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Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of economic breakdowns showing that a la carte pricing doesn't do much to reduce cost. Chris Dixon did a quick breakdown: http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-a...

Also, I'm not sure the fallback to channels is a bad thing. I've been spending a lot of time in the YouTube ecosystem and finding good regular series on a topic is a HUGE challenge. If there was a well curated food channel or educational channel on YouTube I'd pay to subscribe — It's a huge time suck searching, especially using the current tools.

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The comparison provided in that link doesn't work for me, much for the same reasons someone pointed out in the comments.

The conclusion is that bundling benefits both the consumer and the company. The consumer gets both channels cheaper than separately and the company generates more revenue even with cheaper pricing per channel. This completely ignores the fact that I don't want the sports channel AT ALL. Therefore, instead of paying $11.70 for both channels, I'm paying $9 for the one I truly want.

Now expand that over hundreds of channels, including the dozens of sports channels I don't want, and let's see how it breaks down. From the current lineup of channels that I saw the last time I looked I would expect I would only want at most a dozen channels. Compare that to the amount I currently pay would be of huge benefit to the cable company because currently I pay nothing for cable TV as I'm a cord cutter. I haven't paid for cable TV in three years because of their stupid bundling pricing, how did that benefit the company?

It doesn't matter that you don't want the sports channel, if you think it does then you haven't understood the economics argument.

You're also an exception, and if the cable company tried to optimise for you (today) they would lose much much more than they would gain.

You are quite correct and I understand the economics of bundling. But that's why I stated the comparison didn't work for me. But one day they will have to optimize for people like me because the group is growing and things suggest it will continue. It may take a while but it's inevitable, as you seem to agree with in your "today" comment.

Let it take a while, I'm quite happy with the current arrangement of me not paying any money for cable TV.

I'm curious: Is Spotify the future or iTunes?

Why not both?

Your 12 channels cost $100. My 300 channels (which includes your 12) cost $100. Is that really what you want? For a product with zero marginal costs, this is entirely plausible (in fact, required).

No, if that's the cost of my 12 channels then I will continue to say no thanks. Currently I get nothing, save my $100, and I'm quite content with that.

I'm not sure I agree with your last point though. Because it seems the cable TV industry's idea is that the only thing to do is to increase costs for their customers over time regardless of the quality of the product. I stipulate that the quality of cable TV has gotten worse over the years even with the 300 channels they now offer. You're just paying more and more for low-quality noise you never watch.

I can't agree that cable tv quality has gone down recently. Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad? This stuff is not only the highest quality TV we've probably ever seen but higher quality than film as well.

In those cases you are quite correct, plus they are on channels that might not exist if not for cable TV. Surely the content of those shows would not exist on broadcast TV.

And that's just two channels out of three hundred. Yes, there are examples of quality but they are severely drowned out by the noise. I guess I should say the average quality of cable TV has gone down over the years.

I suppose if the majority of the channels on cable offered quality entertainment on the level of HBO's or AMC's offerings then my attitude would be different. But since I can access AMC content now with a agreeable arrangement and possibly get HBO's in the future, I don't feel the need to pay for all those channels I'll never watch. Right now I pay for the shows I want to watch.

Plus, Netflix produced House of Cards of which I'd be happy to compare with any of HBO's or AMC's offerings.

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