Only Half the Homes in America Have Cable TV Anymore (businessinsider.com) 108
Pay television penetration in American households fell to 50.2% in the third quarter and is projected to drop to 50% or lower by December, according to Madison and Wall, a technology and media advisory firm. Fifteen years ago, nearly nine in ten households subscribed to pay television services.
The decline has prompted major media companies to shed cable assets. Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, and A&E are seeking to sell or spin off their cable television operations. Paramount stated it would not divest its cable channels but acknowledged that "each quarter is accelerating decline."
The decline has prompted major media companies to shed cable assets. Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, and A&E are seeking to sell or spin off their cable television operations. Paramount stated it would not divest its cable channels but acknowledged that "each quarter is accelerating decline."
What moron pays for cable... (Score:3)
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Re:What moron pays for cable... (Score:4, Insightful)
...when literally any content provided on them is available for streaming and download for free?
In a word? Convenience.
Where is your centralized TV Guide that allows you to browse and stream on demand as easily as cable does?
And how much of an actual threat is that to any aspect of your life if you're pirating it, both today and tomorrow?
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Where is your centralized TV Guide that allows you to browse and stream on demand as easily as cable does?
Really? Really?? STB user interfaces are widely regarded as the worst in the business. They can afford to be, because the STBs are almost always provided by the cableco and are your only option. They are slow and buggy (just like the majority of smart TV platforms). I also challenge the assertion that anyone really needs a universal content search/browse engine, because most people view their own favorite items/channels and don't venture outside much. On the occasion that a visitor comes over and wants to s
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LOTS of people just want a guide to know what's on what channel when.
That group will skew quite high in the age demographic though as the sub 40 crowd is far more online and finding what they want to watch outside of the platform on which they watch it.
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LOTS of people just want a guide to know what's on what channel when.
Unless you're talking live realtime events like sports or news, the idea of linear TV is pretty much dead. Even the cable STB OSes blur the line between realtime streaming and on-demand. If you search for Paw Patrol, you'll find both "it's playing on this channel right now" and "here's the 271 episodes you can stream for free, which by the way doesn't include the specific episode your kid is clamoring to watch".
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Millions of people would disagree with it being dead.
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..On the occasion that a visitor comes over and wants to see something not in the favorites, it's almost always a journey of "yes! contentX is available!! ... for a trial subscription on Ploom, or for $3.99 per episode on Skunkr, or with ads AND a mandatory email signup on Gizzrd" and so forth into endless "streaming platform you don't care about" spam.
Really? Don’t look now, but you just gave about a dozen reasons why people are still on cable and prefer it. Describe that nightmare process to anyone paying for cable 30 years ago and they would have laughed non-stop. “Modern” conveniences of the future my ass.
And if the iPhone has already taken more pictures than any other camera ever, it stands to reason humans have wasted at least eleventy seven billion more hours scrolling through 4,000 streaming channels across a dozen streaming s
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> Where is your centralized TV Guide that allows you to browse and stream on demand as easily as cable does?
On the "Search" menu of the Roku?
I assume the Amazon Stick, Apple TV The Streaming Box, and whatever Google's pushing these days, have the same feature?
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...when literally any content provided on them is available for streaming and download for free?
Legally for free? I still pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime video. AFAIK, most of that content is licensed.
Sports (Score:3)
Sports streaming can be a bit of a mess and can often cost as much or more than cable.
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My observation has been that any streaming package that includes ESPN is automatically well more than 4 times as expensive as any package without it. Perhaps the cable companies should find a way to dump ESPN and pass along the savings to remain viable.
Sling Blue and Sling Orange (Score:2)
Disney requires specific channels to be at the basic tier of a multichannel video provider's offering, not a "sports" tier. Last I checked (today), multichannel IPTV provider Sling worked around this by offering two different basic plans: "Orange" with ESPN and other Disney properties and "Blue" with more channels but no Disney. Orange subscribers can add the extra Blue channels on a second "Orange & Blue" tier.
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...when literally any content provided on them is available for streaming and download for free?
Cable TV channels and programs are also streamed, often using similar technology. What is the difference between Comcast and YoutubeTV aside from the label of cable and non-cable? Isn't the label mostly a historical artifact?
Now, the "for free" aspect depends on one's tolerance regarding respecting copyright laws.
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> Remember when Cable TV offered an ad-free television viewing experience, for a monthly subscription fee?
No, I don't. Nor do most people reading this.
In fact, I don't know what country you're talking about, but in the US virtually all TV channels - the subscription channels like HBO excepted - in the US provided over cable TV have had ads. That's because cable TV started purely as an alternative to antenna TV to relay the affiliates of the major networks to places that had poor reception. Over time cabl
Gaslighting (Score:1)
Cable in the 1980s did not have ads. When I last had cable in the 2000s, ads did not exist either, but I did not watch any of the big channels.
Re: Gaslighting (Score:3, Insightful)
Cable in the 1980s did not have ads
Let's do this a different way: Name exactly which channels you frequently watched that didn't have ads. If you don't remember them, it's safe to say that it just plain didn't happen.
Re: Gaslighting (Score:2)
Flip it around (Score:2)
Which channels had ads, and were they actually local TV stations? I think you have just confused the two.
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I was just a kid in the 80's but everything I watched had commerical in it. On a Google search I can find that a very small number of networks didn't have them when they launched at the very beginning of the decade but then switched to having them a few years in. The biggest of them being Nickelodeon.
Maybe you're remembering premium stations like HBO or something because the vast majority of regular cable TV channels had commercials and by the decades midpoint everything did. Or maybe as the above suggested
Rewriting history again (Score:2)
No, the whole point of cable was no commercials. You could also get regular TV channels through it, and I think you have confused the two.
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That has never been the case. Basic cable has always had commercials outside of a few rare exemption. Here's an article literally from the 80's about it that the NYT digitized https://www.nytimes.com/1981/0... [nytimes.com] . Hopefully you haven't hit your limit on articles with them before you hit the paywall.
You misread (Score:2)
This is about one channel wanting to experiment with bringing in ads, in 1981, while most channels were not interested. This is also from the newspaper that covered up [npr.org] Stalin's crimes in Ukraine, isn't it?
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Literally the first line from my citation
":Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression:"
Seriously though, were you even alive in the 80's? How do you not remember the commercials on virtually every channel cable offered outside of the premium ones like HBO? I mean, every 30 minute time slot show in the 80's was 22-25 minutes long. What do you think people with cable saw for that 5-8 minutes where no show was playing?
Re: Remember when... (Score:2)
You obviously spent those days watching Pat Robertson because CBN was literally the only ad free channel on cable that anybody actually watched in the earlier days. And as far as I know, it's still ad free. Pat Robertson was brought to you by viewers like you calling in to give money. Before that, the first channels offered by cable were OTA channels. Which have always had ads.
The very first channels that were only available on cable, like TBS, CNN, and USA network, always had ads from their inception.
The o
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Nickelodeon and Ha! did not have ads in the early 80s.
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Either way, cable never promised to be ad free. So many people say they "remember" that, but somehow they can't actually name what channels they actually watched that were ad free. At the time of Nickelodeon, it was so unpopular that they eventually had to reinvent the channel. That included changing their logo from the dude bending over, looking into a literal nickelodeon, a thing that had long since left the public consciousness even in those days, replacing it with the orange splat, which is also when it
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You obviously spent those days watching Pat Robertson because CBN was literally the only ad free channel on cable that anybody actually watched in the earlier days. And as far as I know, it's still ad free.
CBN operated from 1977 through 1997, showing ads starting in 1981 and taking the name The Family Channel in 1988. Beginning in 1997, CBN was reduced to a paid programming arrangement to show The 700 Club on what is now Disney's Freeform channel. There are, however, numerous other religious channels under a viewer donation arrangement like what you describe, such as EWTN. And in 2008, CBN started a second channel called CBN News, first online and then with a handful of broadcast affiliates.
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...Internet connection -- which is NOT free...
Depends on who you live near...
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Streaming and download requires an Internet connection -- which is NOT free.
I...already have an internet connection. It doesn't cost me anything on top of it to watch free shit.
And that Internet connection, in most cases, is owned by one of the big cable TV companies.
That's cool, but what does that have to do with the subject of the article -- not paying for cable TV?
hard to believe (Score:3)
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My parents still do though my dad keeps questioning if he wants it any longer. They don't watch much any more and the cost is out of hand.
What they do is spend two hours or so every night watching YT videos of places around the world or watching shows about this or that subject.
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My mother pays over $100/month for cable tv. She is insane.
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They have an all-in-one package from Verizon. Phone, internet, and tv. It is well over $100/month. Cutting out tv would get them just below that amount.
When I gave up cable well over a decade ago price was the reason. I couldn't justify the yearly cost increases when I was only watching ten or so channels on a regular basis.
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My parents still do though my dad keeps questioning if he wants it any longer. They don't watch much any more and the cost is out of hand.
What they do is spend two hours or so every night watching YT videos of places around the world or watching shows about this or that subject.
And that is the key demographic that would likely have cable. So when they stop, and enough others stop, Cable is in even more trouble than their almost 50 percent drop.
SO and I still have cable, but it's the same thing. She watched Youtube videos, I watch Youtube videos. She keeps things like court shows on for background sound in the house. I watch science channel late at night. But really, the offerings on cable and network TV kind of stink. How many shows can we have of some hot babe banging 10 diffe
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these are probably the 50+ year olds who are too used to it. as that generation is naturally replaced, the sales aren't.
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"The cake is a lie."
Why pay for cable? (Score:2)
When I can get 350 plus channels for free from TCL+ ?
I've been watching for today and have not even seen a commercial, just no content 2 minute "breaks" between content.
Plus streaming services.
Then there is the antenna, good for another 50 or so channels.
Why anyone would pay for cable is beyond me.
Re:Why pay for cable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why anyone would pay for cable is beyond me.
Cable provides a simple one-stop, one-bill solution for a lot of people's TV and internet needs - they had it growing up, so it's something they understood and saw no reason to change. Now they're aging out, and their kids - and grandkids - are looking elsewhere, which is why cable's numbers are in decline...
FWIW, when I lived in Manhattan, the choice was cable or nothing. No OTA, and broadband was only just becoming a thing - I was the first in my building to get it - so streaming was a long way off and time-shifting broadcasts was still done with magnetic tape. Now, get off my lawn...er...window box.
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Could you clarify "no OTA"?
Certainly.
To begin with, I'm not suggesting that there was no VHF/UHF TV broadcast signal in NYC, just that I was not able to receive it.
Specifically, in the three apartments I had - Battery Park, Upper East Side and NoHo - there was no provided antenna drop from the roof, no way to hang an antenna from outside a window, and building construction/location/apartment orientation/whatever meant "rabbit ears" were insufficiently successful.
Friends with houses in Brooklyn & Queens were able to receive OTA, a
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Well, your TCL+ doesn't carry NFL or college football.
As for the 350+ channels, quantity is not quality.
The "cable" became fiber (Score:2)
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Exactly, they probably are because local cable monopolies demand it but how silly if new home constructions are still having coax instead of fiber connected to them.
Re: The "cable" became fiber (Score:2)
Spectrum is just now rolling out, in a brand new subdivision where some relatives live, "fiber powered" internet and TV. It's fiber to a box down the street, and coax to the home.
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On existing homes I get the pitch but coax on new construction is really unbelievable penny pinching in 2025. Shameful really.
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coax on new construction is really unbelievable penny pinching in 2025
But even FTTH isn't even really fiber to your computer. It's fiber to the ONT, then ONT to 1000baseT to your router/WAP. And most people are making heavy use of wireless, so they don't even get the full benefit of (say) a 1Gbps uplink.
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By that logic no fiber optics anywhere matter, not in your business because the fiber touches a SFP module before it hits your NIC. Ok i'm being a little absurd but you get my point, the only reason not to run the fiber is to save $$$, thats the only advantage coax has today, it's cheaper for Spectrum.
why does spectrum even bother running fiber for their backbone? Those same reasons can apply to peoples homes. It's not just about today it's that house could sit there for 50-100 years.
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Copper is actually about to become MORE expensive than fiber for a second time - pay attention to the metals market. Copper had a bad dip but it's recovering and will soon once again climb back up into double digits per pound price, at which point fiber is the penny pinching alternative.
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The number includes digital TV services over Internet, just not streaming on-demand services like Netflix. The big costs are not the physical infrastructure, it's the negotiations with the channels themselves that make the price so high.
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The term "cable" is regularly used by every company offering traditional TV packages for both old coaxial connections as well as fiber. This is incredibly common usage, no one says "I have fiber" when telling someone they subscribe to Comcast's TV offerings or any similiar service (they might for their internet service though).
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"Cable" a Failure to Innovate (Score:3)
The invisible hand of the market in action. No reason cable companies could not have upgraded to fiber networks and/or had IPTV plus screaming fast internet. If cable has reasonable prices, decent equipment and invented in their future. It might have been a different outcome. Oh well, c'est la vie... ...
should forced ESPN to be an add on package and no (Score:1)
should forced ESPN to be an add on package and not forced into basic.
Re: should forced ESPN to be an add on package and (Score:5, Informative)
Try writing a complete sentence. Then maybe can understand what the fuck you want to say.
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Plausible subjects include either "The government's competition regulator" or "A coalition of multichannel video distributors". Which was it?
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They could do it like Sling, which has two basic tiers: Orange and Blue. Blue has the limited basic channels and a bunch of channels from programming providers other than Disney. Orange has limited basic and Disney, fewer channels and fewer simultaneous streams than Blue, with an "Orange & Blue" add-on tier that adds the missing channels from Blue.
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The invisible hand of the market in action. No reason cable companies could not have upgraded to fiber networks and/or had IPTV plus screaming fast internet. If cable has reasonable prices, decent equipment and invented in their future. It might have been a different outcome. Oh well, c'est la vie... ...
For new builds fiber obviously makes sense, but for the many places already serviced by coax DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gb/s.
https://www.cablelabs.com/tech... [cablelabs.com]
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For new builds fiber obviously makes sense, but for the many places already serviced by coax DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gb/s.
That's both now (they could have done fiber a long time ago) and also the best case. Remember, "up to 10 Gbps speeds" (from your link) means anything from 0 bps to 10 Gbps.
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That's both now (they could have done fiber a long time ago) and also the best case. Remember, "up to 10 Gbps speeds" (from your link) means anything from 0 bps to 10 Gbps.
And if you are going to replace an existing coax plant with fiber, it would make sense to replace the least capable parts first. This would be true through all the DOCSIS generations. I doubt it is economically effective today to replace the parts that can actually do multi-gigabit. Anecdotally speaking I think the demand for 10Gbs residential internet is low, and probably will be for some time.
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I doubt it is economically effective today to replace the parts that can actually do multi-gigabit.
I agree. In fact for most cable companies in particular it probably makes little sense to replace anything that can do even just 1 gigabit, because they almost surely have other regions or at least boroughs which are currently underserved.
Anecdotally speaking I think the demand for 10Gbs residential internet is low, and probably will be for some time.
I suspect it's mostly limited to sizable households with a lot of users. But we keep finding new ways to use available bandwidth...
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I tested my connection with fast.com earlier today.
It reported at 480 Mbps.
That's some test server in the internet, to my router, wireless to my cell phone as I sit in bed.
I pay $50/month, all in.
For another $5/month, for 10x the speed, I'd take it. Just because.
Re: The invisible hand of the market in action (Score:3)
FTFY: The invisible hand of government regulation in action
Where I live there is ONE cable provider, no fiber.
State and local regulation forces that.
Why would any local provider invest in fiber or stop increasing prices when they have a government guaranteed monopoly?
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I'm pretty sure most have some form of IPTV. Comcast even gave us a free box for their version. And honestly, usable gigabit speeds are available over coax, what's the need for fiber? Fiber is over-rated. If the use case is streaming, gigabit is ridiculously over-spec, you could stream 20 movies simultaneously at Blu-ray quality including all the unnecessary uncompressed audio streams for every language included on that disc all at once and still be able to browse the Internet while watching all 20 of them.
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I'd say they DID innovate. They saw Cable TV disappearing, so they reinvented themselves as ISPs. So now everybody who's streaming, is still paying the same old cable TV company for the internet connection they use to stream even content from *other* companies. The cable companies are doing just fine, thank you.
Thanks for the non-clickbait title (Score:3)
Only Half the Homes in America Have Cable TV (Score:1)
Title did not need the word "Anymore".
Ditched cable & TV set in 2009 (Score:2)
i'm not usually on the leading edge of anything but dealing with cable providers was like ***wiping with a bladed belt sander
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I dropped cable TV around 1996. Have not missed it at all. Unfortunately I had to subscribe to the local cable monopoly again around 2008ish when it was the only thing available faster than DSL (just Internet, no TV). Fortunately fiber came to town a few years back and cable will never be in my life again.
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I'm roughly were you were.
No TV, just 350Mb internet via coax-cable. The price is competitive, it includes 3 land lines (I only use 2) and my mobile access.
Fibre would be more expensive, so why should I change?
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Fiber was much cheaper for me. $85 for 100Mb cable vs $45 for 300Mb fiber.
I cut the cord years ago (Score:2)
Too much money for not enough content.
When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.
...laura
I'm surprised that it's 50% (Score:2)
I expected lower, a lot lower
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That number probably includes Internet only subscribers.
I'm surprised it's still 50%+ (Score:2)
With 1) a majority of Americans doing their best "Batman Forever" addiction imitation with their eyes glued to their phones, 2) sports packages being available now with streaming options, and 3) digital OTA options in most places for network TV and random digital channels with various, old syndicated content (from I Love Lucy and Star Trek to Home Improvement) with the same commercials volume (if not less than) of cable channels carrying the same edited-for-TV slop... That's just 50% of America throwing the
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I'm amazed by what PlutoTV and Tubi offer for free with ads nowadays. It's basically the same stuff as cable TV, minus live sports of course.
If you're a sports fan, they can still royally screw you over by making sure that your favorite team is streamed over 3 or 4 different networks over the season. They seem to do that on purpose to insure maximum pain if you want to switch to using streaming services.
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Inertia. Took me several years once streaming had taken off and we pretty much exclusively used our Roku and never used our Dish Network box to persuade the rest of my family that the $60-70/mo we were paying for Dish was a waste of money.
I also suspect a fair number have it for the same reason as their landline, as a reliable back up in case of emergencies. I had to demonstrate our antenna was fine for getting local news stations multiple times to deal with this argument.
mail order DVD rental did it for me (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole Netflix DVD mail thing is what had me drop TV service and go Internet only. I can't stand long interruption with ads, I start to lose the plot and don't enjoy watching. And I don't watch a lot of series, especially if they are new. I'd rather let someone else tell me if it is worth starting. Been burned too many times on stuff like Lost.
One thing that could have saved some customers (Score:2)
If they hadn't encrypted everything so you needed a STB on every TV, it would have helped. Pay for cable service, hook up TV, get content. But no, even the local channels ended up be encrypted, so built-in tuners couldn't do shit.
Cable Has Its Points (Score:3)
Dumped cable last year. Sling / Disney+ / Paramount / MAX / Dirtvision / Peacock / Hulu / Starz. With all that, which does add up to some serious $, I don't have the local channels, all of them. I still need an antenna if I want some of the less traveled channels. Plus, last Memorial day, the information was lacking for me to see the Coca Cola 600 after watching the Indy 500. Turns out it was there, on one of the streamers I'm paying for, but searching for it was a bear. Failed, missed seeing the NASCAR event. That would not have been an issue with cable. But cable is about $treaming + $150.
I dumped cable in large part because their attitude toward 24/7/365 internet was lacking, manifesting in a 7 hour absence of the internet for a PLANNED maintenance event. Other cable companies I've had experience with in the past were always able to restrict that to less than an hour and occurring in the wee hours of the morning. But no, these guys have to take it out all Sunday morning. Not all of us are sequestered in church for 7 hours of Sunday morning.
That, and recent system changes precluding getting a cable card and using the really fabulous alternative that is Tivo caused me to switch. But I'm still not 100% happy, it's really tough to find neat stuff on streaming, even if its on something you're paying for but just can't locate, like my NASCAR fail. I'd like to have cable again, but... their internet sucks... and they're expensive.
Reused house coax wiring (Score:2)
Related on reusing coax cables...
The original builders of our house had coax in every room (I guess they wanted to watch TV a lot). No Ethernet. Fiber comes to house technical room, but from that point onwards no network cabling. Would have been a pain to deploy a new set of fiber or CAT6/7 cable everywhere, so mostly surviving with Wifi. However, for "trunk" connectivity I got a couple of these:
https://www.gocoax.com/ma2500d [gocoax.com]
I'm just using them for point-to-multipoint connectivity - had to get a new splitte
Wait what? (Score:2)
All this time I thought I was the cool kid on the block with not just cable but HBO. And analog scrambled porn.
And people who have cable (Score:2)
are too lazy to switch or no smart enough.
They destroyed themselves (Score:2)
It was the bundling that did it. They wanted people to pay for services they did not want.
Worst of all, the streaming services are doing the same thing. I don't think it is possible to get the Marvel movies from Disney without paying for all of Hulu AND Disney.
Eventually someone is going to find a way to take down all the streamers. Oh wait, they already have - the sequential plan where you pay for one service, watch what you want, then quit and move to another.
You want me to pay for your service for de
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Use 429.
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I'm sure you can rent marvel movies if that's all you want to watch.
Let me look....yup. Sure can.
So that's how you can get exactly what you want to watch and nothing more.
LMFAO sheding assets (Score:2)
For me it's about ads (Score:2)
Cable TV is 45min of ads and 15min of low quality content an hour. Why would I do it to myself?
Still getting most content OTA (Score:3)
http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug [brander.ca]
My presentation to the Calgary Unix Users Group on getting the local TV stations Over-the-Air, onto a shared Unix directory as .MPG files that I can save, edit, compress. Just sayin'. It's not even hard. $35/year for the subscription to the index/schedule/search service that gives me the same schedule grid as cable always did.
OTA...well...and of course, the fact that I hate Amazon, Apple, and Disney as monopolist swine and care little for their "IP rights"...
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Must be horrible to walk around carrying all that hate.
Boomers and Zoomers (Score:2)
It'll be at least half of that in ten years.
The Zoomers have no interest in cable TV.
Yeah (Score:3)
Now I pay the same outrageous prices for just cable internet alone, and I pay for streaming services!
Still that many? Wow. (Score:2)
I dropped DishTV over 20 years ago... (Score:2)
imo, seems high (Score:2)