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Thread: The end of cable as we know it?

  1. #31
    Member kaldaniels's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    I can see where if you watch ONE channel, a la carte would be for you.

    But if you (or you live in a household who) want say, ESPN, CNN, COM, AMC, FOOD, and FX (bear in mind, not everyone will be subscribing to these channels, so I imagine they would cost more than they do now in order for the networks revenue to not be whacked) I would not be surprised at all if just that random package cost almost 75% of what a full cable package costs now...at which point, I'd rather pay the additional 25% to keep all the channels I currently get.

    I don't like my cable bill now thru Directv, but they typically work with you on price to save a couple hundred dollars a year.

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  4. #32
    Playoff Veteran sdwagers's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    MLB.TV would be incredible if not for the blackouts...

  5. #33
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    Quote Originally Posted by kaldaniels View Post
    I can see where if you watch ONE channel, a la carte would be for you.

    But if you (or you live in a household who) want say, ESPN, CNN, COM, AMC, FOOD, and FX (bear in mind, not everyone will be subscribing to these channels, so I imagine they would cost more than they do now in order for the networks revenue to not be whacked) I would not be surprised at all if just that random package cost almost 75% of what a full cable package costs now...at which point, I'd rather pay the additional 25% to keep all the channels I currently get.

    I don't like my cable bill now thru Directv, but they typically work with you on price to save a couple hundred dollars a year.
    I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head with ala carte pricing where it is not going to be the panacea everyone thinks its going to be from a cost perspective.

    I have an interesting perspective because I work for one of the cable companies putting in capacity and they are well aware of the current landscape and planning on major changes taking place in the future. One of them being ala carte channels.

    It will not be as cheap as people think for a couple of reasons. Right now programming costs are shared among all subscribers. Even if you take the most popular networks like ESPN the fact is there are a lot of people who don't watch sports that are paying the $6 per head ESPN transmission costs. On the flip side there are a lot of sports fans helping subsidize Bravo so people can watch Real Housewives of Bumblesquat on the cheap. When you break everything up networks are going to charge whatever the cost is to meet their old revenue numbers and divide it by the number of subscribers.

    The second thing with ala carte programming is new channels or niche channels will have virtually no chance of surviving. When you start getting niche channels shut down left and right there will probably be some sort of government intervention where everybody pays a fee to help support startup or niche channels.

    When things go ala carte cable companies will basically reverse the business model. Rather than get 20 different bills from the 20 channels you have cable companies will probably server as a billing aggregator and charge the content providers for the service. That charge will then be rolled into the cost of the content rather than the way it is now where content increases are rolled into the cost of your cable bill.

    The single biggest change though is going to be unlimited internet disappearing. Right now all the models work for watching stuff over the internet because it is all you can eat for a flat price. Our capacity augments right now are growing at 50% per year and are projected to increase at an even faster rater over the next 10 years due to the proliferation of over the top content and new technologies like 4K or 8K broadcasts. It will be like wireless where there is a flat amount and you pay for everything above that.

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  7. #34
    The Lineups stink. KronoRed's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    The thing that will prevent the assumed utopian future of everything streaming is bandwidth limits that more and more ISP's are implementing, then you will have ISP's that straight up block those services unless they get a premium of cash from you or the service, Cable/SAT has a lot more then 10 years left.
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  9. #35
    KungFu Fighter AtomicDumpling's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    A la carte pricing will be per show, not per channel in the long term.

    Companies will charge what the market will bear, in other words they will charge the most their customers are grudgingly willing to pay. They won't set the price based on their previous revenues. That has nothing to do with it at all. If you charge more than people are willing to pay then you will just get undercut by your competition. The prices are set by the market of consumers, not by individual businesses. That is Marketing 101.

    Bandwidth in the future will not be limited. Bandwidth allowances have been skyrocketing around the globe for decades. That trend is only going to accelerate, not decline.

    In 10 years or less there will be no need for cables to deliver TV or Internet access. Everything will be wireless, not only within your house but across cities and the whole nation. Cables and wires will be a thing of the past.

    When it comes to technology, things change much faster than people expect. And some people won't realize it changed until years later. The death of cable TV is already well underway.

  10. #36
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    The cellular companies dropped the long term contracts that they forced consumers to sign in order to get phones for free. Seemed like a great idea the would help the consumer. But they now charge for the phone and the penalty for switching providers is still the same when you factor that in.

    The lesson to learn... companies will find a way to keep making the same profit no matter how they package their product. Ala Carte cable sounds nice, but I doubt it will be any different for the consumer on the bottom line.

    I agree with those saying that wireless will be the way of the future and whatever companies do the best to adapt to that will survive. It looks like DirectV is on the path. Time Warner... not so much.
    Hoping to change my username to 75769024

  11. #37
    Goober GAC's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    Quote Originally Posted by westofyou View Post
    I grew up without cable, I can do this
    Ah yes, the good ol' days of VHF/UHF, and bending the heck out of those rabbit ears trying to get various channels. LOL

    Over the years I've run the gauntlet when it comes to various cable companies. I've had Directv for about 9 years now. It's the best of the lot (I guess).

    I'm probably like a majority though - paying $120/month (no movie channels. Got Netflix) for their one "Choice" package (200+ channels), and I'm lucky to watch a dozen of them on a regular basis. But if I wanted to drop it down a tier or two to save money I then would lose those 3-4 channels that my wife really watches a vast majority of the time. She'd have a fit. So I'm basically stuck.

    I would think that if they ever went to a system where you choose/pay for the channels you want that a lot of channels (networks) wouldn't draw enough revenue from subscribers to survive.
    Last edited by GAC; 04-19-2014 at 04:21 AM.
    "In my day you had musicians who experimented with drugs. Now it's druggies experimenting with music" - Alfred G Clark (circa 1972)

  12. #38
    Be the ball Roy Tucker's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    Quote Originally Posted by AtomicDumpling View Post
    In 10 years or less there will be no need for cables to deliver TV or Internet access. Everything will be wireless, not only within your house but across cities and the whole nation. Cables and wires will be a thing of the past.

    When it comes to technology, things change much faster than people expect. And some people won't realize it changed until years later. The death of cable TV is already well underway.
    I read this and initially thought "nahhhh, no way, too much infrastructure that needs built up, it just won't scale that well".

    But then I remember a couple "holy crap" moments from the early tech era.

    One was I was working for DEC about 1987-88 and managing a VAX cluster that was the front end to the GE AEBG Cray supercomputer. The countdown to HTTP was a couple years off (and ready to go off like a Saturn V) but connectivity with the Arpanet and internet was getting better. The holy crap moment was when I read the SMTP spec, did some digging, and figured out how to send email from wkrp.dec.com to my cluster over in aebg.ge.com. I had to spell out the routing and all that, but I was completely amazed that could be done. Sounds quaint now, but it was a big deal then.

    The second was at a group meeting in about 1992-93 and we had a guy in from DEC's advanced networking group. He showed us a laptop that had a wireless card in it and could get on the internet just out of the air. I was agog. I was like "you mean from my kids' soccer game, I can be sitting on the sidelines and get on the network??". Holy crap.

    So, I take back my "nahhhh". Nobody is right in this thread and everyone is right. It will be a combination of things plus some other wild card that nobody has thought of. It will be very interesting to watch. I never thought I'd see the day when my TV had a browser.
    She used to wake me up with coffee ever morning

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  14. #39
    First Time Caller SunDeck's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    I don't have cable and I'm content largely to keep up with sports the only free way one can any more, either by radio or after they have occurred. It's part time and part budget to me; every minute I (or my kids) spend watching a television is a minute not spent enjoying something active. And I suppose I'm a little bit of a curmudgeon about the money. When I was a kid, you could watch every away game the Reds played for free. That's FREE as in, we the people have granted MLB the right to an anti-trust exemption and we expect them to repay that generosity with some quid-pro-quo. The last generation has seen a chipping away at the pocket book for things that are not measurably better than they were before, or those things have been taken away altogether. I'll just do it the way my grandfather did in the thirties.
    Next Reds manager, second shooter. --Confirmed on Redszone.

  15. #40
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    No publicly traded company is going to make any changes that benefit their customers and negatively impact their revenues. A la carte pricing isn't going to save anyone money.

    Also, this country doesn't have the bandwidth to support broadband streaming to every household. I think I was still stuck with dial up only 13 years ago at my parents house in Farmersville, in the country, only 25 minutes outside of Dayton Ohio, until they finally brought DSL to the township. Amazingly, satellite internet is still a thing, despite the fact that it is horrible and expensive, due to the amount of households that do not have broadband availability.

    A la carte TV may also have a negative impact on the quality of TV shows that are available. For instance, I don't think I ever watched a single program on AMC, until I heard about Breaking Bad, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Breaking Bad may not have existed if everything was a la carte.
    Last edited by bengalsown; 04-19-2014 at 10:57 AM.

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  17. #41
    Rally Onion! Chip R's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    I don't know what the future holds for TV whether it's cable or satellite but I do know that sports is going to play a huge part in this. These networks - both regional and national - have paid a lot of money so people can watch games. They are going to balk at any changes that makes it more difficult for that to happen.
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  18. #42
    5.3 Posts Abv Replacement BluegrassRedleg's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    Quote Originally Posted by westofyou View Post
    I grew up without cable, I can do this
    I'm not sure I could survive. Even watching something in SD now drives me bat-ish crazy.
    Rounding third and heading for home...

  19. #43
    Member joshua's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    I'd cancel right now if MLBN was available on MLB.tv

  20. #44
    I wear Elly colored glass WrongVerb's Avatar
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    Quote Originally Posted by klw View Post
    And I feel fine.


    We ditched cable 5 years ago when we bought our current home. We only get 10 channels- 5 are NH PBS, 4 are VT PBS, and the 10th is ABC. I watch a lot less than I used to. I can now stream the free MLB.com game on the tv through the Blu-Ray or computer. I miss watching some things but not as much as I would have were it not for the internet.
    I stopped watching cable about 1.5 years ago. For years I'd have it on but one day I realized there wasn't anything that I was watching that I couldn't do without. So I canceled and save about $60/mo. I stream all kinds of stuff through Netflix and watch baseball on mlb.tv. Other stuff I want to watch like The Daily Show and Cosmos are streamed as soon as the episodes have been broadcast.

    MLB.tv, just to keep this post somewhat relevant, has to be the best value out there. (At least until Netflix opens up their entire library for streaming.)
    Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. -- Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot)

  21. #45
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    Re: The end of cable as we know it?

    Throw me in with those who currently don't have cable. I have Netflix, MLB.TV, and NHL Gamecenter. I also watch what I can through ESPN3 and catch some streams of UK basketball and other sports-related things that I cannot watch on the PS3 or through a subscription service (the CBS decision to broadcast golf tournaments is great).

    The Comcast-Time Warner merger, which I really don't like, is going to bring bandwidth caps to a lot of people. People won't be happy with it, but I imagine the future is going to be making people pay for how much bandwidth they consume.


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