications Inc., the second-largest U.S. cable provider, recently boosted its monthly fee for a set-top box by about 50 cents and its broadcast channel fee by about $1. Charter operates as Spectrum in Dallas-Fort Worth.
DirecTV is raising rates on all English-language video packages by $3 to $8 a month while hiking fees for regional sports networks by $1 to $1.90 in most markets. Dish said it's increasing prices for English-language video packages by $3 to $5 a month. Altice USA, the fourth-largest cable operator, recently raised rates by 3 percent on Optimum subscribers. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, is raising its fee for regional sports networks by $1.50 on average and its fee for broadcast channels by $2 a month, according to Cusick. Charter Communications Inc., the second-largest U.S. cable provider, recently boosted its monthly fee for a set-top box by about 50 cents and its broadcast channel fee by about $1. Charter operates as Spectrum in Dallas-Fort Worth.
A shame, but if they jack up my costs, I'll just pull the plug and get free HDTV from my HDTV antenna at 1080p resolution.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Great, this is excellent for short-term revenue, which is all that matters.
Next, more commercials should be added.
Selling more commercials will increase revenue
Revenue will be increased with more commercials
Increasing commercials will increase revenue.
the ratio is too small.
5 mins of content, should require 2 min of commercials.
And the same commercial should be repeated at least twice.
the rental fees should also be increased.
also , pay per view fees should be increased.
people should be required to rent the cable box, the cable card, and the remote control, and the batteries for the remote. only authorized batteries should be able to be used.
heck, the tv should be rented as well, and should have a camera installed to ensure only authorized people watch, to prevent sharing.
You can buy a nice antenna.
If you want more content, you can get the slingtv app for way less than probably basic cable in your area.
You can toss in Netfltx and Hulu, and Amazon Prime.
The break even point is about 2 months of cable for all of the above.
I shudder to think what the last person on cable tv will be getting charged to mae up for all the cord-cutters.
Shouldn't they be raising Internet rates instead, since Internet service is needed by cord-cutters too? The other fees are avoided by cancelling cable.
My U-Verse TV series gives me the benefit of unlimited Internet data usage. If I cancel the cable, I will have a data cap. Weasley shits.
We have switched to YouTube TV. Not all of the channels, but enough. Local channels, bunch of news. Unlimited cloud based program storage (9 months). Sports channels (not a big concern but I watch some football, US and the rest of the world's definition, no Fox Sports for hockey though, dab-nab-it!).
$40 per month. We have cable internet through Charter (supposedly unlimited, hasn't been an issue)..
Combined with Netlfix (Bandersnatch!!!! we have 2 endings left and will cheat to find them) and Amazon Prime (already paid for), everything from the Roku, it works.
Going to get HBO Go for a short time to watch Game of Thrones.
BlameBillCosby.com
Exec: Customers are leaving... why?
Marketing: They don't see the value in our service!
Exec: Let's raise the prices!
Marketing: What???
Exec: It ain't cheap if it's valuable! Double the price, double the valuable!
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I recently discovered this site and it makes wading through all the choices so much easier.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Has any industry ever pulled out of a dip in demand by raising costs?
Uhm, what? USPS First Class mail prices are regulated by the government. They cannot raise prices without regulatory approval. And last time I checked, most Post Offices are falling apart, yet you make it sound like they're a bunch of fat cats living the sweet postage life.
Now I get why my Comcast bill (back in the days when I still used cable) kept increasing every months - it's all those cord cutters reducing the num_of_subscribers in the formula!
I wonder how long before they hit Division By Zero exception?
It really surprised me how many channels you can get with an antenna. Something like 40-60 here in Dallas. Growing up, there were four.
How many of those cable providers have a stake in Hulu, CBS All Access, etc already? This will further drive more consumers into the online streaming only services, which will get you fewer channels, and fewer choice in how to consume content. At least Star Trek: Discovery got released on DVD/Bluray now.
Here's the thing: In the United States, cable companies are regulated federally. The cable box they rent out to you is *federally mandated* to use the same crypto card (cable card) that other devices like TiVos and some TVs have built in.
Basically right now you can pay $160/month for phone+cable TV+internet and get an asston of TV channels, maybe 5% of which you watch religiously, and maybe an additional 20% that you watch infrequently. You benefit from this _some_ because the cable companies are merely distributors of premium content (e.g. HBO, Showtime, etc) and "extended digital basic" content (e.g. Discovery, History, Cartoon Network, ABC Family); and up until Netflix was streaming more content than shipping discs around everyone was clamoring for Cable TV a-la-carte.
The reality is, we've got it now with CBS All Access, NetFlix, Hulu Originals, YouTube Originals, but ... the negotiation power of having 2.1M subscribers as a distribution company is lost, and consumers will (or already are) paying more for content a-la-carte.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
That, and if you're in the city, get a simple unidirectional antenna;
The word you are looking for is "omnidirectional". A "unidirectional" antenna points one direction.
Bluetooth-enabled Wi-Fi buggy whips for the discerning customer.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Prices will increase until the cord cutting stops!
The lowest cost for a letter from the USPS is under $.50 while UPS/Fedex is over $1.00.
You're most likely a Conservative/Libertard. You have no legitimate criticism, you just trash the government because you can. You hate it when the government works. Hating the government is a stand in for hating the US. You're anti-American.
Why is Snark Required?
Yes, you'd get much better internet access under communism...
Criticism of certain aspects of capitalism != advocating a switch to communism
At least you had the sense to post A.C. to avoid owning your faulty logic.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
How does this compute in any way shape or form?
Maybe their data tells them what percent of their customers are addicted to individual shows and channels?
The more of the non-addicts that leave, the less reason they have to keep prices reasonable.
And these days, most content makes it to DVD eventually. Addicts really don't care, they can't even imagine waiting. But for other people, there is more content available than time anyways, the delay is meaningless. As the sum total of available video storytelling increases with time, there is less general value in fresh content. So things that are below movie quality will continue to decline, but they'll continue as a more expensive niche product.
There exist people who have never seen My Sassy Girl (2001), The Pianist (2002), or Asobi ni Ikuyo (2010). All modern classics!
The cable companies are well and truly screwed. Caught up in a wave of cord cutting they are at the very same time beholden to shareholders that can't see past the next quarterly earnings report. If they drop prices to try and attract new customers (or stop the bleeding of those leaving) their revenue will drop in the short term and the shareholders are pissed. Not to mention that senior executives hold a lot of stock and will also feel the pain.
So the easiest thing to do in the short term is raise prices to increase revenue. The danger, of course, is that they will piss off even more customers and further accelerate the cord cutting. They are banking on the fact that some people are simply addicted to cable and won't leave no matter how much they charge. The number of people in this group is probably vastly overestimated by the cable companies. I suspect it's in the 10-20% range. A perhaps equal number of people are on the fence and a price increase will force their hand.
What is really working against the cable companies is that not only are there viable alternatives - those alternates are cheaper and better than the slop they are serving up currently. Couple that with the traditional horrendous customer service that the cables companies have, um, earned and you have a recipe for disaster.
Cable companies are increasing prices to maintain revenue growth, not to counter cord-cutting (the title is illogical), and they can do it because TV is mostly price inelastic. Consider the markets Cable companies are in:
TV - Mature, saturated, declining
Landline Internet - Mature, saturated (as far as they are concerned), declining slightly (and possibly declining significantly if 5G can provide 20-100 Mbps fixed Internet for good prices)
Landline Phone - Mature, saturated, declining
Mobile Phone - Mature, mostly saturated
No real competition; in some cases single companies have monopolies over local territory like counties; elsewhere there's a choice of just 2 companies, so an oligopoly situation where 2 choices have 100% of the market.
All those declining markets means one thing: cable companies have a hard time keeping revenue positive and keeping shareholders happy. Their solution? Increase prices on their services; in Canada in particular, they increase the price of TV and Internet every single year. They have wireless "sub brands" that charge $45 for a plan that the "premium brand" service charges $85/mo for. In short: the cable companies want to keep increasing revenue and 2% per quarter isn't good enough, so they are gouging people who won't abandon these services, and they have so little competition they can get away with it. If people want to solve this issue, I recommend making the jump to competitive services, such as online streaming, smaller Internet providers, and also writing to their elected representatives. Big Cable and Phone has a stranglehold on communication services and is doing everything to keep them priced at ridiculously high levels relative to many other markets (Europe being a perfect example). We get much less value from these companies than we should be. And without government intervention and active, vocal consumers the price of cable will continue to rise.
Cord cutting will increase until price increases stop
The very first class you take in Economics in school will explain, very simply, that increasing the price will reduce demand.
If they are trying to fight against cord cutters, then surely the correct way is to increase demand on their own services. This can be done in a number of ways, one of which is REDUCING the price. The other is to pump some money into improving the product at the current price (i.e. give people what they want, not what you want to give them).
They are basically just slitting their own throats here, and will cause more people to cord cut. Those people who can't or won't (probably the elderly) are left to suffer with crippling rates that they struggle to pay.
I suppose, however, this sort of behaviour will just lead to the company ultimately failing and going bankrupt. And for some of these companies, that can only be a good thing...
> That, and if you're in the city, get a simple unidirectional antenna; if you're far from the city get one that you can point toward the city.
And $150-300 for an OTA DVR. And unless you're seriously masochistic, don't even THINK about buying a $22-50 Mediasonic "DVR" -- they're a pain to use, have a UI straight out of the early 2000s, and the one I bought literally died for no apparent reason 5 days after the warranty ended. On the other hand, if you have an old PC with Windows 7 and a HD-Homerun, Windows Media Center is STILL awesome as a DVR.
Seriously, losing your DVR is the absolute worst part of cord-cutting. Even when streaming services offer "cloud DVR", it totally sucks compared to the experience of having a real DVR that doesn't refuse to let you skip commercials, or take 10 seconds to recover when you fast-forward by 20 seconds.
Seems like you totally won that battle. Reminds me of this one time I put cyanide on the pizza and pretended like I loved being starved of oxygen so that nobody else would eat it. Unfortunately Little Joe thought I was bluffing, so his last meal came with a healthy dose of crow. Not enough to counteract the cyanide, mind, but enough for me to notice his regret before we both succumbed to drowning out of water. Some things you gotta teach the hard way.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You forgot:
Executive B: According to my projections, my idea of raising the price by 10% will yield the company 10% more revenue. I'll take my performance bonus now.
Until they jack up the Internet access costs to cover people getting just internet and subscribing to streaming services...
Those vans actually exist (Or existed anyway), old school picture tube TVs put out a lot of RF and you could pretty uniquely identify the type of radiation as coming from a TV.
Accuracy was no higher than the antenna on your scanning gear, so if you were checking single family houses you could pretty easily scan to see if the family had a TV running. For large multi-family housing estates, you were pretty much boned though, best you could do was come to a conclusion that one of the several appartments in your reception cone had a TV, which is not very useful if you wanna send out invoices.
Also, I doubt the technique would work with modern flatscreen TVs since those don't have large RF sources. Although with most modern "Smart "TVs having WiFi and Bluetooth support (No idea why, but they do), you could just pull MAC addresses out of the air and even more uniquely identify people's TVs.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I picked up an RCA ANT3038XR for under $130 inc. shipping, took an hour to assemble, is enormous... and gets 80 channels.
Yup, most OTA is not of interest, but sometimes it's fun to observe the selective opinion masquesrading as news.
Also... the Channelmaster DVR is not free to buy, but there's no program guide subscription, and it's easy enough to set up to record half an hour on news every day that you can watch anytime or ignore at your convenience.
For windows (and soon Linux) use NextPVR with a couple of HDHomerun devices attached to your antenna. Add the Kodi plugin and you have a full DVR with scheduled recordings and live, pause-able TV. Pay $25/year for reliable schedule feeds from Schedules Direct. Total cost $500 for the server, between free and $50 for any client TV, $50 for HDHomerun. $25/year for SD, annual donations to Kodi & NextPVR are my reoccurring costs.
Those who open their minds too far often let their brains fall out.
The scary thing is, that logical fallacy is the default mode for most humans.
If you say something nice about Trump, all sorts of people will suddenly be attacking you and claiming that you are a Trump supporter. What. The. Fuck. A stopped clock is correct twice a day, commenting that the clock appears to be accurate at this moment does not imply that I think the clock is accurate at all moments... but for some people, remarking on the coincidence is equivalent to closing your eyes, putting your fingers in your ears, and screaming "la la la I can't hear you! The clock is ALWAYS accurate!"
It is like a mental disease or something. The weirdest part about all of it is that I see what appear to be perfectly normal people suddenly turning into "frothing at the mouth" idiots through the use of this logical fallacy. Just blows me away.
Have a nice day. :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Have you thought it might be your personal hygiene? What kind of soap do you use?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Once read about three paragraphs of Portuguese before I realized i wasn't reading a dialect of Spanish. If you already know Portuguese reasonably well, you can pick up Spanish easily.
I studied Spanish 4 years in high school and spent 2 years in Brazil (plus I married a brasileira). Portuguese and Spanish are roughly 80% cognates, but pronunciation greatly varies (especially Brazilian Portuguese). After living Brazilian Portuguese for 2 years, whenever I try to speak Spanish I end up with a Portunhol (Espangues?) dialect. You must be extremely careful of false cognates (eg. embaraçada and embarazada are not the same thing).