Technology

If anyone is old enough to remember when cable first showed up, it followed a similar path. They had to complete against "free" over the air TV, so cable had to be a good deal at first to get subscribers.

Once they got the frog in the pot, they slowly turned up the heat.

The next stop for streaming will be the prominent platforms jockeying to be the next "cable" monopolies.

The sales pitch will be "buy a package of channels at a discount" over individual.

It has already begun. Amazon, Apple, Hulu all resell other channels. HBO re-branded their entire channel just to start carrying non-HBO content.

Bigger platforms will leverage subscriber base to lock in content deals so the smaller ones won't be able to compete.

Consumers will get some deals until smaller players are choked out, but as soon as they can companies will start the dry anal rape that only a near monopoly can deliver.

The trouble is, cable has very little to offer in terms of interesting shows.

Sorry I am not rooting for streaming increases but this is a bunch of baloney. One, few people have all the services listed in the article concurrently. And secondly, they are comparing to the average cable bill which wouldn't include content like HBO and would likely be well over $100 probably much more for an equivalent amount of content. Hulu alone covers like three quarters of cable content in most markets.

Seems to me like they could still raise another 20% before they are truly on an equitable par.

But is cable TV a better experience?

Start using torrents. The good old ways are better. Don't feed the corporate motherfuckers undeserved money. I even cheated disney+ for a subscription. I was getting disney+ subscription for one year (with ads) in my credit card if I spent a certain amount. I spent that amount and got the subscription for free and cancelled the order and got my money back. Now I have one year of disney+ which I will watch in the browser with ublock origin. No ads with all content unlocked. Do I care or regret?. No fucking way.

Ahoy there, high seas mateys!

Back to sailing the seven seas.

The whole of the TV industry has lost their damn minds. I saw this shit coming when studios started pulling their content from Netflix without any obvious reason, sure enough, they all made their own version of Netflix and turned it into an idiotic turf war. The only ones that are losing, are the users.

But this is par for the course, looking back, TV started over the air, it was the only feasible way to deliver fast scan image content with sound to a large number of people. First for news, but eventually, for other entertainment content, but people need to make money, so ads. So many ads.

Anyways, cable comes along, now you can get perfect reception of all the ad filled stations all day every day, and we'll even throw in stations you wouldn't otherwise be able to receive, just pay us for the privilege of getting the ads.

Rinse and repeat for every cable or TV technology or service. Pay us for ads. Justify it how you want, that's what's happening.

Streaming enters the market, finally, no ads.... Streaming wars. Now your favorite shows are on entirely different platforms.... Is there a new stranger things? Go check Netflix, nope, nothing new here, what about the mandalorian? Go log into dickney+ and see.... Nothing here, ok, let's go over to paramount+ or MAX or whatever.... Oh, by the way, we all cost more than your cable, but at least there's no ads....

Meanwhile OTA still exists, and you don't have to pay for it. Everyone not going OTA, is ending up on the pirate ship. Yo ho ho, me maties!

Uh, this presupposes I buy every streaming service. The entire point of streaming services as a cable cutter is to not be forced to buy every channel. I can still just pay 16 dollars a month (at maximum) for a single service.

You'd have a better time looking at the inflation in costs of internet to the consumer versus inflation in cost to the companies. Cable companies are pretty blatantly making up the loss of cable subscriptions by charging more and more for the same shitty internet while taking billions in subsidies they don't put towards infrastructure.

But streaming still comes out on top because in many places if I did traditional cable I'd still be paying internet+streaming prices, except I also have to pay for internet on top of that because I don't live in the 1980's.

Can we stop posting blatant corporate propaganda unironically please?

I wish we had a viable alternative where we could bypass the corporate system and allow the actual creative people to do their thing.

At first I thought the $87/mo quoted in the article was still way cheaper than an equivalent cable plan, but that was based on 2015-timeframe pricing when I canceled my cable plan, where I’d have to pay around $260/mo for Comcast Premium Plus. I just checked though, and an equivalent cable plan is only $67/mo. for me now.

Considering the amount of “yarrrr” in this thread I’ll probably get stabbed for this take, but: shows/movies take time and money to create, and running these services isn’t free either. Is $15 really impossible to pay when you want to watch a show?

Cable doesn’t answer the problem of “I want to see [insert show] from start to finish, starting right now”, so it’s worthless as a service for most(?) people. As such, I feel like cable should be forgotten as a point of comparison - it’s a different and much more limited type of service.

Let’s say I have no streaming subs running right now. I feel like I want to check out [insert show]. I find out which service has it, and buy a month of [service] for like $15.

I watch the whole show. Now I also have the rest of the library to check out for the rest of the month. Maybe I find a couple of other movies/shows from the service, maybe not. It still cost me a whopping $15 to watch a full show, and I also now have temporary access to a practically random selection of shows (“random” = depending on whatever service I ended up buying).

Sure if it’s a long show it can take multiple months to view it, but I still feel like the cost is minimal compared to what I get. Nobody is asking you to pay for all of the different streaming services every month.

I’m using a show as an example - but if we’re talking about buying a month ($15) just to watch a single movie, I do agree that it can feel a bit expensive. But in most cases you can find a few other movies that you can check out during the next month. If you’d want to buy a single movie digitally, they often cost like $10-15 per movie anyway - might as well buy a month of sub at that point.

Sure, I’ll also be happier if stuff stays cheap, but anyway. The usual works here: if you don’t feel like a service is worth its cost, don’t buy it.

It’s not like there’s lack of entertainment in today’s world - some free, some filled with ads, some cheap, some expensive. Pick your poison, I guess.

I think at least for me it would be cheaper to rent or "buy" movies à la carte on YouTube and similar platforms than subscribing to that amount of services.

Other thing I see is that people fall on the trap that they NEED to watch what everyone is watching.

Just don’t. Rotate if you need to.

I pay Netflix one month per year, most other services even less.

YouTube Premium is the only I pay full year. It’s my TV now.

I think what a lot of people forget is that what Streaming did was allow you to watch what you want when you wanted it. No need to TiVO it and worry about space. No need to pay a separate fee for OnDemand. Now I can choose to watch 6 seasons of a show day in and day out at the time I want.

It was inevitable that they would start to package streaming services together. It's still better than old school cable. There's always the High Seas for those that have the technical chops necessary for that.

I sit back and laugh as my Plex server streams my 4k video to any device inside or outside my network for free. And it has content from every major streaming service. My monthly fees for streaming are $0.

unplug, unsubscribe, enjoy the silence

just pirate it lol

And this is why we 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

A bit odd that the article doesn’t mention advertising on cable/sat/fiber/traditional(?) media delivery into the home.

The single biggest draw, to me, isn’t that I can watch when I want (that’s second). It’s not having to spend my time watching ads. Life is just better without someone trying to sell me something for 20 minutes out of every hour.

I’m willing to pay for that privilege.

I value my time - or at least the opportunity to spend it how I want when I’m not making someone already rich, even richer.

At least for movies, I've actually gone back to DVDs. I can find them for $1 each at the flea market or garage sales, and once I own them thats it - no subscriptions and nobody can decide to randomly remove them from my collection.