Free Republic

Charter Communications has agreed to merge with Cox Communications in a $34.5 billion deal that will combine two of the top three cable companies in the U.S. Cox is the third-largest cable television company in the country, with more than 6.5 million digital cable, internet, telephone, and home security customers. It has a strong foothold in states spanning from California to Virginia. Charter Communications, known more widely as Spectrum, has more than 32 million customers in 41 states. The cable industry has been under assault for years from streaming services like Disney, Netflix, Amazon and HBO Max, as well as...

Does anyone here use Sling? We 'cut the cord' many years ago, and have used Roku since then; but I would like to have one or two channels that are only available to cable subscribers. (We don't want or need cable.) I'm just wondering if anyone here has been happy with Sling, and what one needs to make it work. I'm not interested in movies, just cable news, documentaries, history, Thanks very much.

President Trump bashed MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and described her network and CNN as the “enemy of the people.” “Wow! Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She’ll be off the air very soon. MSNBC IS CLOSE TO DEATH. CNN HAS REACHED THE BOTTOM. This is a good thing. They are the Enemy of the people!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. The 1:05 a.m. post came hours after Trump held court at a contentious roundtable in California with Democrats, where he slammed their response to the catastrophic wildfires. “You have emergency powers, just like I do, and I’m exercising my...

NATO moved Friday to enhance its naval presence in the Baltic Sea as Estonia’s navy began patrolling an undersea cable supplying energy from Finland. The move follows the excision of a different cable from the power grid on Christmas Day in what Finnish authorities allege is a case of deliberate, targeted sabotage by Russia, as Breitbart News reported. A ship named as Eagle S is suspected of damaging the Estlink 2 cable and Finnish coast guard crew have boarded the oil tanker and steered it into Finnish waters. The E.U. said the Eagle S was part of “Russia’s shadow fleet”...

The Russian deep-water submersion on which the fire occurred on July 1 is the nuclear submarine AS-12, known as "Losharik." The incident occurred on July 1 at about 20.30. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported the death of 14 submariners in the "deep-water apparatus" based inSeveromorsk.

hinese-flagged cargo ship Yi Peng 3 crossed both submarine cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke. She was shadowed by Danish navy for a while during night and is now in Danish Straits leaving Baltics. No signs of boarding. AIS-caveats apply.

A vital undersea cable linking new NATO member Finland to Germany has broken and disrupted communication between Helsinki and the rest of Europe, the company that runs the link said Monday.

American cable giant Spectrum is raising its TV, internet and phone plan prices in July. Spectrum's internet base price will increase by $3 a month for all plans beginning in July, CNET reported. The provider's home phone plans and TV Select service will also increase by $3 in some states. It is the second time Spectrum - one of America's main cable providers along with Comcast Xfinity, DirecTV and Dish - has hiked it rates this year alone. In January, Spectrum raised its low-income plan from $20 to $25 a month. At the same time in January it also raised...

CNN’s new boss said the network faces an “existential crisis” because of cord cutting — and that he plans to eventually pivot away from cable TV toward a subscription-based streaming model similar to YouTube and TikTok. “There are plenty of things we have to fix at CNN,” Mark Thompson, the former New York Times and BBC executive who was hired by Warner Bros. Discovery to dig CNN out of its third-place slump in the cable news race, told Financial Times. He also hinted that more cost-cutting measures are in the offing, saying that there are “likely to be significant opportunities...

Presidential hopeful and Trump challenger Nikki Haley is reportedly launching a seven-figure national cable and digital ad buy leading up to Super Tuesday, Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney told reporters ahead of South Carolina’s primary results. While poll after poll shows Haley down by double digits in her home state of South Carolina, she has made it abundantly clear she plans to remain in the race regardless of the results on Saturday. “South Carolina will vote on Saturday, but on Sunday, I’ll still be running for president,” Haley told supporters during a speech in Greenville this week, making it clear...

The idea of paying for cable was that there wouldn’t be ads. Then the ads came, but there was around five minutes of ads for an hour of content. Then it went to ten minutes for a half hour. In 2023, there are now ten minutes of ads for every ten minutes of content. What was a 90 minute movie is now strung out to three hours on a channel.

Viewing of linear television fell below 50% for the first time in July as streaming viewing hit a new record, according to Nielsen. Total broadcast viewing last month finished at 20% of TV, a new low for the category. On a year-over-year basis, broadcast usage was down 5.4%. Cable viewing slipped to 29.6% of viewing for July, with a year-over-year drop of 12.5%. The top-viewed cable programs of the month were the Home Run Derby and College World Series on ESPN, followed by Hallmark’s “When Calls the Heart.” Streaming accounted for 38.7% of all TV viewing, a new record led...

Tired of communist run woke cable companies censoring conservatives? Time to send a message. Cut the cable and live stream. Here is an alternative with several conservative choices including OANN, Newsmax and more. Packages starting at $2.50, $4.99, $9.99(for premium package)

Can thin diameter 75 ohm coaxial cable be connected to standard or large diameter low loss coaxial cable without creating odd impedance / transmission line reflections and / or losses that are more problematic than the reduced losses in the "better" cable?

A major fibre optic cable has been cut near Aix-en-Provence, France, causing a global internet connectivity slowdown, reports cybersecurity company Zscaler. Experts believe that the cable was severed in a deliberate “act of vandalism"; others have described it as “sabotage.” In the early hours of 18 October, a cable was cut at a major landing point for several undersea internet cables, causing a chain reaction of connectivity problems across Europe and further afield. Connectivity was especially disrupted on internet cable between Marseille-Lyon, Marseille-Milan, and Marseille-Barcelona. According to Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry, the vandalism caused connectivity problems across the world. “We...

President Biden’s prime-time speech on Thursday evening is being met with scorn by some pundits on cable news over its tone and the staging that accompanied it. The speech, during which Biden framed the wing of the Republican Party loyal to former President Trump as a threat to democracy, served as a scathing rebuke of the ongoing political influence of his predecessor, which Democrats hope will energize voters ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. Made against a dark-red backdrop in Philadelphia with a pair of Marines standing behind the president as he spoke, the speech also portrayed Republicans who are...

It was seemingly just a matter of time before streaming overtook at least one form of conventional TV, and now that moment has arrived. Nielsen data indicates that streaming TV viewership in the US surpassed cable for the first time this July. About 34.8 percent of viewing time went to shows on internet services, or slightly more than the 34.4 percent for cable. Streams haven't yet overtaken traditional TV as a whole (broadcasts still represented 21.6 percent), but it's clear online video is capturing more attention. The shift was helped by a flurry of major releases. Netflix had the largest...

Consumers continue to dump their cable and satellite subscriptions at an accelerated pace as the industry continues to see a fall in earnings across the board and for the first time ever, more people are watching on streaming than on cable. According to the Hollywood Reporter, earnings are down for the second quarter. Comcast, Charter, Cox, Altice, DirecTV, Dish, Verizon and Hulu’s live TV, all lost subscribers. Comcast was down a whopping 500,000 subscribers while DirecTV was down 400,000. Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall add that the 2,256,000 decline on subscribers is the worst fall on record. Cahall also noted...

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks reacted to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson by stating that there are some “Republican senators who are not really senators. They’re cable TV hosts.” And ask questions like the definition of a woman.

An undersea fiberoptic cable located between mainland Norway and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean has been put out of action in a still-mysterious incident. The outage on the subsea communications cable — the furthest north of its kind anywhere in the world — follows an incident last year in which different cables linking an undersea surveillance network off the Norwegian coast were severed, a story that we covered in detail at the time. The latest disruption involves one of two fiberoptic cables that enable communications between the Norwegian mainland and Norwegian-administered Svalbard that lies between the mainland and...