Cable companies have started showing fewer ads because of Netflix

Supply and demand -> They can charge more for less.

> How about ad-free versions of their channels?

Apparently that was what cable was all about at the beginning

It's hard to lure back people to an inferior product.

Even among my less technologically advanced friends and family there's maybe only a handful of people who still watch shows regularly on cable television. My in-laws watch TV shows but they record them and skip over the ads. Pretty much the only thing that I know of that anyone watches on cable and still sits through ads is live sports.

Watching cable networks flail around and completely fail to understand that their business model is not relevant anymore is always hilarious. Now that Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have really good original programming there's even less of an incentive to have cable.

A question for those who have done more thinking on this than I have:

I see cable TV going the way of the dedicated phone line - a bundled benefit you get for a very small fee on top of the primary benefit, which will be the internet connection. The overall cost of a subscription will remain roughly the same, but the cost will be allocated to the internet connection: much like mobile carriers are now basically free voice+text across the board and the cost of the plan is based solely on the data tier you want, what I see happening in the future is that both cable TV and home phone are going to be small add-ons to your $90-$120/month internet bill. In many markets there is virtually no competition present to prevent this, and in those where there is, collusion seems to be a foregone conclusion.

This seems inevitable to me given the rise in cord-cutters and, as a recent headline pointed out, the "cord-nevers". Is this what's going to happen?

It astounds me how much US TV airtime is devoted to adverts - roughly 18 minutes out of every hour, AFAIK (plus any split-screen advertising shenanigans).

In the UK, (outside the BBC, which doesn't have adverts) TV broadcasters are limited to an overall average of 7 minutes per hour, with limits of 12 minutes for any individual clock hour (which drops to 8 minutes during primetime).

The BBC's Natural History unit deliberately inserts ten minutes of "disposable" content that can be cut from the program when it is broadcast on commercial channels (e.g. the 'Yellowstone People' segments that were included at the end of episodes of 'Yellowstone' when it was broadcast on the BBC, but are dropped when it's broadcast on commercial channels).