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Comment by pdubroy | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't actually offer any evidence, apart from the fact that Netflix has doubled its subscribers.

Exactly. If anything I'd bet the opposite might be the case. After all, Netflix streaming and Hulu have both been an enabler for a lot of folks to drop their cable subscription altogether(my wife and I have, for one).

The only problem is that there are still a few shows we really want to see (like Game Of Thrones) that we can't find a way to legally acquire. Without cable there is no HBO.

I bet more and more people are going to be turning to piracy to get the content they want when they cut that cable cord.

HBO on a cable subscription is still 15 - 20 clams. Even if it was available streaming or unbundled, that's still a lot more than the cost of netflix.

But I'd be much faster to pay 15-20 than 65+(15 to 20)=80+ and watch 5 channels + HBO.

I think cable misses an opportunity by forcing you to have a heap of channels you don't want just to get the stuff you do. I'd pay somewhere around $20 a month to get the probably 5 or so channels of any interest.

So.. what opportunity are they missing? The opportunity to get less money from their customers? Doesn't sound like much of an opportunity to me.

The opportunity is that they could have more customers. Many people are canceling their cable subscriptions because the price is too high for the value it offers. If cable companies allowed customers to have only a few channels that they cared about for a lower fee, many of these people would keep some level of cable subscription.

The correlation is relevant.

Compare to claims that piracy decreases sales.

But they don't highlight any correlation. A correlation requires two trends, but they only describe one. Is piracy going down? They don't say.

TorrentFreak's content tends to be either really good or really crappy. This article falls into the latter category. Without data to back their claims up it's worthless speculation.

That's one of the reasons I've never liked torrentfreak as a news source. A lot of their writing is also just focusing on worst-case scenarios. If you read torrentfreak daily you'd probably believe the internet is about to collapse as we know it any second.

Thanks pdubroy for finally pointing this out. There is no data to back up the author's hypothesis, so it's just that, a (why-not-plausible) hypothesis. Any discussion further should start with "If this is true, then..."

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