Buy a Roku or Wi-Fi Blu-Ray player.
Difficulttoread.
Curious is anyone has news/perspective on bills in Congress to require unbundling..if that passes..and it should, IMHO it completely destroyed the economics of cable as it now exists. I’ve read that about 50% of cable customers do NOT watch sports, yet the fees for sports channels, like ESPN, are more than HALF of the cost of the average cable bill.
I know its easy to lay blame on the delivery medium - be it cable TV or satellite, however in most cases these price jumps are a pass through of the cost of the feed.
I am a small cable operator and our feed costs jump every year between 5 and 15 percent per channel. The recent largest jump has been the local broadcast channels retransmission fees - as you may have read in the news where the CBS stations in major markets wanted a 300% increase in their feed costs.
As a cable operator it is almost impossible to remove the broadcast channels from the mix and as a consumer it is almost impossible to obtain the local programming any other way with any kind of reliability.
No matter the delivery method there is an underlying cost to get the signals to the home (wires, satellite, or Internet delivery) and those costs are pretty consistent from year to year so the bulk of price increases are a direct result of increases in feed costs (at least in our case). We make every effort to keep our fixed costs as low as possible so as to keep the annual price increases to a reasonable level.
As a cable operator we do what we can to negotiate the lowest possible feed costs, but at the end of the day we have to pass increases on the the end user in order to stay in business.
I know it doesn’t help the check book. I have DirectTV because I can’t get my own cable tv service so I get to see both sides of the equation.
Wait. I thought only greedy cable companies raised their rates while the sympathetic satellite providers were there to offer great deals! Every time a cable company has a price increase, Dish and DirecTV run ads poaching customers insinuating that the cable companies are just greedy.
The honest answer is that all channel providers have to raise rates as contracts are renewed by the channel heavyweights (Disney, Turner, Fox, MTV, etc.) and the carriers are basically stuck between raising rates or pulling the plug on channels.
Satellite carriers are no different. That’s all I’m saying. Maybe ala carte is the answer but be careful what you wish for. Individual channel prices, when added together, could become far worse than the package prices offered now.
Stopped the cable TV 3 months ago. We use an antenna and get all the local stations plus have been a netflix subscriber for about 3 years. Have no reason to go back to cable.
I had DirecTV for about 15 years. Good service, good product. No real complaints. Well, except that I was paying $96 a month with no premium or movie channels.
But, I dropped it last February and have no regrets. I don’t miss TV a bit.
I have Netflix an Amazon Prime streaming, mostly to watch kid’s movies with my daughter.
Pay TV is an expensive waste of time.
There are a couple of offers at 29.99 for Direct for a very decent package. It goes up a bit the second year, but you can always change after another 12 mos.
http://www.braylog.com/id48.html
A couple of years ago, my town of 14k was considering becoming an internet provider. They already operate the city electric utility. One of the big anti factions was Cox Cable.
When the measure came up for a city-wide vote, it was voted down almost by a 2-1 margin.
A couple of months after the vote failed, Cox showed their appreciation by significantly raising the prices of most of their services. My bill with up $10/month, which was quite a jump from their previous price increases which averaged about $3 per month yearly.