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Comment by Amadou | Hacker News Reader

I'm also happy to spend $1.87 per episode for Breaking Bad

Compared to what they earn from regular viewers - subscription fees and commercials - that pricing is nuts.

I'm happy to pay for quality content while filtering out all the jibberish I would otherwise get by watching it on cable TV. And I don't have to pay the $100+ per month that Comcast jacked me up to with fees, equipment, and constantly increasing monthly subscription costs, which would always go up without explanation or warning.

For those of us who are picky about our content choices -- and especially those of us who don't really give a crap about sports -- cutting cable makes a lot of sense. I wish cable providers offered a lower-cost option with no sports package, but sadly, that's the bread and butter of the entire cable TV business model. So I'm stuck paying largely for content I don't consume.

Bundling is a raw deal for those of us who don't care about the bulk of the bundle. (To say nothing of the silly equipment costs, etc.).

It's a raw deal for the cable companies, too. They'd rather do an a la carte format, but the networks bundle themselves. It's like this, ABC, which owns ESPN (one of the most watched TV networks) says that if you want to carry ESPN, you have to carry ABC Family, and ESPN 3, etc.

Cable companies do offer a low cost bare bones option. It is called "basic cable." It's a few bucks a month (around 10-15ish) and when I had it, it was about the first 15-20 or so channels.

http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/residential-home/support/f...

Yeah, the problem with basic cable is that you get only the basic cable channels. There is no great way to sever, say, HBO and Showtime from ESPN-XYZ, etc.

I think the parent comment meant that it was a very low price, relative to how much money AMC makes off of their cable viewers.

No, I am meant that $1.87 is absurdly high compared to how much money AMC makes from cable viewers. See the analysis a little further down, it's less than 40c per episode.

According to the article, they make about 0.35 cents per month from subscribers. Given 13 episodes per year, and a 30% commission that's $4.20 vs $17. I suspect that much less than 25% of AMC subscribers watch Breaking Bad given how bundling works so it can be argued that they're making more money from subscribers than from people buying on iTunes.

you're not factoring in the advertising money they're missing out on with digital downloads.

The article mentions subscription revenue is substantially larger than advertising revenue.

13 episodes is 3 months. So that $4.20 is really closer to $1. Bump it to $1.50 as a generous amount for advertising. Apply your 25% modifier and you are still at $5/season or 38c/episode.

Just for some solid numbers: Breaking Bad costs ~$3m/ep to produce. They normally pull around 3m viewers; this week's premiere pulled 5.9m viewers.

Syndication would probably factor in as well.

But... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_episodes

They pull 3 million viewers for the first showing in the US. Then there are all the catch-up viewings later in the week plus the showings in foreign markets. I don't know if BB will be syndicated, usually takes around 100 episodes before a series can be syndicated, but it is definitely sold on bluray and DVD.

How is it nuts? Most customers pay them much less, but most customers don't watch the show. It's the fundamental tradeoff behind bundling.

They earn 33 cents for every single cable and satellite subscriber regardless of if they watch the show.

That's 33 cents for ALL of AMC, not just Breaking Bad. That's mad men, he'll on wheels, walking dead and the old movies. And they sell discs. And the sell in iTunes. And they get paid by Netflix, hulu, and amazon.

I hope it continues to work out, I tend to enjoy just about all of their original content and they seem to be hungry enough to not just do the lowest common denominator thing. Probably not as big as hbo but give them some time.

Nuts? For being high or low?

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