
Who killed the great American cable TV bundle? - classichasclass
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-08/who-killed-the-great-american-cable-tv-bundle
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hedora
Hint: It wasn’t a CEO, it was the march of technology.

BitTorrent dealt the fatal blow over a decade ago (and something else would
have come around if not it).

In fairness to the article, they do mention some of the later actors: Hulu
gave it a good pillow smothering, but it looks like Netflix will be the one to
convince everyone to pull the plug.

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foxyv
For me it was Youtube Red and Roku. As a kid I had some tolerance for
advertisements and they weren't that bad. But after spending some time without
them I've lost that tolerance. I can't watch network television anymore
because they are so obnoxious.

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chiph
IMO, it was ESPN. Over the years, they strong-armed the cable companies into
carrying more and more specialized sports channels. And gradually increased
prices (boiling the frog).

I would see my cable bill go up, and drop a tier. And 3-4 years later be back
to paying too much for too little, and would drop another pricing tier.

Finally a couple of years ago, I bought a cheap over-the-air HD antenna and
cut the cord. No more.

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dave_aiello
Cord cutting began when people who didn't love U.S. pro sports balked at
paying their cable system for the so-called triple play.

I love ESPN, but their revenue model was built on the belief that it would
have extreme pricing power to use against its cable system customers as long
as it locked up most of the important live sports events.

ESPN's revenue model assumptions caused them to overpay for U.S. broadcast
rights, to favor the NBA, NFL, and MLB over all other U.S. sports, and to keep
raising their per-subscriber rate to cable systems.

The price of the triple play increased most because the fee to carry ESPN in
the U.S. is assessed per-cable-basic-package-subscriber, whether or not the
subscriber watched any ESPN, Disney, or ABC channel.

At some point something had to give.

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anoncoward111
Free wifi, horrid TV shows (compared to youtube), and decent prepaid mobile
service absolutely killed my need for an overpriced comcast $100 bundle.

I do really miss the call quality of a landline though. Wifi calling, at least
in the US, can be dodgy.

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rhizome
_I do really miss the call quality of a landline though_

As a person who still has a landline, V-Tech is working hard to counter your
nostalgia.

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csmark
It was great at beating the rate of inflation and great financial results for
cable companies.

My college years saw the decline of MTV and rise of ESPN. The OJ chase
inspired MTV to make a show out of idiots driving across the country. If ESPN
Sports Center wasn't on it would be shortly. Every other channel had the OJ
trial save PBS. Seriously! It was nauseating!

ESPN spends around $7billion/year on licensing. Eight dollars of every cable
bill goes to ESPN. I cut the cord when it was less than $4/month.

Starting in 2013 Time Warner agreed to pay an average of $335million a year
for 25 years for broadcast rights to the Dodgers. The average payroll and
luxury tax for the Dodgers peaked at $235million. I'm sure in the next 20
years it may approach the $335 million.

So who's your ISP? The profit margin for cable packages is in the mid 40%. The
profit margin for ISP is 97%.

They don't just want to be the only ISP service available today they want it
for the next 30 years because that's where the market is going.

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perl4ever
I dunno, if subscribers are down 5% and prices are up 44%, it doesn't sound
too bad. Even if this is the start of an avalanche, why would they be
increasing prices so much if they _believed_ it?

