Hacker News Reader

>not how tech works. It generally gets commodified and cheaper: TVs

Hardware gets commodified and cheaper, not services usually. Do you pay less for cable tv now compared to 20 years ago?

View on HN

Its complex. Cell phone plans became way cheaper in my country than 20 years ago, they used to be shockingly expensive. People old enough will remember SMS weren't cheap and a single minute of call was shockingly expensive. I'd same similar thing happened with the internet, you can now get a basic plan for cheaper than 20 years ago. Is it as cheap as it should be? Probably not.

It's interesting this hasn't happened with cable I somewhat agree with you there. However you have alternatives that are just as good like Netflix and cost 20 bucks or less if you can live with ads.

Agreed, I think it's a mistake to treat "cable" as the entire product category here. It's a (dying) subset of the product category, not the whole category. Like internet and cellular service, SOTA television content as a whole hasn't ever really been cheaper than it is today.

The US is unique in its "cable" and telecom approach (maybe shared with some other Western countries).

In most APAC and African countries cell plans are extremely competitive and data is SUPER cheap. Same with streaming services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com