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Comment by mikegioia | Hacker News Reader

I cancelled all TV from my FiOS bill last month and I couldn't be happier. $175 was being flushed down the toilet every month.

The biggest thing, that no news article really captures, is that even if you sign up for a $50/mo TV package, the actual price is closer to $100/mo when you include taxes, fees, DVR rentals (!), etc. No thank you!

Like another commenter said, I think a hurdle for the average person is living without TV shows on a fixed schedule. Most people are used to leaving the TV on, or mindlessly flipping channels until anything satisfies you. I could not hope more to move away from that world, and I think that people are finally starting to do that.

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> Like another commenter said, I think a hurdle for the average person is living without TV shows on a fixed schedule.

The biggest hurdle is sports. Being a sports fan and a cord-cutter at the same time is really hard. Even if you subscribe to every pro sports digital package (which aren't cheap, by the way) you still miss out on all of the nationally televisions games, the blacked out local games, and all of the commentary surrounding sports.

Sadly this one is much harder to fix than movies. You can't just build a Netflix for sports because the broadcast rights are too expensive.

"because the broadcast rights are too expensive"

They're in a bubble right now, and there is commentary in the sportsball press about what, for example, the NBA as a corporation will do when the bubble pops. Other than go bankrupt and emerge on the other side with the same people doing the same thing. Its a pretty serious concern for them.

A bubble how? Are they saying that the value of the broadcasting rights are artificially inflated? Or the value of the sport in general (licensing, merchandising, ticket costs, etc)?

Well the cost of broadcast sports is super high because that's the price they can demand. They demand more, and the cable companies have to pay it because who wants to be the cable provider without ESPN or Fox Sports? And then if you want sports on your cable plan, you're paying an extra $100/mo because you have to subscribe to them all so the cable companies can make a profit.

And then you get into the question of the quality of pro sports. Lots of people are unhappy with the NBA and their heavy focus on superstars. Ticket sales are down, and fewer people are watching it on TV as well. The NFL seems to be getting into controversy after controversy that's turning people off. If the players aren't behaving distastefully and if the teams aren't cheating, then there's the whole concussion fiasco playing out right now.

Not to mention a lot of these sports teams lean on non-profit status and taxpayer-funded stadiums. What would have happened if Detroit hadn't funded a replacement for the Silverdome? Taxpayers are getting a bit more wary of where their public funds are going.

None of these things will kill pro sports, but they do lower the value. And it's possible someday a cable company will drop high-priced sports and not suffer any consequences. When that day comes... well the bottom will drop right out of that market.

> Lots of people are unhappy with the NBA and their heavy focus on superstars. Ticket sales are down, and fewer people are watching it on TV as well.

That's completely false on both counts. Ticket sales are at record levels [1] and last years NBA finals broadcast had the highest ratings since 1998 [2].

[1] http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2015/10/26... [2] http://www.sbnation.com/2015/6/17/8795971/2015-nba-finals-tv...

> Lots of people are unhappy with the NBA and their heavy focus on superstars. Ticket sales are down, and fewer people are watching it on TV as well.

As the other commenter said, this is completely false. The NBA has been doing everything right by focusing on stars and personalities. People are much more likely to like/hate a player in the NBA than they are the NFL. The NFL is trying to replicate the star thing that the NBA does, but no players are on the field all the time and helmets make players hard to recognize.

Having been to both NBA and NFL games, I always feel more in the game when at the NBA game. IMHO, NFL games are best watched on TV, while the NBA is great in person particularly in the first 10 rows.

The biggest issue for the NFL cash cow are concussions and parents not letting their kids play football. It will take time, but eventually the skill level will drop.

Very detailed, recent article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/06/the-sports-...

ESPN costs cable subscribers about $40/month whether they watch sports or not. That's the real bubble; when those viewers cut the cable, that income will never come back.

That's a problem for ESPN, not sports in general. The other sports networks are not getting the level of income from subscriptions and are still bidding high on sports deals. NBC just spent 1 billion on EPL rights.

NBC is not bidding $1 billion out of the goodness of their hearts. They are submitting a bid that is greater then other bids. If ESPN and Fox Sports (FSN) have less money for bids due to cable cutters, NBC (and CBS) can lower future bid amounts.

Clearly audiences moving to other platforms is a problem for all networks, but that's not a "sports" problem, that's a cable TV problem.

NBC is not bidding $1 billion because there are people who are forced to subscribe to ESPN that don't want to. They are bidding $1 billion because there is a high demand for sports programming.

I'm arguing against the guy who said that sports leagues are going to go under because people are no longer forced to subscribe to programming they don't want.

Total NFL revenue is about $7B, total TV contracts per year across multiple networks annualized to about $3B, in the most recent contract. Just a couple years ago it was about half... but we're not in a bubble ... sure ... a 70 year old sport doubled in real value in a couple years, not just bubble doubled in price, not very believable claim ...

If XYZ network could win at a bid of $750M I don't think they'll toss away $250M out of the goodness of their heart by bidding $1B. That's $250M that isn't going toward player salaries, overhead, stadiums, owner profit both immediate and via the estimated value of the team increasing for some future sale, etc. That, is a "sports" problem.

If TV revenue were a rounding error on the budget, variation could be ignored, but its not. It varies from sport to sport but very roughly about half the total revenue comes from TV for most popular pro sports.

On a technicality, there isn't a $1B bid because of high demand for sports. There's all kinds of things in high demand with no functioning market at all. Think of weed, for example. Anyway the football bid is $1B because they reckon they can sell more than $1B in advertising to baby boomer aged fans or other viewers who still have money to be influenced. Betting on TV commercial revenue increasing in perpetuity for all time is not a good bet to make.

It's possible to get sports. Basically you buy a non-US version of a sports package like NFL GamePass and then stream the content through your phone. You can get any game without blackouts.

You'll need a VPN connection to a foreign country, and you may also need to get an app (eg NFL GamePass or NHL) from a foreign App Store. Android is easier I hear.

Yes, it's possible, I said it was "really hard", not impossible. If you go to extraordinary means you can find a way to watch the games. You can usually find a Chinese streaming site with 1000 pop-up ads for any game you're interested in as well.

I'm guessing NFL GamePass doesn't include pre-game or post-game shows, I'm guessing it doesn't include NFL Network shows, or Sportscenter or any of the other places where you can watch people talk about sports. This is as big a part of being a sports fan as the games themselves.

It includes NFL Network Live which has all their specials and pre/post game shows.

Bigger part. The games only have 3.5 minutes of action, so you have to have pre/post-game chatter.

I live in an out of market area, so I can get the games, and for a single team subscription, NBA is $120 for a full season, and $200 for every team. NHL is something like $110 (?) for a single team, $130 for every team, MLB is something like $160 for every team. This gives you 82, 84, 162 games respectively multiplied by the number of teams, for a total of just under $500 USD for the most expensive options. This is a lot of money, but comes out to just under $42 bucks a month. The league that can go screw right off is NFL with their $360 something streaming package from DirecTV for 16 games, especially when there's things like Monday Night Football that broadcast half your team's games nationally and black you out. I don't watch soccer so I have no idea how much their packages cost.

Per the parent though, (at least for NHL) if the game is on national TV, it's blacked out on NHL Gamecenter. Fortunately, NHL isn't all that popular, so there's only a few games on national networks each week (of the dozens of games that are broadcast locally). No idea if it's the same with other leagues.

As a big college football fan, SlingTV has been awesome for me. It's about $15/month, and I get ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Goal Line (or something like that), SEC Network, and a bunch of other junk I don't watch.

I've been able to watch about 60% of my school's games this year on it, and the quality is outstanding.

Are any other non-Americans here as genuinely shocked as I am by the idea of paying $175 a month for TV?

Yes! $175 seems like an absurd cost, and I bet it's full of advertising too.

It seems especially strange when I think about what other things I could get for 175$.

American here and the only reason we have cable TV is because it's nowhere near that expensive when bundled with internet access.

Since cable is our only option for broadband where I live, it breaks down like this:

Just internet access for $70/mo

Internet access plus HBO and several channels and a tuner/DVR rental for ~$110/mo

Now, there are some limitations. On HBO, only the "main" HBO is in HD. The other HBO channels are only SD. Same goes for other cable. The "big" channels and network re-broadcasts are in HD or SD but many of the more niche channels are only in SD.

Additionally, with the phasing out of unencrypted QAM, you can't easily use your own tuner. I used to use a simple Hauppauge card in a PC along with a software tuner/DVR program to handle all of my channel flipping and recording but now I have to use their crappy cable box. In theory I could get a different PCI or USB card/box and rent a CableCard to handle the decryption and use my own tuner/DVR but CableCard is very poorly supported both in terms of software compatibility and cableco support.

In the end, we decided to keep cable for now even though I watch maybe one or two shows on traditional cable every week. The vast majority of my watching is done on Netflix or HBOGo. Still, my gf likes the convenience of just being able to flip through channels and she does a lot more "casual" watching of stuff that wouldn't be found on Netflix. If we swapped cable for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, and whatever other OTT subscription services, it wouldn't save a whole lot of money and you'd be stuck dealing with various apps and websites to find the specific thing you're looking for.

If it was just me, I'd probably skip cable TV but since it's both of us, we have to balance the actual savings against the very real issue of convenience, usability, and options.

I think a main issue is that there's not always an easy way to find the cheaper cable plans. They aren't well advertised and we typically get these offers after specifically asking for them from a cable customer service rep.

As an American I think it's absurd too, which is why I don't do it. I get 120 Megabits/second internet for under $100/month and use netflix, etc. if I want to watch a show or movie.

I'm and american and I've never paid that much for even my combined internet and TV.

To explain to non-Americans: $175 for "TV" doesn't mean just the typical channels you would receive over an antenna or clear satellite.

$175 is typically the largest premium package, which includes about 100-200 specialty/sports channels plus about 20-30 movie channels.

And with that, you get over 1000 channels, but almost none of them have anything interesting on.

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