Increases like this will accelerate the jump away from cable. There is no infrastructure costs comparable to physical cable, or last mile boxes and equipment. Just OTT.
I’ve recently started watching more YouTube and while the production quality might not be where people like, you can certainly find meaningful content for non-fiction.
From the same article: “OTT-only households tripled in the past four years (about 40% annually), and I can think of no reason why this trend would slow down”, where OTT means over-the-top streaming services like Netflix.
It’s clear that people enjoy that experience more than cable, which isn’t surprising given it's on-demand nature.
Cable is on its way down, and quickly, where people have the choice.
Lol. Profit of cable seems to be less relevant to a company like AT&T. Especially with most enjoyable content is already available on OTT services like YouTube, Netflix, and Instagram.
It will be interesting to see what changes these streaming services bring to TV consumption and the Internet in the next decade. Comcast and other providers are losing subscribers to YouTube TV and Hulu. I suspect this will cause internet prices in the US to rise since these companies will want to make up the shortfall.
To be fair part of the reason that it's price is rising faster than cable is because cable is more expensive. To a large degree they are catching up to where cable is.
Cable, without premium channels, was $20 a month when I was a kid and there were no commercials. It took about 20 years to grow to $100 a month and with 25% of time devoted to ads. Even discounting inflation, that's a significant decrease in consumer value and a massive increase in cable company profit.
Google's ad empire is almost 20 years old. The same level of enshittification should be expected.
As much as I'd like to see the cable co's die, not the TV industry entirely. The internet is not a truly viable alternative for now.
I'll say this as someone who lives last mile (half or even a quarter if you want to be technical). Television provides higher quality(lower latency) and more stable transmissions. Unfortunately, we're situated just outside of the cable co's reach, so have to deal with a satellite provider for TV and a Telecomm for phone/internet.
We spend $80 a month on a 756kb/s ADSL line and phone service. At one point, we had 4 rooms with televisions, this isn't something that could be handled with internet speeds such as that. When the digital transition happened we went from 7 basic channels down to 2 OTA; up until that point we had no need for an outside provider. If we could access the cable co's infrastructure, the bills would be much lower, 60-70%, and the internet access would be much better.
We need to fight against the communications industry for adequate infrastrucure before dismantling them under the assumption people already have adequate access.
Edit: I'm not the author of the post, I just shared it.
The switch to internet cable/video is on the horizon. With services like Hulu and technologies like Boxee it is just a matter of time. Hopefully the cable companies will find a new way to make money, probably through on-demand content, and not have to actually start using this sort of bandwidth capping.
I agree with Mark Cuban that it will be a few years before we see a realistic alternative to our traditional distribution of content. (cable, satellite)
Large scale, streaming video on the web is so much more pricey when you look at the numbers (cost of generating 1 mill views online VS 1 mill views on a cable or satellite network)
It doesn't take astronomical amounts, though, as I think most cable lines can support at least that much bandwidth ;)
What we're really seeing here is that the majority of the population is moving to internet video instead of their televisions. I imagine some TV networks want a technical guarantee that their video will be streamed uninterrupted by lag, at which point, it's only a matter of time 'till all video content is consumed.
Well it will be interesting but when T.V. goes heavily IPTV and original programming starts coming out online first (see Seth MacFarlane Google deal) then that will drive more people to broadband. The only problem is the cable companies don't actually want that and they provide the broadband. Interesting catch-22.
This is an important point that everyone really misses.
Cable companies make (50M subscribers * $100 /month * 12 mo/yr)=60B dollars per year.
TV advertising is another $80B /year.
Overhead and profit might eat up 20-50% of that, but we're still left with a bill, to create the TV we want to watch, of a few hundred dollars per US man, woman, and child.
Why would people imagine that we can replace that market with a hundred million $8/month netflix subscriptions and not see a decline in the availability of quality programming?
The TV channels cost massive amounts to the cable company, too, though. Internet prices wouldn't have to change much. Comcast is a particularly special case because they own a bunch of channels (NBC Universal), though - others have much smaller footprints.
But agreed that the realistic threat isn't Netflix or Youtube or Sling or Hulu, it's wireless broadband. I'm not as optimistic as you, though, based on my experience with cell phone service in my apartments. :|
All it will take stream massively-watched video at orders of magnitude less cost than either airwave or cable broadcast is TCP multicast. Granted there are some barriers there, but it's fundamentally more efficient than any other broadcast method. It just hasn't been worth it yet because for those few events we've already had long-existing broadcast TV networks.
Hell, you could even do it purely at the application level with BitTorrent.
Cable is cheaper now because of sunk costs, but cable companies are much too fat to innovate at this point. They will do whatever they can to keep prices high and cling to their cash cow, while Internet bandwidth inevitably becomes cheaper fueled by thousands of disparate interests. Cartels may drag out the endgame, but eventually content producers will have no choice but to go where the eyeballs are.
It's the endless cycle between bundled and a-la-carte (regardless of medium).
Cable TV was already priced optimally and digital versions are just catching up. People want more channels from a single source, but each person wants their own selection. Bundling brings down overall cost and provides many more channels, especially smaller ones with more niche content. A-la-carte can be cheaper (not always) but is limited in content.
Add in licensing and rules by content producers and there's no escape. Something fundamental needs to change beyond just the delivery mechanism of video. Many people now watch Youtube creators as a replacement for TV so maybe that's the future altogether.
Except Cable is purely an entertainment-consumption medium. Whereas the internet provides tools and services vastly beyond entertainment including creation of content, goods, and services.
The value-cost ratio is absurdly better on the internet.
It seems to me that the network is the link in this chain that's becoming obsolete. The barrier to entry for distributing content online is much lower - all you need is a bit of storage and some bandwidth. The expenses may be non-trivial if something is popular enough, but there's essentially no infrastructure to set up compared to creating a new TV network.
Providing content with embedded advertising looks like a better model for content providers to me. The main barrier at this point is to get people used to watching online instead of on broadcast/cable TV.
I’ve recently started watching more YouTube and while the production quality might not be where people like, you can certainly find meaningful content for non-fiction.
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