31–40 of 52 posts
Sure, that's why ESPN lost over a million subscribers in the last two months. If there's any evidence people are eschewing internet video and going back to cable it will be the first I've seen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I'm noticing with cable-cutting is that the market is getting more fragmented. Instead of just getting Netflix and watching free Hulu with ads, now you have to get Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, pay for Hulu, buy the Starz app, pay for MLB, etc. in order to compose all the content you want. It's equivalent to buying cable packages where you spend money on a bundle engineered to have only 20% of what you wa…
That assumes you want all that content. One of the reasons I cut cable is becuase I didn't want to pay for content that I never looked at. The only content I pay for now is HBO Now and Amazon Prime, plus streaming movie rentals. If I want sports, I usually just go to a bar. If I want the BBC (which I do), I just VPN into the UK and watch stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't read the paywalled story but where I live there's really one option for internet: Comcast. So if I literally cut cable, I have nothing (I cut my phone landline years ago, and AT&T has no high-speed internet in my neighborhood anyway). What I do is I have the "basic" TV + internet package, as that's actually cheaper bundled than getting internet by itself. I have no ESPN, HBO, etc. I do miss some sports but I ca…
> What I do is I have the "basic" TV + internet package, as that's actually cheaper bundled than getting internet by itself. I've heard this before, and on the surface seems like it's probably skewing a lot of the numbers (making the number of cable TV subscribers artificially higher than it otherwise would be). At the same time, you, like many others, do have it hooked up to your TV, and you watch it at least occasi…
I used to have the basic internet + TV package because it was $10 cheaper than the standalone internet option, and I literally never plugged in the TV equipment.
Is it really though? I haven't had a cable subscription since I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, didn't have one for four years before that, and I have yet to be convinced that I'm actually missing anything - anything I care to watch can be found trivially online (even without piracy, though often you have to sit through ads...) My demand for content hasn't really changed, just my will and desire to put up with b…
Is it really though? I haven't had a cable subscription since I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, didn't have one for four years before that, and I have yet to be convinced that I'm actually missing anything - anything I care to watch can be found trivially online (even without piracy, though often you have to sit through ads...) My demand for content hasn't really changed, just my will and desire to put up with b…
One thing I'm noticing with cable-cutting is that the market is getting more fragmented. Instead of just getting Netflix and watching free Hulu with ads, now you have to get Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, pay for Hulu, buy the Starz app, pay for MLB, etc. in order to compose all the content you want. It's equivalent to buying cable packages where you spend money on a bundle engineered to have only 20% of what you wa…
A smart cable company will view themselves as an ISP who is also a TV service rather than a TV service who is also an ISP.
I haven't had cable TV service for years. I generally abhorred most content on cable TV, even on the "cerebral" channels. NatGeo, Discovery, and History all went toward more "reality" programming. I found myself watching PBS more and more. I don't have a local PBS affiliate that I can get over the air, so I got a small Ku-band FTA satellite dish and pull in a PBS feed that way [it doubled as an Outernet receiver dish]. (Though much of PBS' content is also available online for free.) Other than the occasional free streaming documentary, I just don't watch TV and save about $50-60 a month. [I did put an antenna in my attic so I could watch the Olympics, but even then I found streaming them online was still a better experience. Because, my god, the commercials!]
Also, here's a non-paywall version of the story: http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/2016113...
So you cut the cable service and replace it with internet service. The money goes to the same cable company, right? In my area, you have one choice for cable internet service. with the fastest internet plan and largest data cap available in my area, the data caps allow about 120 minutes of HD video daily without incurring extra fees. It seems like the cable companies are moving to a metered service where you pay for…
Before bit torrent and ok bandwidth, expats shared VHS tapes of TV shows from whatever country you came from. The English and Korean's seemed especially well organized. For movies, local night markets sold pirate VHS, then VCD (which was never a thing in the West from what I heard) and now DVDs. For a while you could buy legal first run VCDs in Bangkok and Hong Kong that cost less than going to the cinema
If you lived near a big city you could also go to the cinema. The cinema is very cheap in most of Asia even fo first run western movies. Even better is that many times western movies are shown in two ways, one theatre has "original soundtrack" with subtitles and the other would have painfully bad dubs into Thai or Khmer. Most people go to the dubbed version, so many times the theater with the original soundtrack is half empty!
If you have access to bittorrent and an internet connection that can handle YouTube there is certainly no reason to have cable. And even for my wife, she can still get the Thai Soaps on DVD at the market that aren't on YouTube.
I've been told that if you are into sports, cable is the only real option most of the time. But then, that's what sports bars are for, and there is no shortage of them in Phnom Penh. And if you're into football (not to be confused with American football), pretty much every local cheap restaurant has multiple big flat screen TVs that only seem to be able to show channels with little figures running around on huge green fields kicking balls to each other. Though from time to time, when the boys aren't looking, the girls will briefy switch to music videos before the boys realize the screen is no longer green color and demand that it be switched back to the game :) People are pretty much the same everywhere...