The big reason many people have to not canceling their cable is live sports.
If this is the new trend, it's catastrophic to cable providers.
If this is the new trend, it's catastrophic to cable providers.
ESPN royalties are ~$7 per subscriber; $7 of your monthly cable bill goes to Disney just for ESPN [2]. They are obviously collecting that from many people who are uninterested in sports, as most basic cable packages include ESPN (if not ESPN 2 and so forth).
Cord cutting is the single biggest threat to Disney right now, and I'm sure this, a major signal that people are excited to consume their sports via the web and that ESPN is inching closer and closer to death, has them crapping their pants.
When Amazon buys Disney World, will they replace Cinderella Castle with a giant cardboard box bearing the "Amazon Prime" tape? ;)
[1 (PDF)] https://ditm-twdc-us.storage.googleapis.com/q1-fy17-earnings...
[2] http://awfulannouncing.com/2016/espns-rising-cable-fee-is-no...
(only sorta kidding..)
ESPN is in a pickle, but they remain the Worldwide Leader. Sports as an entertainment business is changing (quite a bit at the other end, where new and old media companies wage increasingly expensive wars over content acquisition as the pro sports leagues recognize they have TV deal leverage), but the company has some technical chops and understands scale and being on-site for events in the old world and new that the Valley (and Seattle) shouldn't assume they'll immediately be able to crack.
tl;dr: Overpaying for Jim Nantz on Thursday night NFL "absolute poopfests" while running around shouting cord cutters overestimates tech's ability to take over traditional entertainment channels.
Seemed to me they were doing it to inflate subscriber numbers.
That's more than we pay for Netflix, Sling, CBS All Access and Hulu. We also have Amazon Prime.
Cable TV is fixed. I have 4 TV's in my home, only watch 1 at a time, rarely 2 may be one at any given time. So I would have to pay for a 2 concurrent stream account. With cable I would have to pay for 4 Boxes 24/7 just for the option of watching TV on them.
I remember the days where you paid for Service to the home, not service per device. then the FCC gave the cable companies a special exemption to allow them to start Encrypting the signal that is when they started to screw people over on the Box fees.
I cant wait for the day the Electric Company can charge be by the outlet, and then start charging me more based on the type of appliance I plug into said outlet
Admittedly, I don't mind this because it has drastically improved service availability and quality in my area by stopping people from stealing cable.
But all this is a moot point if you don't have unlimited data. You might not end up saving.
When it happened, about a year ago, the final bill was $10 cheaper. Today it's a bit less, I think $5; they shifted a couple values around.
This throws back to the Phone Companies and DSL where you had to buy a bundled POTS line to get DSL.
Now I pay exactly $29/mo of internet, nothing more.
Our final bill before all this was $70/mo for internet (100/20). After the deal it was $60/mo for Internet+TV. That's final bill; that's the amount we pay on our credit card.
I didn't do anything special. I don't even complain to TimeWarner about anything (a friend of mine gets discounts by calling and complaining about internet speeds). They offered the deal when I went in to drop off their cable modem, cause I had bought my own (and yes, the deal is $10 cheaper even taking into account removing the modem lease).
The only thing I can think of as to why I got "special treatment" is that I've never, ever had cable TV on my account with TimeWarner, and always told them no when they nagged me with random phone calls. So maybe they offer this deal to customer who they know will never subscribe, because having the subscription is worth the $10/mo to them.
Unless they're ready to move up 2 orders of magnitude, they're not getting close to the kind of money the NFL is looking for.
"Your team just won with the winning play by $thisguy. Want to buy his jersey while you're here?"
Broadcast rights are just one of the places professional sports makes money.
The best car show at the moment (IMO) is Mighty car mods on Youtube, a pair of Aussie lads who love Japanese cars. They're absolutely hilarious and actually are really knowledgeable about cars.
It barely seems like they are even interested in cars anymore, everything felt overrehearsed and written, even the little quippy jokes to each other felt like they were done multiple time for extra takes.
Im not sure what exactly made TopGear so special, but it seem to me that whatever it was has been lost. maybe the guys are just too old or too rich to put in the effort they used to.
I was jerked around by their customer service on cancellation, which seems to be part and parcel of anything related to AT&T. I would love to see their entire business model completely upended.
Holy hell I didn't realize service could get that expensive. It makes a bit more sense why my parents never got cable. I figured $80-100/month would get pretty much everything.
Quite honestly, I'm thinking about upgrading my PS Vue plan from the "Access" plan to the highest one that includes HBO and Showtime, at $65/mo it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than even the lowest-tier plan I can get from the local cable company.
You can get everything for around $270.
Most streaming sites authenticate you before letting your client know the IP, port and path of the stream. Once that is known, you can turn off the VPN or whatever, and stream like normal, so it should stream at a higher bitrate.
Of course, you can still get a package with DirectTV that lets you view all the games.