Posted on 10/25/2020 5:21:34 AM PDT by MacNaughton
Key Points:
At least three large U.S. media companies expect the number of U.S. households that subscribe to a traditional pay-TV bundle to fall to about 50 million in the next five years.
At 50 million subscribers, it’s unclear the current pay-TV model can survive without falling further.
The jury is still out on if streaming economics will convince investors to breath new life into traditional media companies.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Get a good internet connection.
If you don’t have an internet-enabled TV, get a Roku stick.
I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime. Lot and lots of movies and TV serials. Good value, IMHO (Prime has paid for itself many times over in Amazon shipping).
If you want live TV, you can go with Hulu, Youtube Live, Sling, and I think Disney and others are now in the game. Each has a a variety of service levels (e.g. HBO) that you can subscribe to monthly. Live TV will include most local news. Beware that Hulu will not let you move your subscription from place to place, so it’s no good for summer homes/cabins or hotels. I’m using Youtube but they just jacked up their price.
I’d never consider cable again.
“SEVERY FREAKING DAY.....It NEVER changes.”
Same here at the OBX NC. Just Charter, same crap over and over. Over the air broadcast don’t work in my area only get a couple of kid channels and PBS.
You don’t need it your TV either.
Your local government (city/county) grants the cable companies franchise monopolies for your area.
There is a local honey pot that needs to be stirred.
You mention “the basics”. Are you still paying for a basic bundle including all the Marxist news channels?
My hope is the cable companies hurt enough financially to have to go to a la carte when we would no longer have to fund the Marxist news channels.
This is an excellent article.
It turns out that the best way to crush Disney and the other leftist media owners is to _slowly_ cut the cord, not all at once!
I had not thought of that.
If everyone disconnected at once, these insane leftist would save a fortune on the cable TV programming costs and infrastructure.
A slow bleed forces them to maintain the infrastructure while losing their economies of scale.
This is beautiful!
A few years ago, my son-in-law gave me a Roku for my birthday. Within a month we cancelled Dish, and we've never missed a beat. I lost Fox, but from what I'm reading around the net that loss wasn't such a loss after all.
What makes streaming so Very Attractive now is the ability to subscribe and then to unsubscribe with a single mouse-click. Currently, we are subscribed to Brit Box in order to watch the lengthy Inspector Lewis series (excellent!). After we finish horking all eight seasons down, we'll look around for a bit. But, if we find nothing compelling, or if we learn of something appealing on Netflix or Hulu, or HBO - well, we'll just unsubscribe to Brit Box and resubscribe to whatever happens to offer something we wish to watch.
Local news/weather? All the local stations offer websites where you can catch up to the most urgent news/weather. Learn how to access that on your smart TV and you're home free!
Bundled cable TV is a dinosaur. Just like legacy newspapers.
I suppose overlapping copyright problems would make this impossible, but it would be interesting to have either cable channels or a streaming service group product by year. I wouldn’t mind watching media from 1955 to 1970 or so.
We’re just over a year into our cable package being gone.
We have Prime Video, Disney +, Netflix (We trade for this.) and Hulu w/Live TV.
There’s nothing we miss. Spectrum has not done anything to our bandwidth but keep offering us $49.99 basic cable for a year.
“The Bundle” will never get me back. I refuse to pay $13 a month for a box, endure 18 minutes of commercials per hour for re-runs when I have more than I can ever watch as it is.
Yes, I hate Disney as well but with 2 girls under 10 it doesn’t seem optional and $70 for the year is the price of 2 Blu Ray releases. Oh and I can’t lie, I can’t live without the first 10 seasons of the Simpsons and the Mandalorian.
Non-broadcast cable TV does not require an FCC license.
If i put my tv on now i can almost guarantee 2 channels are showing The Waltons, Two Channels showing Little house, I will promise the Golden Girls is on and USA is showing SVU.
Old westerns carry at least 8 other channels.
TNT has Charmed on till around 10 then Supernatural till 2 then Bones till whenever then on to Friends.
That lineup hasn’t changed in almost a decade..
“Yea buy cable to expand your viewing horizons”
Right...
We cut the cord 7 years ago and do not miss it. We have a Roku and currently subscribe to AcornTV. We tried Hulu and Netflix, but did not keep them. I am looking into Britbox. We watch Trump rallies and other events on Youtube.
You just need an Internet connection.
My mother has a Roku device, but we bought a television with a Roku as its main “brain.” I prefer Roku, due to its impartiality on content.
However, with each platform, you can usually get “apps” that provide all the content access of the others. This is not universally true, because Apple’s TV streamer, with special Apple series, is not yet an app for other streamers.
There are hundreds of apps on Roku, and these serve as a single “channel” or as a complete platform of embedded stations (think “cable package” without necessarily needing to pay, because they give you commercials).
We have Amazon Prime, Disney+, KlowdTV (OAN and others), and Hulu. We still have an Over-The-Air antenna that gets dozens of local channels. However, we have been binge watching The Roku Channel, due to having CBS’s former series “Cold Case” on it.
Having such a “channel” lets you watch all the content on demand, which for us, means all years of episodes to be watched in any order one wants.
It’s so much nicer than having to accept what a channel on a cable package gives you at 8 PM, because you choose from the available content what you want to start watching AT ANY TIME.
I have Spectrum for high speed internet only. My TV is an Android Sony (smart TV). Get an Amazon Fire Stick and an Amazon Recast (the Fire Stick for streaming from internet and the Recast for recording over-the-air broadcast content). Add an antenna to capture that broadcast content, and you’re good. The antenna I use is the ALL-IN-ONE Antop Indoor TV Antenna, HDTV Antenna,Amplified FM Antenna with Noise-Free 4G Filter,Dual output with Smart Booster System Enhanced VHF/UHF Signal.
Works great.
Here is what we did:
1) Purchase a good quality HD TV antenna. This will give you the local channels. We are out in the country and get between 38 and 50 channels, depending on propagation and my desire to climb on the roof and adjust the antenna
2) Purchase a Roku. Aside from the streaming services like Amazon Prime, Hulu Netflix, etc, there is a lot of free streaming content to include network TV shows, news and movies. You can also watch you-tube on ROKU.
3) No matter your thoughts on Amazons politics, Amazon Prime is a good service. There is a lot of free content on Prime Movies, and if you do a lot of online shopping, the money you save on Amazon shipping will pay for the yearly fee for Prime. Don’t watch the Prime Movie content you find objectionable.
4) If you have family, or friends that do streaming services, share PWs for access. For instance, you pay for Amazon, someone else pays for HULU, someone else pay for Netflix (if you like watching kiddie porn and obama propaganda). Share the PWs and everyone can watch all three).
The cable providers if they want to extend the inevitable a bit longer has to go to the individual stations and say hey look you NEED to refresh your line-up at least once a decade or we are dropping you from our system.
“I’m on the spectrum pick 10 plan.”
If you don’t mind saying, what is your monthly cost?
You put your finger on the sort of Net Neutrality we actually need. Regulation to stop ISPs from screwing with their competition by throttling bandwidth as you observed.
It is internet plus $29 a month for pick 10 plan.
I thought YouTube was google.
If so, no thanks.
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