Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

N different services still come out cheaper than cable. I pay for Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime (which comes with Video) so let's say ~ $30 a month. Compared to Cox Cable, it's not even close -- $30 is Cox' entry level cable offering (and I can't share it with my family, nor watch shows at my own leisure).

My bet is that there's plenty of cash still left. Until cable companies wise up (which is probably never), Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video will continue printing money.

Edit: almost forgot that with cable you still get ads lol.

View on HN

> N different services still come out cheaper than cable.

For the US which is used to pay triple digit sums a month for basic TV yes, but for Europeans? No way. For Germans, for example, it's the (mandatory) public-broadcast fee of 18€/month/household and maybe 20-30€ if you really really want pay TV (add another 30-40€ for the premium sports but these can be streamed all over the net). So basically the delta between public TV only (which covers private channels, too! Lots of stations here are OTA) and pay-TV is Netflix+Spotify+maaaybe one additional service, that's it.

Always found that interesting in Europe. In Brazil, you don't pay for "public-broadcast" (as we call here, open TV). But could you tell me more about private channels on public TV?

In Germany you have to get a TV License for every household that owns a TV. That money is used to fund public broadcasters like ARD, WDR, etc. Now, you can watch the privately funded TV stations from the same TV ofc, but they don't receive money from the Govt. Instead they are funded by ads, etc.

This is outdated. It doesnt matter if you have a TV at all, every household has to pay

> In Brazil, you don't pay for "public-broadcast" […]

Are you sure the public broadcasters (e.g., EBC) aren't financed by tax-payer money? In the Netherlands there is no separate fee for public broadcasting, but we all pay for our public, free-to-air television and radio via taxes.

There is a mandatory fee that you will pay for being connected to cable (which most people are, even if they don't necessarily use the TV). This pays for the "free" channels that everyone gets.

Are you including the cable company's data cap tax of $50-$200+ per month?

These evil megacorps are running people into into the data cap (as streaming quantity/quality increases) and will adjust rates until they're sheering the sheep closer than ever before.

Expect to continue paying more for internet access despite cable company costs plummeting. You can thank the corrupt US gov officials that enable them.

I’m in Germany. My internet and phone bill is 27€/month. I – as many Germans – watch via satellite, so I pay 0€/month for private TV. The public broadcasting fee is 18€/month per household, no matter how many people live in one.

Netflix is definitely not going to be cheaper, and adding Amazon Prime and the other services on top even less. And I still wouldn’t get all the same content.

> Until cable companies wise up (which is probably never), Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video will continue printing money.

Hulu lost over $600 million last year, so they must have a conveyor belt from the printer directly to the toilet. We'll see what happens once Disney takes majority control, but I bet this time next year Hulu's going to be very different.

That’s n different services just to get a decent coverage of recent releases. As for the back catalogue, I haven’t seen anything that is even close to decent.

I supplement the big ones with FilmStruck (has a subset of the Criterion Collection), MUBI and Fandor. Together they have a decent collection of "older" (pre-2010s) films.

I don't know for the other twos but Mubi doesn't have much of a collection. They have a rolling 30 titles chosen by them. It's interesting if you want to discover new movies (though heavily dependent on their taste being aligned to yours), but not so much if you pull the filmography of Gene Hackman on imdb and want to watch the movies you haven't seen already.

[edit] actually none of the other two you mentioned is available in the UK...

Right, MUBI is more like an online movie theater. FilmStruck and Fandor are traditional streaming services. They're small, though. I think FilmStruck's catalog numbers much less than a thousand.

That's entry level cable, with ads (as you mentioned), and that's before you pay all of the BS fees and rentals for the boxes and HD surcharges and recording surcharges and whatever else they come up with this year.

> with cable you still get ads lol

Amazon Prime shows you short ads of other Amazon shows, at the start of episodes. Not in the middle, though.

until each of these services hike up their prices and more of them spawn up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com