Time Warner Deal Is How Comcast Will Fight Cord Cutters 424
An anonymous reader writes "This NY Times articles makes the case that Comcast's planned acquisition of Time Warner Cable is part of a strategy to fight back against the millions of people ditching cable subscriptions. 'The acquisition rests on the assumption that as people cut back on their monthly TV plans, the cable lines coming into their homes won't lose their value.' The idea is that switching away from cable TV will simply make consumers more beholden to their internet connections, and removing (i.e. acquiring) the competition will let Comcast raise rates without losing customers. The article concludes, 'The steady price increases in broadband rates cast a pall over any cord cutter's dreams. It's possible that you might still save money now by cutting off your cable. But if you plan to watch a lot of TV over the Internet, don't expect to save money forever.'"
The only thing they need to do... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is not be messing with the price all the time.
Somehow, mysteriously, the price changes slightly every month and it's always up.
Once the promotions are gone, it creeps up a bit every month. (The promotion ending for '1 year sign up price" is a big jump.)
Eventually, people start looking at the bill trying to figure out how to reduce it. That act, is what kills them. You don't want people thinking about the bill, you want them to just pay it.
I'll be dropping the TV / Movie portion of my cable in a month or two (summer means outside, and moving to a single abode again). But I wouldn't if it wasn't $45 a month more than it was when I moved in.
Re:Cellular is the business model (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally fine with that if allow anyone to lay cable.
Right now, only ONE cable company is allowed to operate in any one area. Which means they cannot compete with each other.
make it so that they can compete and they can try any program they want. Non-competitive ideas will get priced out of the market.
Nationalization (Score:4, Interesting)
If the government is going to allow for basically a single regulated entity to control the majority of cable and internet service in the US, maybe they should just nationalize it and cut out the middle man. After all, what is the difference between a single provider that the government says what it can and cannot do and the government just doing it? Didn't the US learn enough with the "too big to fail" model? This merger has disaster written all over it. If anything, instead of consolidations, they should be breaking up these megacorporations to have more competition, not less.
Re:what price increases? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Germany, I pay for 100Mbps/20Mbps (Down-/Upstream) EUR 25 per month (at current exchange rate around 34 USD/month).
Well, at least the company selling the service offers the product as "100Mbps/20Mbps", but in fact when the technician came and connected it, we saw sync-speed of 100Mbps/31Mbps and his comment: "Yeah, we actually sell only what we can guarantee".
I have measured it many times, and it is really effectively 100Mbps/30 Mbps
While I was in the US from 2009 onward, I had the feeling that the US has the worst internet connection (to homes) of all the countries I spent time in (except emerging markets). And it was the most expensive I have seen so far.
The elephants in the room. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cellular is the business model (Score:3, Interesting)
And in that case it will be either that the ISPs has to install firewalls to filter out "unwanted" traffic that otherwise will drive up your bill.
And their incentive to do this is what again? ISPs make money off 'spam' ( in the generic sense ) much as the USPS does.. So why would they care? And where else will you go?
Even our local city government gets a bit of revenue that way, by charging to issue permits to solicit door to door.
Municipal fiber? (Score:2, Interesting)
How about Municipalities or States laying publicly owned fiber next to the publicly owned roads and then having private companies deliver services over those cables so we eliminate the natural monopoly?
We can run fiber to any number of "central offices" where private companies install their gear to deliver voice, video, data...etc.
Installing multiple cables to deliver the exact same service seems like a waste of resources.
Re:what price increases? (Score:2, Interesting)
very little new customers out there.
The customers are all 3 inches tall, or what?
Whence comes this bizarre aversion which Americans seem to have developed to the words "few" and "fewer" recently?
It's like the people who write "loose" when they really meant "lose", or the ones who can't distinguish among "their", "they're", and "there".
It does serve one useful purpose. It immediately indicates whether you are dealing with one of the sheople. If you are, they will thoughtlessly and unconsciously make the same error because so many others are making that error. Such errors suddenly become more and less trendy in a very observable manner. That is, after all, what makes them sheople: they are unable to be very aware of their actions and decisions, preferring to operate in a sort of zombie autopilot state of consciousness. Thus, almost overnight, you see these errors everywhere despite no central authority coordinating everyone involved.
If you try to correct them, they will resent the implication that they should be asked to think. They will focus on the lack of damage from such grammatical errors, calling you "grammar nazi", and miss the actual point. The actual point is about mindlessly going through the motions with no real awareness, something that causes real damage in the world (consider how many car accidents could be avoided if people routinely considered what they were doing prior to acting, how much propaganda would not be believed, how many elections could have ended differently).