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The Cable-Cutting Dream Is Kind of a Myth
- PaulHoule 10y agoJust wait until today's teens grow up. Most of them have never gotten in the linear TV habit, they prefer to watch Youtube and don't have the attention span to sit through a commercial break. 10 years from now, cable TV is d00med.
- Finnucane 10y agoI'm 52 and I don't have the attention span to sit through a commercial break. That's what the ff button on the DVR is for. The new TCM-Criterion streaming service gets us one step closer to not needing the cable tv service any more.
- lfowles 10y agoNot like we didn't change the channel during commercials back in the day anyways!
- digler999 10y agoI'd say the golden age of TV consumption contributed to shortened attention spans by conditioning us to focus for ~10minutes and get interrupted by 5 minutes of random nonsense.
- dexterdog 10y agoCommercials were never that bad back in the day.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- awalton 10y agoIs it really though? I haven't had a cable subscription since I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, didn't have one for four years before that, and I have yet to be convinced that I'm actually missing anything - anything I care to watch can be found trivially online (even without piracy, though often you have to sit through ads...) My demand for content hasn't really changed, just my will and desire to put up with bullshit. I think the only real losers with cord cutting are people who like sports, as they all refuse to get with the times and have ridiculous region locking on all of their content. Luckily I do not suffer from the affliction...
- hkmurakami 10y agoI'm in the same boat. But certainly we're in the minority in this country for not really caring too much about sports.
- adventurer 10y agoI'm sort of in the same boat? I don't want cable but it is cheaper bundling it with internet. I receive two extra channels than I would get from an antenna and the cable company tells shareholders their subscriber base is still going strong.
- CoolGuySteve 10y agoOne thing I'm noticing with cable-cutting is that the market is getting more fragmented. Instead of just getting Netflix and watching free Hulu with ads, now you have to get Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, pay for Hulu, buy the Starz app, pay for MLB, etc. in order to compose all the content you want. It's equivalent to buying cable packages where you spend money on a bundle engineered to have only 20% of what you want. The only difference is that it's all video-on-demand now.
- serge2k 10y ago> The only difference is that it's all video-on-demand now And ad free, or pretty much (HBO sometimes has a minute of ads before episodes, at least those are sometimes worth watching. That's how I found about westworld, for example). I'd buy cable if it was ad free (and cheaper). Right now I have netflix, hulu plus, amazon prime (+ motortrend for 5 bucks), hbo now, and nhl gamecenter. It's not cheap, and it's not the best experience going through apps. It's still better than ads.
- Waterluvian 10y agoMy bank account says otherwise. I have a $30/mo Internet bill and a $30/mo phone bill. Both get me unlimited Internet at good bandwidth, so I just watch a metric ton of YouTube, Twitch, etc. I've never had any other monthly telecom service.
- jbpetersen 10y agoHow'd you manage those deals?
- dmoy 10y ago$30/month on phone is not hard if you don't use an overlarge amount of data (or if you never talk on the phone and use <5GB from TMobile's old 5GB for $30 but with only 100 minutes deal). idk about internet, "good bandwidth" in my area is >>$50. Probably depends on where you are and what your definition of good bandwidth is.
- tnorthcutt 10y ago"Both get me unlimited Internet" seems to indicate that there's not a cap on transfer for the GP's phone service, which is surprising at $30/month (in the US, anyway).
- dmoy 10y agoAh yea I missed that. Must be talking about the t mobile deal, but not mentioning the massive throttling? Or have some grandfathered plan that isn't relevant to the rest of us?
- Waterluvian 10y agoCanada. Wind Mobile and Teksavvy with a grandfathered plan and 6 $1 off referrals. To be fair mobile is unlimited up to 6GB then throttled back to what seems to be about 4 or 5mbit download. I hit that cap only once when I was away from home for a week and used it as a constant hotspot.
- slg 10y agoI can't read the pay-walled article, but based off my own habits I do wonder what has really changed. I don't have cable, but I pay Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Sling, MLB, and the NFL anywhere from $8-$25 per month. At this point, that isn't much different than the old model. I'm not saving any real money and I still pay for plenty of content that I have absolutely zero interest in ever watching. The only difference is that instead of paying a single middleman for my TV, I moved slightly upstream and pay a handful of providers.
- khedoros1 10y agoI've had trouble getting to other paywalled articles through the "web" link, but this one worked fine for me.
- jgh 10y agoNo it isn't.
- gozur88 10y agoSure, that's why ESPN lost over a million subscribers in the last two months. If there's any evidence people are eschewing internet video and going back to cable it will be the first I've seen.
- devoply 10y ago"This thing sucks... I want 1,000 channels with not a single show that I actually want to watch. I love being an ADD TV viewer that just surfs channels"
- bryan11 10y agoSo you cut the cable service and replace it with internet service. The money goes to the same cable company, right? In my area, you have one choice for cable internet service. with the fastest internet plan and largest data cap available in my area, the data caps allow about 120 minutes of HD video daily without incurring extra fees. It seems like the cable companies are moving to a metered service where you pay for what you use, much like old-style phone service where you paid by the minute. It looks like cable cutting is going to affect how shows are produced and provided, but overall it's a money maker for internet providers.
- RyJones 10y agoI suspect the reason Comcast pushes discounted internet with cable is to subsidize the cable subscriber number. I haven't had cable TV since they switched to digital in 2008 or 2009 here in ~Seattle. They can't sell ads against the internet-only customers, so we don't matter.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nickthemagicman 10y agoJust get Sling TV. Its essentially cable.
- jimhefferon 10y agoIt is worth a significant amount to me that Fox News not get any of my money. Or the Catholic channel.
- grendelt 10y agoCable-cutting is the act of cutting cable TELEVISION, not just cable service outright. It surely can be done but not if you're addicted to watching all the same programming as cable has. A smart cable company will view themselves as an ISP who is also a TV service rather than a TV service who is also an ISP. I haven't had cable TV service for years. I generally abhorred most content on cable TV, even on the "cerebral" channels. NatGeo, Discovery, and History all went toward more "reality" programming. I found myself watching PBS more and more. I don't have a local PBS affiliate that I can get over the air, so I got a small Ku-band FTA satellite dish and pull in a PBS feed that way [it doubled as an Outernet receiver dish]. (Though much of PBS' content is also available online for free.) Other than the occasional free streaming documentary, I just don't watch TV and save about $50-60 a month. [I did put an antenna in my attic so I could watch the Olympics, but even then I found streaming them online was still a better experience. Because, my god, the commercials!] Also, here's a non-paywall version of the story: http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/2016113010512/the-cable-cutting-dream-is-kind-of-a-myth.aspx http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/2016113...
- nilved 10y agoNice try, I replaced it with piracy.
- deerpig 10y agoToo many HN links point to items behind paywalls... That said, its all what you're used to. I've lived for nearly 30 years in odd corners of East and South East Asia and most of that time I had no access to cable or satellite, or the content that was available was so dreadful that it wasn't worth having. Over the last four years in Phnom Penh the only channel worth watching was BBC news and after that vanished the only reason to get cable would be so my wife can watch Thai Soaps with crappy Khmer voiceovers. If I had an American bank account, I could get netflix or other net services like spotify, but I don't, so I'm cut off from those services. Before bit torrent and ok bandwidth, expats shared VHS tapes of TV shows from whatever country you came from. The English and Korean's seemed especially well organized. For movies, local night markets sold pirate VHS, then VCD (which was never a thing in the West from what I heard) and now DVDs. For a while you could buy legal first run VCDs in Bangkok and Hong Kong that cost less than going to the cinema If you lived near a big city you could also go to the cinema. The cinema is very cheap in most of Asia even fo first run western movies. Even better is that many times western movies are shown in two ways, one theatre has "original soundtrack" with subtitles and the other would have painfully bad dubs into Thai or Khmer. Most people go to the dubbed version, so many times the theater with the original soundtrack is half empty! If you have access to bittorrent and an internet connection that can handle YouTube there is certainly no reason to have cable. And even for my wife, she can still get the Thai Soaps on DVD at the market that aren't on YouTube. I've been told that if you are into sports, cable is the only real option most of the time. But then, that's what sports bars are for, and there is no shortage of them in Phnom Penh. And if you're into football (not to be confused with American football), pretty much every local cheap restaurant has multiple big flat screen TVs that only seem to be able to show channels with little figures running around on huge green fields kicking balls to each other. Though from time to time, when the boys aren't looking, the girls will briefy switch to music videos before the boys realize the screen is no longer green color and demand that it be switched back to the game :) People are pretty much the same everywhere...
- gumby 10y agoI wonder about the statistics on this. My only choice for internet in my houses (residence and holiday house) is Comcast. For both, it's cheaper to subscribe to an internet+TV deal than internet alone. I just taped the cablecard to my modem for when I cancel service. ut I'm sure I count as a subscriber. Interestingly the vacation house has been selected as a Nielsen home. But since there's no TV the rep has told me they won't count me. Every couple of months though I get a request to have my TV usage tracked. I'm sure ignoring non-TV watchers helps them give encouraging stats to their customers by reducing the denominator!
- teilo 10y agoThis article entirely misses the point, and is out of touch with the reason people skip cable. Cost only marginally comes into it. It comes down to this. Which would you rather spend your money on? Live TV which you have to use a DVR to watch at leisure, and even then you are limited to only that which is currently being aired; or on-demand streaming, where you can choose exactly what to watch, when to watch it, without filling up a DVR, skipping through commercials, etc. Not only do I pay for Netflix, HBO Now, Starz, Showtime, and Amazon Prime. I also purchase season passes for shows I want on Amazon Video or Apple TV. I likely still pay less than I would for cable. I have no interest in live TV, and for the rare events I care about (such as the Super Bowl), those stream for free online. Even if I pay the same or slightly more, I don't care. It's not about the cost. It's about the freedom.