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.'"
Cellular is the business model (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cellular is the business model (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Unwanted traffic in a somewhat escalating scale:
Don't ever think that this will end up well.
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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.
Re:Cellular is the business model (Score:4)
You're conflating the issue....
The sender may pay the your local government for the permit but the end recipient is not. Whereas with this deal, that's what OP Is saying. Same for the USPS, no one has to pay to receive their mail in a bulk package and then filter out the wanted and unwanted.
It's not like cellular since if I have 10 minutes left on my plan and I need to make a call I know exactly how long I have and can end it without any overages. Whereas with the internet I have no control over if I get DoS'ed, and even if I am, any firewall I install will be past the point of meter so I'll still be charged. Plus video advertisements which would then be directly costing me money.
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With that kind of deep packet inspection, they could even alter your data stream. What a bunch of GREAT SERVICE. Comcast is a WONDERFUL COMPANY that can go straight to THE ICE CREAM SHOP FOR DELICIOUS TREATS.
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.
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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.
What about laying fiber? My cable choice between Brighthouse and FiOS shows this can be done.
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How many cable companies do you have in your area?
How many land line phone companies do you have?
One
This is by law. Its a stupid law. Change it, and then those companies can do whatever they want with their pricing. If they offer inflated prices people will jump to the other company.
And for the record, the fiber is usually only allowed by that land line phone company. If YOU try to lay fiber you will get arrested. You can't do it. you can't get a permit. And even if you do, a court will invalidate it.
Re: Cellular is the business model (Score:3)
If you have portions of the outside of your dwelling that are "exclusive access" to you as a tenant, then the property owner can not legally prevent you from putting up a dish. One of the few things the FCC gets right.
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that's only in some tiny hick towns
the problem is that even in NYC there aren't enough customers for two companies to operate in the same area once you get past the huge capital costs of installing your own cable under the ground or on poles and paying the city rental fees
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That's the problem is a lot of cities like to collect rent from anybody who wants to lay any kind of infrastructure, and even then they grant exclusivity to one provider.
The reason google fiber is only in these "hick" areas is because they don't have to deal with these kinds of restrictions. There was one city government that tried to add one of these restrictions to google, so they pulled out of that city, and now their politicians are in hot water over it.
http://stopthecap.com/2013/10/... [stopthecap.com]
Just a month earlier, council members including Terry Goodman, Curt Skoog, and Richard Collins seemed intent to pelt Google with a range of objections and unusual questions that suggested a lack of basic knowledge about fiber broadband.
According to those in attendance, Skoog in particular seemed far out of his depth, questioning if 1,000/1,000Mbps was fast enough to provide connections for 6-12 computer terminals inside a local school.
I'd do the same
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They want 8 dollars a customer? For what? The use of their poles?
Fuck that. I'll bury the line. Doubtless they still want the money because it isn't about collecting a fee for using a service. Its a toll collected because they can.
That is bullshit. If this were more widely publicized I think these fees might go away.
Re:Mexico City (Score:4, Insightful)
The obvious solution to that is regulation that alows for CLECs in cable and Internet just they way they were allowed for in phone service. This whole stupid mess is just the result of a bunch of Ayn Rand cultists thinking that the market would magically sort itself out if we let all of the jack*ss corporations run amok.
Los Angeles had multiple competitive DSL providers 15 years ago and it's WAY more spread out than New York City.
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No, the solution is to invalidate all the exclusivity agreements and allow anyone with a sound business plan to get a permit to run their own fiber/coax/copper/whatever (including municipal governments). The reason the market isn't sorting itself out is *because* of regulation.
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Re: Cellular is the business model (Score:5, Insightful)
Dont forget that the us taxpayer heavily subsidized the deployment of the lies. Dont perpetuate the lie that the cable companies did it with thier own money.
Say what?? (Score:4, Informative)
If Comcast is paying $1B to cover a region, and another $100M a year to maintain it, it'll pay that regardless of whether it keeps or loses 50% of its customers. And likewise a competitor will pay exactly the same.
The cost structure you assume is exactly the opposite of what actually happened when phone service was deregulated to allow competition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carrier [wikipedia.org] Costs to maintain the shared wiring infrastructure were split amongst each operator (ILEC, CLEC) rather than multiplied by each additional operator as you suggest.
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If that were true, cable Internet service wouldn't slow down as subscribers are added. But it does, and when that happens, it seems to take a lot of time and investment to upgrade the system. So, in different words, you're
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It wasn't deregulation that broke AT&T's death grip on telecommunications... It was TECHNOLOGY. When microwave links came along, and ANYBODY could put together a nation-wide network without physically layin
Re:Cellular is the business model (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want them to compete, I want them to be regulated. One carrier per region makes more sense.
Telecoms are massively regulated already. If you want things to improve, you need to look at the regulations and decide specifically what changes to make that will cause improvements. Because you can make things worse with either more regulation, or less regulation. Or you can make them better with more regulation, or less regulation. That's why saying, "I want more!" or "I want less!" is just idiotic; the details matter.
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2. As to the costs of installing all this cable and maintaining it. Other countries have multiple ISPs operating in the same area. Explain that.
Please give some examples. I've not seen any. Usually, if multiple ISPs operate competitively in the same area, they are sharing the last mile (owned by the government, or ex-government lines in many cases). But in the context, you are implying that other countries are more likely to have multiple ISPs with independent infrastructure. I don't believe that to be true, but I don't spend lots of time researching telecommunications in areas that don't affect me.
Re:Cellular is the business model (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, only ONE cable company is allowed to operate in any one area. Which means they cannot compete with each other.
I believed this to be the case too, but was corrected on a Streaming Media forum a few months back, and was informed that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 [wikipedia.org] eliminated exclusive cable franchises (or, more accurately, empowered the FCC to overrule such arrangements granted by municipalities). Of course, by 1996, the US cable TV build-out was more or less complete, so there's little opportunity for an upstart to begin laying cable and competing.
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.
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And who maintains the stupid thing? Some giant government union?
I live in California. We deal with CalTrans all the time. They are responsible for building and maintaining our roads.
They do a piss poor job (as in work has to be redone because it wasn't done properly the first time), cost in some cases 10 to 20 times what competitive bids would cost, are slow, and of course have the extreme pleasure of dealing with their political manipulation of state politics.
Yay.
The only way I'd even consider your idea is
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It's not just the cost... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the shitty content. I got rid of cable because I don't actually watch TV any more. Call me a Luddite but I actually read books more then ever. I guess they better start investing in firemen and flame-throwers.
"Cord cutting" (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish they would stop misusing the term "cord cutting" for not subscribing to television while still getting Internet via cable, as it is confusing and stupid. The term originally came about as people stopped paying for land-lines and used their cell phones exclusively instead, and there it made sense.
In this case, as the article points out, "In most American households, the cable cord is the fastest conduit for broadband service. This suggests the canny strategy by which those once-inescapable cable providers might combat the rise of cord cutters: The cable giants will simply become even-more-inescapable Internet giants."
Well duh, it's been that way for a long time. You aren't "cutting the cord" by saving a few bucks by not paying for television but still getting Internet over cable. Even 10 year ago, it was like a $10 difference to not get basic cable. Where cable is losing the big money is on all the premium bundles.
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I wish they would stop misusing the term "cord cutting" for not subscribing to television while still getting Internet via cable, as it is confusing and stupid.
Yeah. They're literally cutting their own balls off by doing that.
Premium bundles (Score:2)
Where cable is losing the big money is on all the premium bundles.
Which they combat by slowly moving commonly viewed 'basic' channels to the next level bundle.
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But what happened next? Comcast decided to switch basic cable from analog to digital to save bandwidth. (Ok, no problem so far - that's actually a good idea). But what did they give basic cable subscribers then? A tiny box which converted the digital signal to 4x3 Standard Definition NTSC television (th
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.
Try again (Score:5, Insightful)
"and removing (i.e. acquiring) the competition will let Comcast raise rates without losing customers."
Nobody in America currently has a choice between Comcast and Time Warner. I hope the DOJ rejects the merger because the resulting company is too big. But the amount of competition in the cable internet market would not change at all.
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Nobody in America currently has a choice between Comcast and Time Warner. I hope the DOJ rejects the merger because the resulting company is too big. But the amount of competition in the cable internet market would not change at all.
Who cares how big they are if it doesn't change the amount of competition?
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Because it affects the future possibilities of competition.
There are little to no future possibilities of direct competition. And the various cable players can always band together to fight indirect competition (such as municipal fiber) which is in fact what has been happening. Sorry, I don't see the difference.
It's true that in a very few markets there's competition between cable companies. Those markets are very few, however, and they already tend to feature indirect competition.
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So because you feel there will probably never be direct competition screw it and ensure there will never be direct competition? Seems a little cart before the horse...
Right now we're talking about cable companies, who can't reasonable share wires. Therefore every cable provider has to build out their own distribution network. In today's economic climate this is essentially unthinkable. When you add that to the long-term contracts granted to cable providers giving them monopoly over the right of way, in many markets there cannot be direct competition. The cable companies have to be destroyed before we can have competition anyway. Might as well consolidate them and then de
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Or, and gosh, I am not sure where I have heard this before, you separate the infrastructure and allow more than one company to sure the cables, similar to the cable companies..
Cable companies are already having problems with bandwidth on coax.
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You are right, and it worked out well for the US financial meltdown in '08.
You know, we bailed out the banks in the nineties, too. Maybe the problem is the bailouts. If they didn't exist, people wouldn't perceive bigger banks as safer, and there would be more competition in banking.
it's to fight the content owners (Score:5, Insightful)
the reason cable bills go up and no one has a choice of channels is because Disney, Discovery, Viacom and everyone else constantly raise prices and only offer their channels in one big bundle. and always add more channels.
when a channel is blacked out on their TV people always blame comcast or direct TV. they should be blaming the channel owner for wanting too much money and not giving any choice of channels.
comcast might not be a saint, but a bigger comcast will mean that any time a channel owner wants a price increase they risk losing more than half their revenue during the blackout. in the past they would pick a small carrier for the price raise since the effect on revenues was pennies
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the government will probably make them put a netflix CDN, but even then netflix isn't a saint either
they have doubled their prices in the past
they constantly lose content
they changed their API to make themselves look good and not pass on the data when content is being removed
if comcast can get the content owners to blink and sell their channels in bundles they can work with netflix since netflix takes care of the crap channels with mostly old syndicated shows
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I think Netflix doubling prices was really just setting up Instant as a separate service. It's unreasonable to expect that the free, then later, $4 instant add-on was going to continue for too long. I wasn't happy with it though, so I dumped the discs.
They do lose content, but they also constantly add new. I imagine they don't have much choice without paying a lot more.
It would be nice if channels were unbundled, but I think that's just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The idea of linear channels jus
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the whole point is that TWC can't do that
Disney and others sell their channels in one bundle take it or leave it. you don't pay, there is a blackout
No thank you Comcast (Score:2)
Cut my cord last year. At the rates they charge and the intermittent and barely-broadband service they provide, I can live without their content.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Good luck with that Comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way I've been willing to deal with a price increase is when they offer me a stupid amount of extra bandwidth. Oh you want to give me 25/10 service for $5 more? Sure. Oh you want to give me 25/25 service for $1 more a month. Heck yeh! You are offering 100/65 for $35 more a month......FUCK YEH!!!!
Comcast's idea: we are raising your rates by $5 this year and we are throttling your connect to 7/1. Me: Go fuck yourself and cancel my account. Comcast: wait?! what?!
Just the past amount of bad blood I've had with cable companies would keep me from doing business with one again. When I bought my house, my real-estate lady thought I was nuts, I checked out all the houses she was going to show me to see if they had cable or FIOS for service (the area around Tampa is broken up into little monopoly zones with either one or the other) and refused to go look at houses that only had access to cable.
As far as having to "pay" things are moving so fast that in 10 years most of the new shows are going to come from any of the old broadcasters. Comcast doesn't represent so much as a horse buggy whip factory, but a store that specialized in selling and delivery horse buggy whips.
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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.
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Cable is regulated?
Enforced separation required... (Score:3)
What you guys need is something akin to what happened with BT here in the UK - Arms-length separation of the infrastructure and the service. Sure, you may only be able to have one cable provider in the city, but if they have to sell non-discriminatory access to other ISPs at the same rates as their own consumer division, then you get the healthy kind of competition. There's a thriving ISP market in the UK, only downside is the big boys keep hoovering up the smaller ones that do too well, meaning if you want to stay away from the big boys you have to keep finding and migrating to a new small one every few years. :(
BT has these rules because of its ex-monopoly status, but personally I think it'd make perfect sense to apply the same rules universally. BT Retail should be able to provide service over Virgin Media's cable infrastructure in an area if that's the most cost effective way of doing it - don't limit my service options to the infrastructure provider's.
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Their value is in the last mile. (Score:3)
Verizon is spending tons of money upgrading last mile to optic fiber. AT&T is already pitching cell tower to home connections. Companies who would be adversely affected if cable companies get too powerful in controlling the distribution channels will fund competitors.
But, in the end, instead of a monopoly we might end up with a duopoly or at the most three choices for home to internet connections. Still I hope this merger does not go through. Cable monopolies could do plenty of damage before viable competition emerges.
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It is cost effective and quite competitive to bring broadband to the street corner pillar boxes or the neighbourhoods for telephone companies. It is the "last mile", often fraction of a mile, that connects individual homes and wiring inside the homes that is prohibitively expensive for the new entrant. That is the real barrier to entry. But as WiFi spec improves, the last mile could be done over the air. Already this technique of mostly wire, but end nodes connected over the air is proving to be very cost effective in most third world rural areas. I have seen regular home phones connecting to the local cell tower in Bangalore some 10 or 15 years ago.
Verizon is spending tons of money upgrading last mile to optic fiber.
Verizon, if you do some research, has stopped or severely reduced rolling out their optic networks. They have shifted their strategy towards building out their mobile networks. They see, as you do, that the last mile is likely to be a wireless solution. However, they are betting that it's the mobile market (smart phones, tablets, etc.) that will provide this service. Why pay for a separate broadband wired service when you can get similar speeds and experience from your HD tablet connected to your TV via
The elephants in the room. (Score:3, Interesting)
Or you could be just like Cox Communications (Score:3)
and have 2 rate increases on internet services in the same year with no additional speed increase.
Future Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Future cost of cable will be this:
$150 per month for cable TV + internet
$140 per month for internet only
Enjoy your options.
I've done my part (Score:5, Informative)
Now, we are not as a community beholden to Time-Warner, but can switch to Verizon as a provider of all things digital (internet, TV, and phone).
Both are desperate to sell you "packages" of services, rather than just internet. Screw them. I call once a year and threaten to ditch them for their competitor. The result is a rate reduced by about 40%.
I do not own a television, nor do I use a land-line phone. I just want internet. Well, that sort of logic falls short with their telephone salespeople. The only threat that works is, "I will totally cancel service from you and will go to your competitor."
"don't expect to save money forever" (Score:2)
"As we are going to suck you dry dear customer, and once we control all mainstream content creation and distribution, we will decide how much we screw you."
LTE and 5G (Score:3)
The problem is the cable is not going to be the only fast route into your home forever. Some people with good coverage are already using a home-based LTE router as their only internet connection. As this becomes more widespread and 5G starts rolling out, the cable companies will have another contender to deal with besides FTTH offerings. The nice thing about wireless as well is typicallty a region is served by more wireless providers than cable companies, so more competition will help keep prices low.
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Not really. What will happen is cell data will get to be as expensive ( its already more for most people as the true unlimited plans are long gone )..
Besides, if it ever did become a threat, Comcast would just toss in 'tiered internet' to squeeze them, or just start buying out the smaller companies ( like sprint and t-mobile )
Netflix, et al (Score:2)
"But if you plan to watch a lot of TV over the Internet, don't expect to save money forever."
Let me stop you right there. If you live in certain areas of the country and pay for Netflix, it's likely you aren't watching ANY TV over the internet with the recent CDN/peering issues going on.
The "orderly transition" (Score:5, Informative)
So, I attended the Streaming Media West [streamingmedia.com] conference last month, and one of the things I came away with was how the existing players (Hollywood, cable companies, etc.) are adamant about ensuring an "orderly transition to IP-based delivery." That is an exact quote from one of the over-the-top (OTT) sessions I went to, where over-the-top refers to content delivered over IP directly to the user from someone other than the broadband provider (e.g., watching a movie from Netflix instead of from your cable company's video-on-demand service).
This is very much the point of the "TV Everywhere" systems by which you login with your cable or satellite credentials in order to watch cable/satellite content on a mobile device or set-top box (iPad, Roku, etc.). It's basically a rear-guard action against the cord-cutters: we'll let you watch the same content on any device, provided you pay the same price for it. Keep paying your cable bill, even if you don't watch cable.
I wrote a long blog about the show here [subfurther.com]. But taking it back to the Comcast / Time Warner deal, the competitive issue is not in individual markets (where, indeed, there's usually only one cable company), but in the power of a combined Comcast / Time Warner to keep creatives in the old system, by using caps, throttling, predatory pricing, and other dirty tricks to hamper genuine Internet TV.
Presumably, once the Justice Department comes to understand the antitrust implications of this deal, they'll immediately launch an investigation. Of Apple.
Why do they 'fight' their customers? (Score:3)
As for the issue of Comcast or Verizon choking services like Netflix, The FCC needs to get off its keister and fix the debacle it made of net neutrality. There are some days I really wish Google/Apple etc... would band together for a hostile takeover of the last mile trolls and reduce them to dumb pipe service providers to lower the access bar for all the content they aggregate. For them a low margin dumb pipe ISP environment would seriously pump up their content distribution capabilities because more folks could afford more access. It seems pretty obvious the telecom industry still holds to much sway over the congress critters to think government will ever roll back their current 'entitled' last mile troll position on its own. In fact they will likely end up being a puppet used by telecom to fight tooth and nail against any such attempt... witness the growing body of legislation directly hindering google FIOS efforts. Someone seriouly want to defend those actions as being 'in the publics best interest'?
Unsurprisingly, I am one of the folks that ditched cable TV. Even when I realized it was an insignificant price drop I still insisted on internet only service. I believe cable TV is broken and has been since they introduced commercials on top of paid subscription. Even so I got a cable subscription once I started living on my own pretty much because it was what you did. Then I realized at one point I hadn't turned on the TV in several months (Everquest) and when I did it was almost painful to try and sit through a typical broadcast. It became absolutely galling to me to pay 90+ dollars a month to be bombarded by advertisements. Even premium channels like HBO now bombard you with a significant percentage of advertisement (of their own materials, but advertisement no less). Back when they started you paid your fee to have movies movies movies and more movies. These days any given channel is dishing out something like 20% advertisements and that is if you do not consider the product placement sequences that are now common and unavoidable through any medium. An example of that method is on Bones when Booth and Bones talking about features in Ford vehicles while they 'drive' to or from something on the show. In and of itself I have little problem with that. But when they then break to a ford commercial it is enough to make me want to put a fist through my TV. Arrrrggghhhh.... Charge me, use commercials, or do product placement. Pick ONE. Using all three is just greedy.... worse than that it is a deal breaker. It made it such that it was no longer something I wante
It's much simpler... (Score:3)
You don't need any in-depth analysis to figure out what's going to change.
Look at Time Warner's internet service prices:
http://www.timewarnercable.com... [timewarnercable.com]
$15/mo for 2Mbps.
Then look at Comcast's internet service prices:
http://www.comcast.com/interne... [comcast.com]
$40/mo for 3Mbps.
MORE THAN DOUBLE THE MONTHLY PRICE, FOR JUST ENTRY-LEVEL INTERNET SERVICE.
The competition between cable and DSL has kept prices down for years. But now, with Verizon switching to FIOS with even more astronomical entry-level internet prices, you will have NO CHOICE in the matter, but to pay much more than you do now, for slower service. How many people are going to just go without internet, when they only occasionally browse the web, and their cheapest option is $40+? Comcast is trying to rape my mother...
What a stupid idea... (Score:3)
The whole thesis is a remarkably stupid idea. Time Warner and Comcast are NOT direct competitors. They are MONOPOLIES in differet markets. They already have the ability to screw with you if you are trying to cut the cord. You probably have no where to go.
PERHAPS you can flee from your local cable monopoly to your local phone monopoly. MAYBE.
All this does is increase the number of cities where Comcast has a monopoly. Ultimately, the real impact of this will likely be with negotating with content providers. Comcast might be able to go all Walmart on Disney.
Re:what price increases? (Score:5, Insightful)
and costs are increasing with salary raises
Citation please. If anything salaries have been broadly flat. I don't know maybe salary growth has exceeded averages among cable providers, possible. As you say those not as many new customers, and more customers who already have cable tv don't need cables run and being more internet savy than 10 years ago do self installs. They should if anything be able cut staff. Both on the installer side and on the back office support provisioning end.
Upstream and transport network bandwidth is getting cheaper. So that cost should be going down for them too. I don't see much evidence to support them doing any cable plant upgrades to offer more bandwidth to the home. Most of them have little or no competition so they are content to make 50Mbps down / 15 up their max offerings most places and not splitting the segments up and doing more fiber home runs to enable them to offer more. The lack of incentives to continue investment in enhanced cable plant should also if anything be lowering their costs.
Looking forward if they need more IP bandwidth they can just start scaling back the television offerings that apparently fewer and fewer customers want. Again I don't see their costs going up.
Frankly this merger if allowed looks more like an opportunity for gouging than anything else. Normally I am laissez-faire type when it comes to markets. I'd say let them merge; but this is a case where these companies only are able to operate in the first place because of government granted rights of way. Either the rights of way ought to be reconsidered and property owners allowed to charge them rent, or we should just start regulating them like public utilities.
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time warner is rewiring most of their buildings in NYC now. they just did mine a week ago and the word is the base internet tier will be 50/5 soon
and then health insurance costs per employees always go up, they rent stores for customer support, stocking up the cable boxes and modems. NYC I always see their installers. people are always moving and install TV when they move in
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i'm at 15/1 now
50/5 would be nice for uploading photos to icloud or flickr
what's the point of gig-e? if i want a movie i'll buy a blu ray and my itunes and vudu rentals already look good.
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i don't buy a lot of movies but the ones i want to buy i only buy on blu ray because the quality is better. especially the sound on my TV with no home theater
even at a few $$$ like Gravity i'll still rather have the blu ray/dvd/digital combo since i can always play it OFFLINE.
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internet connection is not perfect
i like physical disks because the quality is better. blu ray is up to 50Mbps
my blu ray player will always work and there will always be blu ray compatible players out there for sale. at least the next 20 years
i kind of trust itunes and vudu but the content is DRM'd and i need the special equipment for that store to play the content on my TV
unlike blu ray which is open
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networking and CDN issues have no effect on my blu ray collection.
itunes is also good since you can download a local copy to a computer and stream locally
vudu and ultraviolet i only buy ultra cheap when there is a sale
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i'm 40 and have been around since the very beginning of the internet
i've seen lots of fads come and go that i thought were awesome at the time
if you read the business and financial press you will know digital sales are in the impulse buy category. same as the supermarket check out aisle stuff you see. same psychological concept they mastered selling women's magazines to housewives 40 years ago. huge margins for the maker and seller. digital sales has nothing to do with being more high tech than blu ray. sin
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multiple 4k streams?
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and why would i care since there is no 4K content and no decent affordable 4K TV's now
in 10 years it will be affordable
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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?
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It's technology. You pointed out yourself how the price per mbs has dropped over the years and then suggest for some reason it should now go up. Technology naturally drops in price because of advances regardless of how many people are using it. Unless of course you have a monopoly.
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there are very little new customers so your revenue base will stay flat
meanwhile the costs like employees, support, equipment, bond payments for network upgrades, etc will increase
its like your electric bill, its always going up
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a lot of people get married and have kids so the average household size is around 3
313 million people you figure around 100 million households
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They have about 2.9m cable, 6.2m total subscribers, so we are still less than 15% of the population of the US. Cablevision about 3m and the rest are all about 4m, add them up and we are at about 52m subscribers, or about 16.6% of the population. With 83% not subscribing my point still stands, there are anything but a few customers to tap into.
None of that matters if potential new customers aren't interested.
This is like the fact that the vast majority of adult Americans do not currently smoke cigarettes. You might say that's some serious growth area for the cigarette companies, right? Except, that vast majority doesn't want to smoke.
It probably doesn't help that Comcast has such a bad reputation in terms of customer service and in terms of throttling and otherwise manipulating traffic. It only encourages people to do without if they can
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.
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And in Lithuania I pay 23.17EUR/month for 300/300mbps advertised. I reality the speed drops to about 60mbps during peak time (but not every day), but the connection is very reliable and the ISP does not complain that I upload ~30TB/month.
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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.
And Germany has about 82 million people across an area 15% smaller than the size of California. California has about half the population (38 million people). That's just one state. The US is huge by comparison with a large part that has tiny population densities. I'm just pointing out that providers in other countries with much higher population density can lower their prices because it costs less per customer for infrastructure costs.
Don't get me wrong, the US prices are way too high. However, the US
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True. On the other hand, when I subscribed to Internet service in the 1990's it cost about $22 (in 2014 dollars) for basic service. Now it costs $30 for basic service. In the 1990's you could 70 times the bandwidth when you paid 7 times the price. Now you will get 10 times the bandwidth when you pay 5 times the price. It's not the best comparison, I realize, but it should be enough to demonstrate that we are paying more for Internet service.
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My broadband price has been increasing about 5% per year. Along with that I've also been getting regular speed increases. Right now it's 100/30 Mbps up/down.
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What salary raises? Unless you're in the 10% salaries have been dropping for 30 years, just not as fast as the value of the dollar.
If my salary last year was $60k, and inflation dropped the value of the dollar by 5% while I get a 4% "raise" then I haven't actually gotten a raise at all, I've had my salary cut by 1%.
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This!!
My internet price (from Comcast and acquired entities) has remained steady at $43 for probably 20 years now, while my download speeds have increased from 1.5Mbps to (today) 57Mbps over the same timeframe. Factoring in inflation and speed increases over that timeframe, my cost per throughput has steadily and dramatically dropped.
The article is FUD.
I think the issue for cord cutters us data caps. If the cable company had a steady 250gb cap then you went from 450 hours of full speed downloads to 15 hours of full speed downloading. So even as bandwidth has improved, your ability to use it has not. Just like how the cellular companies tout their fantastic super fast downloads to make you think you are getting better service but if you actually use that high speed data, you can hit your monthly data cap within a few minutes of downloading.
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When you get Hulu to replace it, you will notice it has the same amount of commercials. So I just torrent all my TV shows. better quality, no "buffering" and no commercials. I would pay Hulu 2X their subscription rate if they removed the commercials for me. But they have no plans on going commercial free for any reason.
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It's a balancing act that I'm sure they would rather rectify for the consumer - but they cannot. The content providers are always going to want to have some form of tied in advertising; Hulu can guarantee that the advertisements are seen - as opposed to DVRs which can skip (or fast forward) through the adverts.
I haven't paid for Hulu yet (bing rewards points provide this to me for free for now) and I've enjoyed running through shows I wouldn't otherwise watch. As much as I would love to see no commercials
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as a TV customer, cable cutter and back to TV there are two reasons to pay for TV today. Sports and quality kids' cartoons. Disney jr and Nick and some of the other cartoon networks.
otherwise as you said, the advertising ruins it. tried watching a movie and its horrible with all the commercials. Netflix is good for documentaries but they have gotten worse lately. got rid of some good episodes and series
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I didn't stop getting cable because of the price, it was mainly due to being sick of commercials and the fact that the little programming I enjoy is all online now. Money just wasn't ever a factor for me when doing this is my point.
What he said. The truth is, I never had cable TV for those reasons, and this: Remember, the deal was commercials = free TV. Cable started out with no commercials (yes, it did - except for the network channels), but they slowly began adding them in, until now, where there are more commercials on cable channels than on network television. Of course, TV watchers are a docile group to begin with...