The price re-negotiation tactic worked for me for several years with Comcast. However, last spring I couldn't get them to budge when my locked in price expired. That's when I dumped their TV and phone service.
That's when you do the cancellation and change providers or sign up as new customer with current provider.
Spectrum wouldn't be the first cable TV provider to walk away from offering the service. Some smaller providers have already done so, including Wide Open West in our area. They are reselling YouTube TV bundled with WOW's Internet service.
Pay attention next year. You might have gotten a 4-year rate lock when you signed up. We have competition. And I have to take action to manage my FIOS rates every five or six years.
Could be a significant aspect. I was paying over $10/mo just on taxes and fees for the TV cable service.
Spectrum may be pretty close it it already. They have already begun the process of phasing out cable boxes and providing Comcast's XUMO steaming devices instead to its internet/TV bundle customers.
Wonder what they'll do for people who only have TV service, no internet? Would the regulators just let them walk away from that service if there's no other provider in the area? That would seem to be a blow especially to senior citizens who enjoy their TV but are not technologically-versed in streaming or have no interest in Internet services.
I get fliers all the time from Choice Wireless, HughesNet, and one or two others whose names escape me at the moment, all offering slower speeds at higher prices. Strangely, whenever someone asks on one of our community's Facebook pages who has the best internet, there are customers who either defend these slower companies or will badmouth Spectrum by claiming their speed claims are bogus, and it's almost always the same people making that claim about Spectrum. I've called a few of them out both privately and publicly, and they either ignore me or take the "bait" and admit they just don't have the time to call for service (yet continue to pay whatever their monthly rate is, supposedly). For some reason, many in my small rural community are frightened to call a company when something isn't working, and then they wonder why nothing ever gets fixed.
At one time, cable companies were considered utilities, until the FCC deregulated them in 1986.
I've run into this with my sister and brother-in-law. They continue to pay for AT&T DSL Internet service at a higher price than what they could get broadband from another provider in their area. Their bandwidth is so poor that they cannot stream anything. Whenever I push them to switch, they claim they cannot because they are using AT&T email addresses for their businesses. It's not that difficult to switch an email address, but they will not do it -- and they may not have to anyway, as they have AT&T as their cell provider. They've also experienced numerous Internet outages with the DSL service, which impacts their businesses (both of them work from home). I finally gave up.
When we first moved to our current home in 2015, AT&T had the fastest internet (18 Mbps down, 1.5 Mbps up) and Spectrum had not begun offering anything other than TV service. Three years later, Spectrum began offering additional services, but we decided to give them some time and to hear what others in the community were saying. We were also in a two-year contract bundle deal with AT&T/DirecTV (we had switched in 2017 after I moved our household to Nevada). One year into that contract, we added Spectrum internet (I somehow managed to get a "free" upgrade from 100 Mbps to 400 Mbps for three years) and kept AT&T as our backup since my wife telecommuted and her employer demanded a wired connection. We did not renew DirecTV in 2019 and cut the cord, going with an OTA DVR (part of our property taxes go towards maintaining retransmission of Reno television stations from a local antenna to residents). One more year later, in 2020, AT&T wanted to raise our monthly internet to $65/month but still at the measly 18 Mbps download speeds, which was still the fastest they provided. We cancelled service immediately and told them that was highway robbery. For the last several years, AT&T keeps promising that faster internet service is in the works, but the reality is that they do not want to spend the money to upgrade this shrinking town, they have lost so much market share in the last few years to both Spectrum and T-Mobile, that leasing the fiber line into town to other providers is much more profitable.
Our Ace Hardware store has had issues with AT&T over the years, but I think the straw that broke the camel's back occurred last November when their service went out at the store for several hours, basically shutting down all internet orders, phone orders, and credit card transactions. When I suggested to the store owner that he might want to look into Spectrum Business, he replied "That will be my first phone call as soon as AT&T gets my service back up and running!"
The problem when we talk about “streaming” is that “streaming” can refer to a lot of things and they’re not all equal, just the same way someone saying they’re “watching TV” can mean many things.
Streaming at its simplest definition is the act of playing back content that’s not stored directly on the device that’s playing it. That means that streaming can mean:
-Playing back content from your own local media server
-Renting/purchasing a la carte content through a digital storefront like iTunes or Vudu (the 21st century equivalent of renting or buying a videotape or disc)
-Subscription streaming, where a monthly or yearly fee is paid to lease access a changing library of curated content (the 21st century equivalent of subscribing to cable)
When we call all of these things “streaming” as if they’re equal or interchangeable, it becomes much harder to have a discussion where everyone is on the same page. With that said…
At the end of the day, a Blu-ray is just a container that can hold up to 50gb of data, that must be encoded in one of a few pre-established codecs. Because all disc players and discs bearing a Blu-ray must be compatible with each other, they’re more or less locked into standards established in 2006. Although there have been tremendous advances in codec quality and efficiency since then, Blu-ray can’t really take advantage of them.
There are no such limitations on streaming because streaming apps can get software updates and streaming devices can get firmware updates.
This means that for all intents and purposes, a 50gb file on a Blu-ray disc is not automatically superior to a 10gb file coming from a streaming provider.
Muddying the waters even further, with the decline in physical media sales over the past couple decades, there are numerous cases where studios remaster films and provide those newly remastered editions only to streaming providers. There are far too many examples to list where the disc version has an outdated and inferior master and the streaming version has a new and improved master.
But all things being equal, if it’s the same master being used on both the disc and streaming versions, theoretically the disc may be better, but in practice, the overwhelming majority of consumers cannot tell the difference under normal playback conditions.
In terms of whether some services are better than others, when it comes to digital rentals and digital purchases, the AppleTV streaming box and the iTunes/Apple Movies storefronts are generally regarded as edging out the completion.
In terms of subscription streaming, that’s harder to say because it’s difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Most subscription streaming services offer content that they either have a temporary or perpetual exclusive license for - so if the show or movie you’re interested in is only featured on one service, you can’t really compare how it appears on one service to another. Subscription streaming services typically license bundles of films in large packages and they are not always provided the most up to date versions from studios, so sometimes it is possible that if a movie goes from being available on one service to a different one, the quality may not be the same, and sometimes it is exactly the same. This is sort of like asking in the cable days if HBO or Showtime had better picture quality - it’s a hard thing to quantify.
Streaming providers offer what their studio partners deliver them. In general, digital storefronts are given the latest masters that reflect the film’s original aspect ratio. In some cases, but not all, sometimes subscription streaming services are provided with cropped masters that the studio originally prepared for broadcast/cable/satellite television providers, because in some cases those providers demanded content be delivered in the 16x9 full screen format. Since subscription streaming is the 21st century successor to television/cable broadcasting, sometimes studios deliver those masters, either out of habit and/or by oversight. In general, if you buy or rent a film that’s in the wrong aspect ratio and complain to the store, they will refund your purchase. There really isn’t much of a recourse for subscription services, since they guarantee access to their library, not to a specific title.
I hope that helps answer your questions in some small way
I absolutely agree with this statement, though I know there will be some rather vehement pushback. For me personally, streaming quality is just as good as disc in both visual and audio quality (with equivalent masters). But of course I don’t have perfect vision or hearing, so my judgement may not be specifically relevant.
