Can I intercede and say that $170 cable bills were never a thing outside the US?
Since the marginal cost of selling an additional unit is near zero, it makes sense for sellers to heavily price discriminate such that poorer people are charged what they can afford and richer people are charged what they can afford.
That is where brands come in for differentiable products. The generic brand lotion and the name brand lotion might come from the same factory. Maybe it is even the same product, or the different in quality is only slightly better for the name brand. But now the seller can target people willing to pay $x for lotion, and people willing to pay $2x for basically the same lotion.
Or you implement “binning”, where products of worse quality get branded differently, even though the sale price difference between the better quality product and the generic quality product is disproportionately larger than the cost to produce the better quality product than the generic product.
Anyway, you cannot do this for a movie or tv show, so the sellers of movies/tv shows do it more crudely via country or region of the world.
Between the time element and snobbery, the market is segmented and revenues maximized.
Classic economic theory on pricing lists commonly used options that essentially try to achieve that but with various indirect methods:
1. provide discounts to various demographics that are known afford less - e.g. students, seniors, etc.
2. provide different prices at times or places that have customers with different average ability to pay - e.g. geographic discrimination, and also discounts provided at times when traditionally employed people can't take them.
3. simple "inconvenient obstacles" e.g. coupon schemes, intentionally created queues, etc where people who accept the inconvenience get a better price, and people who can afford to pay more simply don't bother and pay.
4. Direct, prolonged, serious personal bargaining and haggling, resulting in an individually negotiated price that depends on your willingness to pay.
But IMHO people would not like if it was explicitly based on their ability to pay, so companies try to disguise that.
[1] https://openmedia.org/article/item/2021-rewheel-report-shows...
[1] https://www.offersnewcustomers.co.uk/sky-tv/complete-bundle/ [2] https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/packages
What was the situation outside of the US if you wanted to watch The Sopranos or Sex and the City or something else on HBO back then? My assumption is that this wasn't all free and over the air?
In retrospect, they did a great job of curation.* I seem to spend more time looking for something to watch than watching, and often just give up and go to bed.
* Up til subscription satellite TV became available. Quality was inversely related to the number of available channels.
I think the focus should be on keeping the market fractured. If content is of poor quality that just means the population is ok with poor quality. There is business to be made on poor quality. /s
Once upon a time I worked as a CSR for a cable company, and a couple customers, old honest people, opened the conversation along the lines "I only come back because, impossible as that might appear, the other company is even worse than you are"
I highly disagree with that sentiment. Cheap cable packages maybe had 40 channels which barely expanded on the local broadcast availability, littered with advertisements. No real dedicated movie channels, movies were often cropped and edited to fit the time slots and ratings allocations for the channels when they did air. Time shifting meant having to keep a VCR well stocked, or later buy/rent a DVR. And if your VHS or DVR was full, well, you're out of luck, you just missed that episode. Decide you want to start watching some TV show that's been on for a few seasons? You're out of luck, better go rent some tapes or DVDs to get caught up. Want to watch on the go? Sorry, you're out of luck, the only place you can consume this is at home, or lug around a TV, VCR, and VHS tapes with you.
For less than half the price of your supposed $20 cable package (before adding additional expensive hardware) I can watch literally thousands and thousands of movies and shows at a moment's notice anywhere I have an internet connection.