Average American Cable Subscriber Gets 189 Channels and Views 17 340
An anonymous reader writes "Nielsen, the company that studies the viewing habits of television viewers, announced its findings in a blog post Tuesday. Since 2008, the number of cable TV channels offered as a bundle rose from 129 to 189 in 2013, but in that time-frame viewers have consistently only watched an average of 17 channels. The data seems to support the notion that consumers are better off subscribing to channels a la carte, but cable companies are of the opinion that 'the price of cable TV wouldn't change much if channels were served à la carte because content providers won't sell the most popular programs to cable companies unless the provider's other channels are also served up.' Nielsen concluded in its post that 'quality is imperative—for both content creators and advertisers', signaling the possibility that more Americans will cut the cord after realizing that their cable bill has increased in the last few years but their consumption of content hasn't."
200 channels... (Score:5, Insightful)
and nothing to watch.
Re:200 channels... (Score:5, Informative)
"and nothing to watch."
Yeah, we had satellite for a good long time but gradually pared back the channels we received because many we wanted were tied to other channels we didn't and that pushed the price up. Once we got to the basic package we realised that the vast majority of what we watched was on free to air digital HD via our TiVo so we dropped Satellite. We're down to about ten channels now. Still nothing to watch though.
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that is my problem. all the channels I do watch are only available in huge bundles of one or two channels each.
So I have to do all or nothing. However next week I am taking my cable box in and going for nothing.
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Here's the Scoop (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants to hear this, but it's the truth and people should understand it:
So is that a bad thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, lots of channels will cease to exist. But the makers of the content are already using different outlets like youtube to get their content out there. Once they get enough following there, they might strike a deal with netflix or a similar company. Just because "24/7 content you can't choose" goes away doesn't mean that you can't replace it with "content you choose whenever you want it".
TV has been the industrial age of amusement and news. In a lot of "industrial" products, we are now producing custom ordered items, keeping the price low because of automation. If you don't buy your car off the lot, you can have any colour, engine and accessory package you want. It will be produced especially for you and it won't cost you a dollar more than the same car would cost you off the lot. I don't fit in confection sizes (too tall) and I have a lot of my clothing made. Compared to name brands, my clothing is cheaper and often higher in quality. This is because they now have computer controlled cutting machines that calculate the correct fabric cuts and the fabric gets cut by a robot. This is how modern TV is going to work as well.
People now have a choice what content to watch and when to watch it. It may be bad for TV channel owners, but in the end, this will provide improved quality and diversity of content at a price that people are willing to pay for it. Advertising models will adapt to this. In show product placement, more ads on the cheaper subscription compared to the premium one and so on. Don't be fussy about people moving your cheese but adapt and reap the benefits.
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All this talk of robots and automation as relating to television just makes me think of the Network Execubots from Futurama.
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Italy [tivusat.tv],France [fransat.fr], Austria [digital.orf.at] have a choice of free to view/free to air cha
Re:Here's the Scoop (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unbundling will not happen anytime soon
I think you're right, but what may happen sooner is that the whole "cable" system goes away. My prediction is that within 10 years, the number of cord-cutters will grow, and you'll see people move to streaming solutions similar to Netflix and Hulu. Of course, those services will continue to "bundle" in a bunch of content that you're not interested in, either, but nobody will care. You don't hear people complaining, "Why am I paying for that movie on Netflix that I have no interest in watching? Just let
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I'd disagree. This is subjective of course. On my U-Verse dvr, I constantly have a backlog of 60-80 hours of shows. TV series, sports, animal shows, movies, travel shows, etc. I wouldn't have been aware if some of these even existed without taking occasionally time to "browse" what's on those 200 channels. In my view, the biggest problem with cable TV right now is not bundling, but the incessant commercials. A typical news program, sports, or TV series is loaded with commercials. The real content is like 70
Re: 200 channels... (Score:2)
And I've got second sight!
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I believe a la carte is the future, but I don't think forcing it upon everybody is a good idea. The market is already gradually moving in that direction due to two forces pushing it that way:
1) Netflix and Amazon already offer original content, and you're free to choose between the two. Effectively a la carte. Other companies like Sony and Microsoft have already taken interest in doing their own Netflix style offering with their own original content.
2) The content providers are pricing themselves out of the
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I believe a la carte is the future
Yes, a la carte *individual programs*, not channels. I too have a kajillion channels, and I don't watch 17 of them. Rather, I pick and choose the programs I want to watch in the channels that have a vague chance of not sucking 100% of the time.
But then, since I happen to like documentaries better than movies or shows, I already have a la carte programs - it's called Youtube...
Oh yeah right (Score:2)
I be willing to spend a few bucks a station to only get what I want. Could spend maybe $20 and get what I want and saved like $60
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Could spend maybe $20 and get what I want and saved like $60
Exactly why they won't let you.
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I Think it would probably cost the same price to get just what you want. They already know you aren't watching most of the channels, but it doesn't cost them any more money to give you all of them.
The only time they are losing money is when they are giving you something for free that you would have been willing to pay for.
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I be willing to spend a few bucks a station to only get what I want. Could spend maybe $20 and get what I want and saved like $60
People want ala-carte pricing because they think it will save them money Unfortunately it doesn't work that way.
For example, if you are paying $100 a month for 200 channels that works out to 50 cents per channel. So people think they could just pick 20 channels and only pay $10 a month. But, there's nothing that says the cable would have to charge the same price for all channels. They could charge higher prices for the more popular channels and your total cost would remain approximately the same.
Re:Oh yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
You're assuming everybody subscribes to all the popular channels. At least in my case, that's not true; I'd be interested in at most a couple of them, so even if the total monthly cost is spread over only the top say 10 channels, I'd still save quite a bit.
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The only reason it will cost more per subscriber in some cases is that the costs will not longer be distributed among the 10 million viewers that subsidize the channel. So ESPN will have to decide if it can charge 2,000,000 viewers $20 a month, or cut costs an live on what the free market will actually bear instead of depending on a socialized mark
Re:Oh yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
How can Cox get away with this? Disney is famous for saying "carry all of our channels or none". That means that all of the ESPN channels, Disney channels, ABC, and every other channel that Disney owns must be included with all of a cable company's packages (and charged accordingly) or Disney will refuse to deal with that cable company at all. How can Cox (whoever they are) get away with a deal that no other cable or satellite provider has managed to get?
Re:Oh yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
ESPN is the most expensive channel in your cable package, and I don't watch sports. Just dropping the sports channels would cut a huge portion out of my (hypothetical) cable bill. Just because most people want ESPN doesn't mean everyone does.
Re:Oh yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing about a la carte is that it works the opposite of the way most people who think about it believe it will work. A channel has very high fixed costs and overhead so it is likely that that the more demand there is for a station, the cheaper it will be per person, and the fewer people who want to watch a station, the more expensive it will be. So a high demand station like ESPN will probably be very reasonably priced, despite having a high cost to produce.
Re:Oh yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
That is an overly simplistic analysis.
Reality is that the supply of ESPN and crappy channel are both unlimited once the channel is 'added' to the network, so the a la carte price is what the market will bear -- ie what is highest price they can charge for it where charging more will lose them more subscribers than the extra revenue will cover.
For a channel like ESPN, they can raise the price pretty high and lots of people will continue to pony up to keep getting it. For a channel like "gameshow reruns from the 70s"... not so much so it will be much much lower.
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This is probably true, hence even though I want a-la-carte, I would never advocate adding new laws enforcing it. Instead I'd prefer to allow the content companies to become the victims of their own success, as I described here:
http://entertainment.slashdot.... [slashdot.org]
TL;DR, let's just allow the content companies will eventually price themselves out of the market. I don't subscribe to cable anymore, and I always tell everybody I know how they can get their entertainment without a cable sub.
The only people that are s
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Yes, many poor stations with low viewership would go into a death spiral that would result in far fewer channels. On the other hand, these remaining channels would be ones people actually watched. I see this as a win-win-win for the consumer, fewer better channels with an overall lower average bill.
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Only if you assume all people will want the same set of ~17 popular channels.
How about a "network á la carte" system, where you don't get to pick just ESPN, but all it's bundled channels as well?
I don't quite know the structure of this bundling, but I'd assume you'd end up giving the viewers a choice of some 10-30 bundles, each one containing just 1 or 2 popular channels and a dozen or so less popular ones.
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>I don't quite know the structure of this bundling, but I'd assume you'd end up giving the viewers a choice of some 10-30 bundles, each one containing just 1 or 2 popular channels and a dozen or so less popular ones.
Isn't that exactly the system we have now? People only want 1-2 dozen channels but end up subscribed to ten times that because the others are included whether they want them or not.
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They will follow the money (Score:2)
Higher than what the content providers get from the cable providers, but still less than what you pay for the cable package. Which seems like a pretty decent deal.
Content providers like the WWE are already rolling out their own internet offerings [time.com]. Other content providers are known to be considering the same.
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Now somebody just needs to mention Nazis....
Shit
It gets worse (Score:4, Insightful)
On 17 channels, how many actual shows are being watched...
Most people would be financially better off just buying what they like on iTunes, even at $3/episode.
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Especially when they don't even have commercials!
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This sounds great but the math doesn't work out. If most people watch 17 channels let's say it's really 13 channels they have to pay 4 (removing the big 4 over the air channels). Let's assume they watch 2 shows on each channel (which seems fair). Most shows have 22 episodes a season (yes, some have less but then you also have daily shows and weekly shows that go all year). So 26 shows times 22 episodes times 3 dollars = 1716 dollars a year or $143 dollars a month. That is more than most people spend on cabl
You could have had Real Madrid... (Score:2)
RealMadrid App - TV In-App Purchase - 4.99 [apple.com]
How much was your cable again? Did it cost more than $4.99?
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How many apps would I need to purchase ?
How many teams do you really like? Ten? So, $50?
How much is a sports package that lets you even watch soccer, much less the others... and you get more out of the apps than you do out of a TV subscription. And you get options for the video, like watching out and about or airplay to a big screen...
Monopoly cable companies (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in rural Texas and have one choice for Internet and TV. I pay $128 a month for 250 channels and a 30MBit connection. I watch the following channels:
- BBC America
- SyFy
- Travel
- History
- HGTV
- USA
- Animal Planet
- Local affiliate for Revolution TV show
- My kids watch Nick Jr. and Nick, sometimes Disney
Maybe 10 channels.. what a waste of money. I have the least amount of channels I can get and still qualify for the bundle. If I could get BBC America, I would gladly cut cable, as the rest I can get online.
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You can buy individual shows from Amazon for $1.99 an episode. They have many of the shows that air on cable. Make a list of the shows you and your kids watch. See what is on Netflix and Amazon (both Prime streaming or pay-per-episode streaming). You might find that you'd save money by getting your shows from there instead of cable.
The Wall still relevant 35 years later (Score:5, Insightful)
So even with 189 channels, Pink Floyd is still pretty close with the lyrics from "Nobody's Home"
I've got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from.
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Bruce Springsteen got it even closer with "57 Channels and Nothing on"
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"Shit to choose from" more accurately describes the offering than "nothing on."
Same problem as always... (Score:5, Funny)
Wife is addicted to crap TV. I would cancel my $200/mo U-Verse service in a second if she'd let me.
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What does she watch? Are there other ways to watch them?
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Or downgrade her?
Re:Same problem as always... (Score:5, Funny)
Wives are a bit like Windows. Once you upgrade from girlfriend to wife, it's like upgrading from a previous Windows version to a later. You can, technically, go back, but it usually costs you a lot of time and effort, and if you're not careful a lot of your stuff is suddenly gone.
Re:Same problem as always... (Score:5, Funny)
This makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
I am convinced that the price per channel would go up if everyone was able to purchase channels a la carte.
It costs $X to produce all the content, and they need to charge each customer more than $Y (where y = x / number of customers) on average in order to make a profit. Everybody knows no one could possibly be watching 200 channels. But if all of a sudden people decide they want to only pay for 20 channels, then everybody is going to be paying the same price for just those 20 channels.
People want a la carte because they think it will be cheaper, but it probably won't be on average. For example It'll be cheaper for people who watch 5 channels and more expensive for people who watch 30.
The real way to save money on a la carte, is to cut out the middle man (e.g. the cable companies). If you can purchase content directly from the supplier (e.g. from HBO, or comedy central, etc), that's however many less salaraies that need to be paid by your subscription costs.
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If you can purchase content directly from the supplier (e.g. from HBO, or comedy central, etc), that's however many less salaraies that need to be paid by your subscription costs.
Of course, you'll also end up paying for more channels.
I like my movies and have pretty much all the movie channels my cable provider offers: HBO, Cinemax (same parent company), Showtime, The Movie Channel (same parent company), Starz, Encore (same parent company), and Epix. So I'd end up with those, because they produce original programming, but I'd also end up with subscriptions to Sony, Universal, Disney, Paramount, etc.
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Yes it would, but your bill would still go down. Only thing you lose is the pissing match about how many "channels" you can brag that you have.
Not true. Some channels will go away no matter what. Other channels will find customers don't value the
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At 17 out of 189 channels, you could let people pay tenfold for the popular channels, and they'd still pay less.
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Likely so, but even then the cost of paying for just that one channel that you do want to watch will likely be substantially lower than the package that you now pay for which includes all the other crap channels you do not want to watch.
I
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Imagine if there's this shirt that you want to buy, but its only sold in a package for $200 with 4 other shirts sized XXXL which you will never wear. Does it even make sense to buy the bundle?
Yeah and imagine if the shirt by itself were $190, then paying $200 for a 5 pack (where you can;t use 4 of them doesn't sound so bad). We live in a world where the shirt companies just need $200 from every customer and they have unlimited shirts. charging $200 for a shirt seems outrageous so they try to help you rationalize by giving 5 shirts for the price of 1.
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Its even more obvious that a-la-carte will not necessarily be cheaper when you look at packages with foreign language channels. I don't think the viewership patterns are any different for other packages, just not so glaringly obvious.
My wife is Japanese. Our pay TV provider carries one Japanese language channel (NHK World Premium). It is bundled in a premium package with about a dozen Chinese channels (a mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin). Neither of us speaks any Chinese dialect, so it is just the one c
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And 36 are shopping channels (Score:3)
Does this number include the duplicate HD channels, the spanish channels, the religious channels, or the pay-per-view channels? 36 shopping channels? Really? REALLY PEOPLE?!? AMAZON ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YA?!?!?
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You just explain why people watch only such a small subset of channels.
For you the Spanish channels may not be interesting, for someone else they may be all they watch.
And be glad that Amazon is not good enough for all of us! They're monopolistic enough already. Try to imagine a world where the only place to buy stuff is Amazon (and, where the only place someone can sell stuff, is Amazon). Just the though of it scares me.
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But think about the amount of money spent to create and maintain 36 separate shopping channels and the amount of money spent to produce long infomercials and then think about the fact that there are enough people buying all this crap to not only pay for all of that but to turn a profit. Barnum was right.
Satellite too. (Score:2)
I dumped Dish earlier this year. Same reasons; too many commercials on the few channels I did watch, and their last price hike crossed the $50 line.
They tried to convince me stay by offering a free upgrade to HD, but I told them I didn't have an HDTV. That is not strictly speaking true, my TV will do 720P, but it does not have an HDMI input (it has component, composite and S-video.) But close enough. All these HDMI-only boxes are useless (including yours Apple.) And no I'm not replacing my TV until it dies.
Anti-competative measures (Score:5, Insightful)
17 seems pretty high (Score:2)
Before we cut the cable, our family watched:
PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, E and A&E
We switched to a pure NetFlix and HD antenna environment and couldn't think of going back. We even upgraded all the TVs in the house with the first year savings. Even the ESPN "exclusive" stuff (college basketball and football) can be streamed from somewhere for free.
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Even the ESPN "exclusive" stuff (college basketball and football) can be streamed from somewhere for free.
Just out of curiosity, what are those (legal) options? I would care far less about ESPN if I could get Monday Night Football legally on my TV somewhere else...
Re: 17 seems pretty high (Score:2)
Could always hit up a sports bar? You don't /have/ to drink so it could be free. If you are there with friends, volunteer to be thr dedicated driver and you may get free soda and/or coffee.
Re: 17 seems pretty high (Score:2)
We switched to just Netflix+UnblockUS about a year ago. OTA is pretty much useless around here (Saskatchewan, Canada).
Still paying $90/mo for internet, though. To be fair its 100Mbps, which is mostly for the higher bandwidth limit.
57 Channels... (Score:2)
...and nothing on. The Boss said it well.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
$60+ for ESPN (Score:4, Informative)
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Wrong conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that most people only watch a few channels doesn't really mean that a la carte would be cheaper overall.
Imagine that there are two channels. It takes a hundred bucks to keep the channel airing for a month. We have two viewers, A and B. A likes channel 1, and B likes channel 2, and they dislike the other channel. Right now, they each pay $100 to watch both channels, although they only look at one. Each channel gets paid $50 per bill.
So imagine that we switched to A la carte. Now A only subscribes to 1, and B only subscribes to 2. They channels still need the same amount of money to stay on the air, so what is the new price? subscribing to channel 1 is $100, and subscribing to channel 2 is $100 too. both channels get the same amount of money, both people pay the same bill... and they now get half the programming. Success?
So let's say that now ESPN charges $20 per subscriber. They do so, because they believe that the value they provide to the average subscriber is about $20. Let's say I don't like ESPN, Well, ESPN didn't get any less valuable, it's just that I will not pay the $20, and said $20 are going to be passed on as rate hikes to the people that want to watch the channel.
So while some people that really just watch very few, cheap channels, might get some savings, if your 17 channels include ESPN, Disney Channel, CNN, AMC and HBO, guess what? You will probably be paying a whole lot more than before, as unbundling makes every single channel more expensive, and you just happened to like 'anchor' channels that can really ask for a premium.
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The income for a channel is based on what the market (subscribers, advertisers) will pay. The channel has to create its content based on that income. This basically means that in your scenario, if both viewers wanted only channel 1, they would pay half the cost.
Channel 2 would be without viewers, and would have the hard choice of either creating attractive content to get its viewer back, or
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The reason your example works out like that is the channels have equal costs, which is unrealistic.
Let's say channel 1 costs $80/subscriber and channel 2 costs $20. So the total is still $100 with 2 subscribers.
Now they unbundle. A, which likes channel 1, now pays $160/month. B pays only $40/month.
My example is taking advantage of the difference between popularity (50% each) and cost (80% vs 20%). Perhaps in real life, the channel which costs $20 would only get 20% of the subscribers, in which case they'd s
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well they would be higher if you subscribed to 20 channels.
I guess the point is losing variety that's available on a whim.
maybe have a pay as you go? but then again, you have payperview already... and in other news netflix subscribers on average watch 0.001% of the available content.
We HAVE to have a la carte! (Score:2)
It'll stop the ESPNs and CNNs from extorting cable providers. ESPN charges a BOATLOAD for licensing because they know that cable providers can't risk losing the 33% or so of their base for whom that would be a showstopper. Now, if we have a la carte, do you think that 1/3 of the customer base will pay 3 times as much each for ESPN (that would probably be about $25/month) to maintain pricing parity? NO!
It'll also eliminate the garbage channel suites (with clones repeating the same content) as well has put
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ESPN and CNN are forcing cable to bundle, not the other way around.
Did you know ESPN is owned by Disney? They force sports fans to get Disney kids
Works both ways.
Putting pressure on the cable companies does nothing. Write congress, not much likely to happen there.
Drop to basic service if you don't want bundles.
Ala Carte my ass (Score:2)
You all know that they have the technology - via the digital set-top boxes - to only charge you for the minutes you watch, but no-one even talks about that. Why am I paying for ESPN even when I'm watching NBC?
That's why the cable companies are "fighting" ala carte & will finally give in. They don't want folks really thinking about this.
If my phone company can charge me by the minute why can't the cable TV company?
Try 8 (Score:2)
>"Average American Cable Subscriber Gets 189 Channels and Views 17"
I must be above average then (or perhaps below average), since I get something like 300+ channels and watch maybe 8?
Ones I can get over the air (so I don't count those 6, of which I might even watch only 3)+
History
Science
NatGeo
SciFi
AMC
Epix
Encore
WGN
It's the Sports (Score:4, Informative)
It would be interesting to see if those 17 average out to specific channels, or categories of channels. i.e. Sports Broadcasts.
Honestly, I'd be a cord cutter and I know a lot of other people who would as well, if there were *reliable* alternate way to get the sporting events I want to watch. Baseball, Hockey, Soccer, Auto Racing, just to name a few that you can't really get outside of a cable subscription. Football *could* be piled in there as well, mostly because there are relatively few games on the broadcast channels on any given weekend for a given region. However, NFL is probably the *most* available of any sport.
I never watch anything else that can't be reliably streamed from Netflix, Prime, Hulu, etc. But I have to pay for all of it to get the sports. ):
My Guess for Ala-Carte Rates... (Score:2)
1-5 channels $80
6-10 channels $90
11-15 channels $100
16-20 channels $120
21+ channels $150
The average bill goes up, people get less variety, and everyone is happy that we're not paying for stuff we rarely watch.
So be it... (Score:4, Insightful)
The data seems to support the notion that consumers are better off subscribing to channels a la carte, but cable companies are of the opinion that 'the price of cable TV wouldn't change much if channels were served à la carte because content providers won't sell the most popular programs to cable companies unless the provider's other channels are also served up.'
Then cable will die.
When a company decides it is better to not provide value to it's customers, and there is now a plethora of other options, they will soon find themselves without customers.
Already "cut the cord" (Score:2, Interesting)
When I moved a year ago I haven't signed back up for satellite or cable at the new house. Honestly, its just not worth the bill. I pay $8 per month for Netflix and paid $50 one time for a decent HDTV antenna. That gives me plenty of stuff to browse around on and basic broadcast TV. If HBO made HBO GO available as a separate service I'd probably get it just for Game of Thrones, but I'm still doing OK without it (honestly, I'm torrenting it, but I'd be willing to pay $5/month for HBO GO if they'd do it).
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I wouldn't. 5 episodes into season 4, and every single one is boring the hell out of me. GoT may have jumped the shark.
And if you have any patience at all, you can eventually rent the DVDs from Netflix for a few cents.
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Yes, and I'm saying what I'd be willing to pay for it. Much more than that and I will simply continue to get what I want through other channels. Valve (via Steam) has already proven that it tends to be better to sell digital goods to lots of people are cheap prices than fewer people at high prices. I'll pay $5/month for HBO GO . . . or they can get nothing.
Oh yeah? (Score:5, Funny)
.
How many of those are broadcast? (Score:2)
Exclusive Content... (Score:2)
The only hope is that enough people cut the cord so that cable companies cannot afford to buy up all the content any more. Then the content creators realize they don't need cable and can
Cord cutting (Score:2)
That's why I cut the cord 5 years ago (cable was free from previous employer, when I had to pay for it, cut the cord. When we moved to HD in 2011, got myself an HVR-1600, built an external antenna, reinstalled BeyondTV and never looked back).
I get all Montreal channels, and PBS Mountain Lake (14 channels so far). No luck for Vermont channels, Mount Royal is blocking LOS to Mt Mansfield. I thought I would miss some shows, but on some days I would need 3 tuners in the HTPC to be able to record everything. I w
Yeah, excelsior (Score:3)
In 1996, my rural cable system sent us a big mailer: GOOD NEWS, WE'RE ADDING SIX CHANNELS!
As it turned out, there were three religious networks and three new shopping channels. I sent them a letter (they were not an ISP back then) suggesting they combine all that crap into one channel, call it The Jeezus Shopping Network, and that would free up the other five analog channels for stuff I actually wanted to watch.
Never heard back from them.
Just went through this (Score:4)
Called Uverse Monday, was on hold 40 minutes and they disconnected me.
Called again Tues, was on hold 40 minutes and they disconnected me.
Called again this morning, ended up agreeing to fewer channels, no HD, no Showtime, for the same damned price I'd been paying the last 4 years.
I'm thinking I'll spend tomorrow researching laws (I live in California) to see if that verbal contract is valid, and what my options are.
Eff ESPN (Score:2)
No Capitalism here. (Score:2)
Nielsen statics are skewed (Score:2)
duplicate channels (Score:2)
I'll Be the Control Group (Score:2)
Next time they do the survey, I volunteer to be part of the baseline sample.
Channels subscribed: 0
Channels watched: 0
Channels worth watching: 0
Companies like HBO should go a-la-carte (Score:2)
HBO gets $x per month for every subscriber who subscribes to it via cable/satellite/etc.
If HBO offered an a-la-carte offering (basically the current HBO go streaming offering but available to anyone and not just those who subscribe to HBO) and charged $y for it (where $y is higher than $x) they could make MORE money than they do right now. Anyone who switched from HBO-via-cable to HBO-a-la-carte would be an increase in revenue. As would anyone who doesn't currently get HBO but who takes up the a-la-carte of
It's the networks fault... (Score:3)
Honestly if they did shows "ala-carte" things would be different. I would GLADLY pay for TV shows I like Fox cancels Almost Human and replaces it with another cop show that has a lower average IQ rating so it will work better for the typical FOX viewer.
IF shows were Ala-Carte I could give my money directly to the show creators. Betting Firefly would be brought back to life in a heartbeat if FOX did not want to let that IP rot and Die.
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Fox cancels Almost Human
Fox also canceled Alien Nation, so I'm hardly surprised. Over two decades later, and Fox is still cancelling SF shows.
17 seems high (Score:3)
I would think that the average would be lower, especially in this economy. The "network" channels plus a few of the basic cable channels. Maybe eight or nine total for the most part, with very rare ventures into maybe two or three more. Do people really sign up for "pay" channels anymore?
I think that if people could really buy ala carte instead of having to buy nearly 200 channels or nothing, the numbers might be different.
We dumped cable during dot com bust (I was out of work at the time) and went to Netflix. You can't imagine what reducing your TV budget from $120 a month to $6 a month does to your budget. We also invested in this think called an Antenna, which was surprisingly cheap. Our homeowner's association did not allow antennas (thereby handing a monopoly to a local really terrible cable company) but the communications act of 1996 invalidated that.
We had cable again for a short time in 2006 to try out the latest crop of DVRs, and they stink. Sluggish response and not enough disk space. (I think I calculated once that DVR disk space costs 12 times as much as the same space purchased at Best Buy.) Dumped all of that at the beginning of the current recession, got a roku instead. (A one time cost that was less than one month in cable TV fees.) Wife and child watch shows a year or so out of date, but they have gotten used to it, and they can binge watch. (Which isn't necessarily a good thing....)
I need internet as I work from home, but fortunately fiber is available in my area, so I don't have to deal with comcrap. Now we have two Rokus, one upstairs and one downstairs, wife has a Hulu account and daughter has her own Netflix account, and all I'm paying for is the network.
The cable TV model is obsolete for several reasons -- real time vs demand, package vs ala carte, and unreasonable cost. But I think it will take an older generation (what I call the "tv tray generation") dying out before the cable companies finally go under. But it's inevitable.
Me? I really don't have much time for TV. Fridays is "pizza and movie night", and we take turns picking the movie, but other than that and The Big Bang Theory, I'm largely ignorant of what's on the tube. And -- a little insight -- you'd be astonished at how much productive time that frees up.
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Ending up being owned by Jeff Bezos?
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The homeless typically don't watch much TV either. Correlation is not causation.