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Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

On the flipside, many have cut the cord because of the high cost of cable, partly due to the cost being inflated by being forced to have channels such as ESPN. Amazon purchasing the rights to sports increases the cost for those that do not care about sports.

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ESPN is currently quite the quagmire for Disney corporate. Surprisingly, it's the business unit that makes up the largest amount of Disney's revenue, around 30%. [1] The last several posted losses for Disney (including the one just reported this month) have been primarily due to decreasing subscriber counts for ESPN.

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...

I'm never one to resist change, but jumping to Bezos buying Walt's land seems a bit premature. Cord cutting may represent a move away from traditional coax cable packages...but actually delivering a non-trivial amount of revenue, subscribers, and staying power in an industry shouldn't be scoffed at.

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.

I'm actually surprised how cheap ESPN is. In the UK, adding the two main sports networks (Sky and BT) adds something like $70/month, maybe more, to your bill. It's definitely not included in "basic" packages but i bet millions of people still subscribe to both. It's pretty much the only reason people have payTV, and something like 60% of households do have payTV as a whole.

You need five channels to get the equivalent of what BT and Sky provide with the Premier League, and you are absolutely bombarded with advertising. European football isn't really suitable to the same business model, so we have to pay for our sports.

Who needs a fairy godmother if you have Amazon Prime Now? ;)

(only sorta kidding..)

Oddly enough, TimeWarner (Spectrum) is giving me an overall discount on my bill ... in exchange for having TV service. What I mean is, my final bill for Internet+TV is _less_ than just Internet. I don't even watch TV. I threw the installation kit in a box and haven't ever set it up.

Seemed to me they were doing it to inflate subscriber numbers.

That is because they massively overcharge for unbundled Internet Service, you will pay for Cable TV, even if you do not want want it

This throws back to the Phone Companies and DSL where you had to buy a bundled POTS line to get DSL.

Having recently bought a home, the worst part was moving to an area where I had to give up the fiber connection I had through Cincinnati Bell and going back to Time Warner. I thought I'd kicked them out of my life for good, was paying much less for an incredible speed and the reps were super nice.

If TW is anything like Comcast, the bill is only lower until you start adding fees. I have six TVs. 5 additional cable boxes would be $50. Plus the "HD Technology Fee" - $10. Plus the sports access, network access, and various other fees, we would pay about $80 a month just in fees.

That's more than we pay for Netflix, Sling, CBS All Access and Hulu. We also have Amazon Prime.

If someone is throwing the install kit for TV service into some box for later returning, I doubt they are telling TW "Yeah, I have 5 TVs, all of which are HD. Sure, I'd like to pay an extra $100/month for something I have no intention of watching."

Once you get one set top box that is capable of HD, they charge you the "HD Technology Fee".

Then say you have no hd tv. So, no hd fee. Am I missing something?

Then you don't get an HD capable settop box. So you watch everything in SD?

If you're not connecting the settop box, why do you care if it's SD?

I'm with you but technically it's not apples to apples. With 5 TV set top boxes you can watch on 5 tv's different content. Each of the streaming services you listed have login limitations so to get 5x streams you are paying double to triple service fees.

The Streaming services charge by Concurrent streams

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

>> 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

Admittedly, I don't mind this because it has drastically improved service availability and quality in my area by stopping people from stealing cable.

Would it matter anyway if it is all digital?

We only have three people in the house. So all three of us could watch live tv simultaneously with Sling. Hulu gives us errors once in a blue moon if we try to stream from multiple TVs, but for the most part, it hasn't been a problem. It's also not usually a problem with Netflix or Amazon Video.

But all this is a moot point if you don't have unlimited data. You might not end up saving.

Nope, it's lower all-in.

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.

Be careful with that and watch your bill carefully. I signed up for internet service recently. The TV bundle wasn't that much more expensive. I read the fine print and they were going to tack an additional $16/mo in fees for the television; $8 going to sport channels.

Now I pay exactly $29/mo of internet, nothing more.

Yup, I check the bill every month.

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.

There's also an cost inflation problem for cord cutters as well. Having recently moved, I discovered that the slowest cable modem plan which Spectrum (formerly Time Warner) offers is now 100Mbit. It seems the days of $30/mo broadband are over...

Yes, there's a major conflict of interest here. Entities like Comcast have incentive to impose bandwidth caps because then you'll be forced to acquire video content (by far the most bandwidth-hungry application) over your cable subscription to prevent fees.

I would kill for anythin beyond the 5mb I can get where I live. Most of my neighbors still cant get high speed internet. I am less than an hour from one of the us's 10 biggest cities.

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