- Joined
- Jun 10, 2003
- Messages
- 26,388
- Real Name
- Josh Steinberg
Fortunately that hasn’t happened for me yet - but I think that speaks to how out of control cable pricing was in my former neighborhood where there was no competition between providers. We paid $150 a month for basic cable with no premium channels and $50 a month for decent internet. When I cut out the cable, they raised my internet rate to $100 because it was no longer bundled with other services. We paid for apps on top of that so it was a lot every month. And the thing was, we basically stopped watching stuff on the cable once Hulu started showing the same programming the next day without the commercials. We kept cable far longer than we should have because of the FOMO factor and at a certain point we realized we just were never using it, or just using it for filler content that we didn’t actually miss once it was gone.
Flash forward a few years and I’m in a neighborhood with competition between providers, and my non-promotional standard rate for blazing fast internet is just $40 a month. There just aren’t enough streaming services that interest me to have active all at the same time to come anywhere near what I used to pay, so even with rates going up, I’m still coming in at a lower monthly number now than I was five years ago.
I realize that’s not much comfort to anyone being priced out of HBO but I think a big part of the issue is lack of competition between internet service providers is making the baseline costs of just having internet access too high for too many people, and if the rates were lower for everyone, that would more than make up for an extra dollar here and there from the app costs.
There are too many services creating too much content for too few sets of eyeballs and until that works itself out - which it will - there is going to be tension between what these companies are spending on their services and how they’re raising revenue to cover it. But ultimately, I think I still prefer this a la carte system over the old fashioned cable bundles.
I’m also - and this is probably heretical for an enthusiast forum - just not overwhelmingly impressed by 4K in the way I was going from VHS to DVD, or DVD to HD. I’m generally content with the ad-free tier at HD resolution. I don’t see how something like Seinfeld reruns is harmed by being watched “only” in HD and I’m not willing to pay extra for the 4K version for things like that. I guess at the end of the day, speaking just for myself, I have a limited amount of outrage to go around and I think I’m just at the “ehh, whatever” stage when it comes to my reaction.
