
The Cable-Cutting Dream Is Kind of a Myth - taylorbuley
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cable-cutting-dream-is-kind-of-a-myth-1480536397
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grendelt
Cable-cutting is the act of cutting cable TELEVISION, not just cable service
outright. It surely can be done but not if you're addicted to watching all the
same programming as cable has.

A smart cable company will view themselves as an ISP who is also a TV service
rather than a TV service who is also an ISP.

I haven't had cable TV service for years. I generally abhorred most content on
cable TV, even on the "cerebral" channels. NatGeo, Discovery, and History all
went toward more "reality" programming. I found myself watching PBS more and
more. I don't have a local PBS affiliate that I can get over the air, so I got
a small Ku-band FTA satellite dish and pull in a PBS feed that way [it doubled
as an Outernet receiver dish]. (Though much of PBS' content is also available
online for free.) Other than the occasional free streaming documentary, I just
don't watch TV and save about $50-60 a month. [I did put an antenna in my
attic so I could watch the Olympics, but even then I found streaming them
online was still a better experience. Because, my god, the commercials!]

Also, here's a non-paywall version of the story:
[http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-
markets/2016113...](http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-
markets/2016113010512/the-cable-cutting-dream-is-kind-of-a-myth.aspx)

~~~
vt240
Interesting, what are you using as a receiver ?

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awalton
Is it really though? I haven't had a cable subscription since I moved to the
San Francisco Bay Area, didn't have one for four years before that, and I have
yet to be convinced that I'm actually missing anything - anything I care to
watch can be found trivially online (even _without_ piracy, though often you
have to sit through ads...) My demand for content hasn't really changed, just
my will and desire to put up with bullshit.

I think the only real losers with cord cutting are people who like sports, as
they all refuse to get with the times and have ridiculous region locking on
all of their content. Luckily I do not suffer from the affliction...

~~~
CoolGuySteve
One thing I'm noticing with cable-cutting is that the market is getting more
fragmented. Instead of just getting Netflix and watching free Hulu with ads,
now you have to get Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, pay for Hulu, buy the
Starz app, pay for MLB, etc. in order to compose all the content you want.

It's equivalent to buying cable packages where you spend money on a bundle
engineered to have only 20% of what you want. The only difference is that it's
all video-on-demand now.

~~~
sundaeofshock
That assumes you want all that content. One of the reasons I cut cable is
becuase I didn't want to pay for content that I never looked at. The only
content I pay for now is HBO Now and Amazon Prime, plus streaming movie
rentals. If I want sports, I usually just go to a bar. If I want the BBC
(which I do), I just VPN into the UK and watch stuff.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
I also don't want to pay for content I don't watch, which is 80% of Netflix
and Amazon Prime.

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PaulHoule
Just wait until today's teens grow up.

Most of them have never gotten in the linear TV habit, they prefer to watch
Youtube and don't have the attention span to sit through a commercial break.

10 years from now, cable TV is d00med.

~~~
Finnucane
I'm 52 and I don't have the attention span to sit through a commercial break.
That's what the ff button on the DVR is for.

The new TCM-Criterion streaming service gets us one step closer to not needing
the cable tv service any more.

~~~
lfowles
Not like we didn't change the channel during commercials back in the day
anyways!

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Waterluvian
My bank account says otherwise.

I have a $30/mo Internet bill and a $30/mo phone bill. Both get me unlimited
Internet at good bandwidth, so I just watch a metric ton of YouTube, Twitch,
etc. I've never had any other monthly telecom service.

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jbpetersen
How'd you manage those deals?

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dmoy
$30/month on phone is not hard if you don't use an overlarge amount of data
(or if you never talk on the phone and use <5GB from TMobile's old 5GB for $30
but with only 100 minutes deal).

idk about internet, "good bandwidth" in my area is >>$50. Probably depends on
where you are and what your definition of good bandwidth is.

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tnorthcutt
"Both get me unlimited Internet" seems to indicate that there's not a cap on
transfer for the GP's phone service, which is surprising at $30/month (in the
US, anyway).

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dmoy
Ah yea I missed that. Must be talking about the t mobile deal, but not
mentioning the massive throttling? Or have some grandfathered plan that isn't
relevant to the rest of us?

~~~
Waterluvian
Canada. Wind Mobile and Teksavvy with a grandfathered plan and 6 $1 off
referrals.

To be fair mobile is unlimited up to 6GB then throttled back to what seems to
be about 4 or 5mbit download. I hit that cap only once when I was away from
home for a week and used it as a constant hotspot.

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gumby
I wonder about the statistics on this.

My only choice for internet in my houses (residence and holiday house) is
Comcast. For both, it's cheaper to subscribe to an internet+TV deal than
internet alone. I just taped the cablecard to my modem for when I cancel
service. ut I'm sure I count as a subscriber.

Interestingly the vacation house has been selected as a Nielsen home. But
since there's no TV the rep has told me they won't count me. Every couple of
months though I get a request to have my TV usage tracked. I'm sure ignoring
non-TV watchers helps them give encouraging stats to their customers by
reducing the denominator!

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teilo
This article entirely misses the point, and is out of touch with the reason
people skip cable. Cost only marginally comes into it.

It comes down to this. Which would you rather spend your money on? Live TV
which you have to use a DVR to watch at leisure, and even then you are limited
to only that which is currently being aired; or on-demand streaming, where you
can choose exactly what to watch, when to watch it, without filling up a DVR,
skipping through commercials, etc.

Not only do I pay for Netflix, HBO Now, Starz, Showtime, and Amazon Prime. I
also purchase season passes for shows I want on Amazon Video or Apple TV. I
likely still pay less than I would for cable. I have no interest in live TV,
and for the rare events I care about (such as the Super Bowl), those stream
for free online. Even if I pay the same or slightly more, I don't care. It's
not about the cost. It's about the freedom.

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gozur88
Sure, that's why ESPN lost over a million subscribers in the last two months.

If there's any evidence people are eschewing internet video and going back to
cable it will be the first I've seen.

~~~
devoply
"This thing sucks... I want 1,000 channels with not a single show that I
actually want to watch. I love being an ADD TV viewer that just surfs
channels"

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deerpig
Too many HN links point to items behind paywalls... That said, its all what
you're used to. I've lived for nearly 30 years in odd corners of East and
South East Asia and most of that time I had no access to cable or satellite,
or the content that was available was so dreadful that it wasn't worth having.
Over the last four years in Phnom Penh the only channel worth watching was BBC
news and after that vanished the only reason to get cable would be so my wife
can watch Thai Soaps with crappy Khmer voiceovers. If I had an American bank
account, I could get netflix or other net services like spotify, but I don't,
so I'm cut off from those services.

Before bit torrent and ok bandwidth, expats shared VHS tapes of TV shows from
whatever country you came from. The English and Korean's seemed especially
well organized. For movies, local night markets sold pirate VHS, then VCD
(which was never a thing in the West from what I heard) and now DVDs. For a
while you could buy legal first run VCDs in Bangkok and Hong Kong that cost
less than going to the cinema

If you lived near a big city you could also go to the cinema. The cinema is
very cheap in most of Asia even fo first run western movies. Even better is
that many times western movies are shown in two ways, one theatre has
"original soundtrack" with subtitles and the other would have painfully bad
dubs into Thai or Khmer. Most people go to the dubbed version, so many times
the theater with the original soundtrack is half empty!

If you have access to bittorrent and an internet connection that can handle
YouTube there is certainly no reason to have cable. And even for my wife, she
can still get the Thai Soaps on DVD at the market that aren't on YouTube.

I've been told that if you are into sports, cable is the only real option most
of the time. But then, that's what sports bars are for, and there is no
shortage of them in Phnom Penh. And if you're into football (not to be
confused with American football), pretty much every local cheap restaurant has
multiple big flat screen TVs that only seem to be able to show channels with
little figures running around on huge green fields kicking balls to each
other. Though from time to time, when the boys aren't looking, the girls will
briefy switch to music videos before the boys realize the screen is no longer
green color and demand that it be switched back to the game :) People are
pretty much the same everywhere...

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bryan11
So you cut the cable service and replace it with internet service. The money
goes to the same cable company, right?

In my area, you have one choice for cable internet service. with the fastest
internet plan and largest data cap available in my area, the data caps allow
about 120 minutes of HD video daily without incurring extra fees. It seems
like the cable companies are moving to a metered service where you pay for
what you use, much like old-style phone service where you paid by the minute.

It looks like cable cutting is going to affect how shows are produced and
provided, but overall it's a money maker for internet providers.

~~~
RyJones
I suspect the reason Comcast pushes discounted internet with cable is to
subsidize the cable subscriber number. I haven't had cable TV since they
switched to digital in 2008 or 2009 here in ~Seattle. They can't sell ads
against the internet-only customers, so we don't matter.

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slg
I can't read the pay-walled article, but based off my own habits I do wonder
what has really changed. I don't have cable, but I pay Netflix, Amazon, HBO,
Sling, MLB, and the NFL anywhere from $8-$25 per month. At this point, that
isn't much different than the old model. I'm not saving any real money and I
still pay for plenty of content that I have absolutely zero interest in ever
watching. The only difference is that instead of paying a single middleman for
my TV, I moved slightly upstream and pay a handful of providers.

~~~
khedoros1
I've had trouble getting to other paywalled articles through the "web" link,
but this one worked fine for me.

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jimhefferon
It is worth a significant amount to me that Fox News not get any of my money.
Or the Catholic channel.

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nickthemagicman
Just get Sling TV. Its essentially cable.

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nilved
Nice try, I replaced it with piracy.

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jgh
No it isn't.

