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Comment by erdevs | Hacker News Reader

Between Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime, etc on-demand services... what is left keeping people from cutting the cable TV cord? Just awareness and inertia? (Which are powerful, witness AOL dial-up ISP for a decade+.) Or are there other things keeping people tethered still? Sports? Reality TV series which don't all make it onto these on-demand services?

Think this a smart move on Hulu's part. And depending on the economics, potentially smart for Yahoo+Verizon too.

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Sports and broadband speed. Many cable companies have pricing setups that make paying for just high-speed internet nearly as expensive as a slower package + TV (and the TV channels aren't impacted by broadband speed issues). Now, this is generally only true in the first year of a contract (and then you're bumped to truly insane rates for TV services), but if you're willing to shop around and have multiple people who might be streaming at once, it's a better deal that way.

I say all of this as a cord cutter myself. It took a while to figure out, but I was able to cobble together essentially every channel or show through legal means using Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Playstation Vue, HBONow and an OTA antennae. The costs savings only really worked out once my roommates and I all realized that each of us were paying for our own Netflix and HBONow subscription, but even without that, it's nearly the same price as our previous cable package (intro rate), plus has the luxury of being able to cancel each individual service should we decide to make any kind of change without having to go through the hell of Comcast customer service.

Sports is the big thing.

Also cutting cable cord doesn't really save you that much. In most cases you still need to buy internet access from your cable company which is hardly cheap.

If cable cutting becomes more widespread I expect cable companies to offer "discounted" cable channels with their Internet:

It's either $100/mo for 10mbps Internet + HBO or $99 for 10mbps Internet alone. HBO has been discounted to $1/month. What a great deal!

In the US, you cannot get Olympic coverage without a cable subscription. The streaming from NBC demands authentication with the credentials from your cable subscription. I don't have one. I can't even try to use my internet service credentials, because my current apartment includes 50/50 fiber for free (the most first world problem. Maybe even a .5 world problem).

I signed up for Sling[0] for a free trial to watch the games. The annoying part is that the event I truly care about (Judo) is minimally covered on network television and at awkward hours.

[0]http://www.sling.com

In the US, you cannot get Olympic coverage without a cable subscription.

Not entirely true if one doesn't mind a little grey area by SSH tunneling to your London, UK Linode and watching it on BBC. There was a good step-by-step post at http://bearsfightingbears.com/how-to-watch-the-olympics-live..., but it doesn't work for me anymore. It's what I did in 2012. Now I just don't care enough to bother. :-)

Yes, my "In the US" means for a network endpoint in the US. There are always ways to exert control over where the apparent endpoint of your connection is.

Sports and inertia are my guesses. Sports, because that's what I hear everyone say when asked why they still have cable. Inertia because paying the cable bill every month is easier than explaining to your spouse why he can't watch Real Housewives of Bumphuck, ID on a lark. That, and I don't think cord-cutting is for people that sit down in front of a TV to watch something. I've caught myself doing that: flip the remote until I find the least uninteresting thing that moves and makes noise.

My spouse, thankfully, is about as big a fan of commercial television as I am, so it was easy sell to unhook DirecTV seven or eight years ago. Between Netflix, iTunes, and HBO Now, we have more TV than we have time to watch (again, not big watchers to begin with). When we sit down, it's with a purpose, not channel-flipping. That's not to say we're more noble than others, as we'll bing-watch a series with the best of them. We just don't sit down to "watch TV", we sit down to "watch Stranger Things".

Hulu? That was part of our cord-cutting way back when. But the commercials got more frequent, and long before Hulu wised up and offered "ad-free" we just quit watching it. Sorry, Hulu, inertia works both ways and we got used to doing without you, never to return.

Cheaper to bundle your internet with cable than to just have internet.

In intro rates, yes. Outside of that, absolutely not. Yes, you can shop around annually. Or you can pay about the same and have the ability to cancel and turn back on subscriptions you stop using or want to start again.

You can get sports covered if you sign up for Playstation Vue. I have been off cable for several years, but had always missed ESPN/FS. Playstaiton Vue has fixed that for me.

Live events, for me. Primarily NFL/NBA/MLB games, but also things like live news coverage.

Most of the people I have asked who haven't cut the cord say they don't know how to set it all up or think it will be more complicated to use.

And/or they do not have internet at their house, only use the internet on their phone.

I think the *TV/Stick devices are pretty damned simple... I got my parent's a Roku a few years ago, and they still use it regularly (though they haven't cut the cord, mostly sports).

I think they're simple too, but then I remember working in tech support for DirecTv how many people just didn't plug the TV in.

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