Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

I recently moved to my own place from an apartment I shared with a roommate who worked in TV and insisted we have a premium cable package. We had an absolutely immense number of channels, but when I moved out I didn't even have a second thought about dropping TV service altogether.

Most of the channels I may have been interested in watching have slowly descended into drivel: Discovery, History, TLC, Science...they all show total garbage reality shows 24/7 these days. A huge portion of the hundreds of other channels we got seemed to be essentially filler garbage to inflate the channel count.

Aside from the content, the UI/UX of the whole cable experience is terrible. Our cable box was brand new and 'top of the line', yet was so slow that I'd sometimes count the seconds between selecting something and seeing any sort of feedback. The 'cloud DVR' service–touted by our cable provider as a premium feature that would allow you to watch recorded shows in other rooms or on different devices–would regularly simply not function, or, especially on nights when a popular series was premiering (Breaking Bad comes to mind), would throw 503 errors when trying to watch the recording.

We were spending upwards of $150/month for service, and they kept trying to sneak in rate increases. Towards the end of our lease neither of us-even my TV industry roommate-watched anything on TV. Cable TV is a terrible service and I'm glad to see that it's getting shaken up.

It's truly amazing how terrible it is.

Extremely expensive, enormous amount of advertising, content is only available on a time schedule, DVR is slow and still has the ads you have to fast forward through (if it works at all).

I don't understand why anybody would pay for it (with the notable exception of sports).

My fear is that it'll shift into a service like Hulu where they ditch the time schedule, but you're still paying for tons of advertising. I hope the Netflix and HBO model win (or even Apple and Amazon). Better content, no advertising, better price. I hope the others fail and take all of their shitty content down with them.

Don't underestimate sports. I think live sports are what keeps the industry afloat.

Don't overestimate people's preferences either. I'm sure tons of people will gladly sit in front of those channels you described all day every day.

When do we reach the tipping point?

Seems to be in every industry. Enough people switch to rooftop solar, utilities can't survive. Enough people switch to electric cars, all of the infrastructure around gas vehicles starts to come undone. What's the tipping point for cable tv? At what point is it no longer sustainable for them to operate as they've traditionally done?

Interesting times.

> What's the tipping point for cable tv? At what point is it no longer sustainable for them to operate as they've traditionally done?

Its probably not a big deal, in the end; if people cord cut and eschew TV-style content, it might hurt cable providers. But cord cutters that just increase consumption of higher-speed internet services are just transferring demand from "cable TV" to "high speed internet", and the providers of those services are largely the same anyway. So, demand shifts, and CATV fades away and ISP prices increase, and the same big companies make the same big money and have to maintain fewer distinct service offerings to do it.

there are tons of issues with rooftop solar: they still require the grid, its only economically sensible with heavy subsidies and tax rebates (even worse when you consider time valued money), much of the country is unfeasible to run 100% on solar. Hawaii is the most feasible solar place in america, with electricity costing 3x the national average, and yet it has a long way to go and even those solar customers require the utility companies.

cable on the other hand, doesn't seem like its that far away. besides infrastructure, one of the reasons why cable is expensive is they have to pay royalties to content providers. lets assume cable went away today, do you really think netflix / hulu would be able to charge the same rate?

they are trying to free themselves from the content providers by producing their own original content

If MLB.tv didn't block out Giants games in the Bay Area, I would have already cancelled my cable tv. I think on the tipping point, I can eventually imagine the MLB lifting blackout restrictions.

can you not get them with an antenna?

Typically a blackout affects all the local channels unless the game is sold out some time prior to game start. They really want you to buy a ticket (and concessions, and memorabilia, and parking, and...)

Unlike the NFL, MLB doesn't have attendance-based blackout.

I'm not sure how it works, but the Giants contract is with Comcast SportsNet and 99% of the games are on their channel which is cable only.

Perhaps not. The Red Sox are (almost) not OTA for instance

Nowadays, in the Bay Area, day-to-day baseball games are broadcast on cable-only channels.

Probably. It would actually be nice to see statistics for how many businesses (i.e. bars, gyms, restaurants) have cable/satellite subscriptions, especially for sports.

I too am without cable, but there's hardly a shortage of places that have the next game on a TV around me. Having a pint or two for the occasional game (or sitting at the squat rack or elliptical while watching TV) is a much better alternative than paying ludicrous amounts every month.

I get cable for four months a year to watch college football. Then I cancel it. Kind of a pain, but that's what it's come down to.

Incidentally, it is WAY easier to cancel a Cox account in person at the local office than on the phone.

Protip: If canceling telecom/tv/whatever crappy ossified subscription business, tell them you are immediately moving to a very remote location. I usually say I've joined the Peace Core and am leaving for Namibia next week. After you repeat this a few times they stop nagging and escalating you and just cancel the service.

I usually just repeat the same exact phrase until they give up on the script. Three times is usually the max times someone will listen to me repeat "I would like to cancel my service" before they laugh and just do it.

your lying is screwing over people who join the Peace Corps.

If you don't want to be on a contract, don't sign a contract.

Ditto - Hockey season for me. As a TiVo user from day one, it's been interesting to see over the years the progress (and lack therof) being made in the provisioning process - especially for non-cable-company-owned hardware.

Back in the early days, it'd almost always take at least one in-person visit to activate the cable card - Frequently two. Nowadays, I can get it done in 3 or less phone calls.

Did I mention I hate cable?

A monopoly in live sports is what keeps the Murdoch empire afloat and free to fund his political intervention.

I receive advertising for Netflix Originals when viewing Netflix, now.

"Most of the channels I may have been interested in watching have slowly descended into drivel: Discovery, History, TLC, Science"

I completely agree. It's amazing how these once interesting channels have decided to go the reality TV route, and it's so far away from the type of programming you'd assume they would have. I remember being devastated when the History Channel started doing this.

It's because the content people used to consume on those channels is now better consumed on the internet, and the audiences for that content have followed.

Given that, those channels can either go out of business, or pivot to provide content for the remaining audience.

Also, 'reality tv' is ridiculously cheap to produce compared to normal broadcast fare. Minimal crew, minimal writing, low (if any) 'actor' compensation. Usually shot in cheap locations.

> Most of the channels I may have been interested in watching have slowly descended into drivel: Discovery, History, TLC, Science...they all show total garbage reality shows 24/7 these days.

Unless you consider shows like "How it's Made", "Mythbusters", "Extreme Engineering", "Outrageous Acts of Science", "Engineering Disasters", "The Universe", "Ancient Impossible", "Ancient Discoveries", "How the Earth Was Made", and "Modern Marvels" to be "reality shows", I have to disagree. Those shows are all full of good and interesting history and science.

Yes, there is a lot of drivel in prime time and daytime to pay the bills, but with a DVR and a small amount of planning, you can extract quite a bit of good stuff from Discovery, History (I'm including H2 in this), and Science. TLC, though, is largely crap.

Similar for National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Animal Planet: a fair amount of crap, but some gems for science/engineering types you can DVR without much effort.

Or, if you're patient, just wait for them to show up on Netflix and watch there.

I've had the same experience with Fios. I had no desire for TV service, but they offered it with HBO for less than Internet along, so it made sense.

I'd rather use HBO Go most of the time now that I have legit access to it, except logging in on it requires going through Verizon, which manages to screw it up about 50% of the time. It's also perpetually requiring me to re-register my TV with the service.

The On-Demand service is terribly slow to navigate. The cable box also routinely shows interstitial ads when trying to browse the program guide. It's like somehow the additional competition has actually made their service worse.

Yeah, I just moved into an apartment where the couple recently cut the cord as well. I think the only part where you're wrong is in saying cable TV is getting "shaken up." I'm pretty sure cable TV as we knew it is over.

You weren't paying $150 just for the TV package, I hope.

It was internet, TV and phone. The unused phone service made it a package, netting out -$10 from the bill if it had been just TV and internet. Since moving I've replaced it with 50mbit internet for $35/month.

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