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Comment by awalton | Hacker News Reader

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 bullshit.

I think the only real losers with cord cutting are people who like sports, as they all refuse to get with the times and have ridiculous region locking on all of their content. Luckily I do not suffer from the affliction...

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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 catch most games I care about on the radio or online. And the really big games are still usually on "broadcast" channels which I get on my minimal TV package.

> 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 occasionally. Despite the bundle being cheaper, you still are by all metrics a legit cable TV subscriber.

The big question is if it wasn't cheaper, would you still have cable TV? If it was $1 more to get TV vs just internet, would you do it, and at what point does it become too expensive?

> At the same time, you, like many others, do have it hooked up to your TV, and you watch it at least occasionally. Despite the bundle being cheaper, you still are by all metrics a legit cable TV subscriber.

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.

The reason cable is bundled as a discount is twofold: (1) you can get upsold later on a bigger and better package ("only $9.99 more!"), and (2) the bundle is a temporary/promotional rate -- after a fixed amount of time, long after you've forgotten about the fine print, your cable bill jumps up.

Source: worked a summer during college for a cable company, trying to appease thousands of pissed off customers.

People always try and tell me that it was a promotional rate, but I had this rate for five years.

I had the equipment, but never plugged it in. When I returned the equipment 6 months later, the Comcast rep refunded the entire price of the tv service, without even being asked. Normal I'd have nothing positive to say about their customer service, but that was quite nice.

Same here. When I moved and returned three sealed boxes of equipment, the customer service agent couldn't understand how I watched TV without hooking up a TV (didn't occur to them that maybe I didn't).

Where I live Comcast is the only option, and it is not (to my knowledge) possible to get an internet only package at all. I imagine that I am reported as a "cable customer" even though my TV isn't connected.

> is if it wasn't cheaper, would you still have cable TV

For me the answer is no. I do watch TV occasionally (but often go weeks or months without; I think the last "TV" I watched was the World Series) but the vast majority of what I watch is on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or YouTube or other online. If internet-only were cheaper that's what I would get. I might consider getting a rooftop antenna for broadcast network TV, but probably wouldn't bother.

I would pay 0$ more for TV+Internet vs just Internet. For the last two years, despite having a TV and Comcast sending me a (huge & ugly) set-top box that would give me basic TV channels, I just cannot be bothered to connect it. The only thing connected to my TV is a Chromecast, which I use a lot. I'm sure Comcast still counts me as a cable TV user.

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 want. The only difference is that it's all video-on-demand now.

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.

I also don't want to pay for content I don't watch, which is 80% of Netflix and Amazon Prime.

> The only difference is that it's all video-on-demand now

And ad free, or pretty much (HBO sometimes has a minute of ads before episodes, at least those are sometimes worth watching. That's how I found about westworld, for example).

I'd buy cable if it was ad free (and cheaper).

Right now I have netflix, hulu plus, amazon prime (+ motortrend for 5 bucks), hbo now, and nhl gamecenter. It's not cheap, and it's not the best experience going through apps. It's still better than ads.

I don't know. Netflix appears to have added a lot of licensed content over the last year. $10/month for Netflix vs $65/month for basic Fios TV. I could add HBO Now for $15/month and still be money ahead.

Netflix removes as much or more than it adds.

I'm in the same boat. But certainly we're in the minority in this country for not really caring too much about sports.

I'm sort of in the same boat? I don't want cable but it is cheaper bundling it with internet. I receive two extra channels than I would get from an antenna and the cable company tells shareholders their subscriber base is still going strong.

I have cable and have not turned my TV on in months. You really are not missing much.

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