Bad news for cable companies

Wait a second...

Why do we have cable and dish companies? Their job is to deliver the programming to us, right? Well, it seems like technology might be taking them the way of Kodak if I can stream my channels through Amazon and Google.

I will still have an internet provider, Xfinity, but if I can pick and choose my channels for say $5 a month each through a streaming device...

If AMC gets more money this way than the kick they get from from my cable provider, then they are going to start going through Google more and more and start pushing that more and more.

I can get my networks, in great HD, via an antenna. If I chose 10 more channels at $5 a month each, that might be ESPN, NFL, MLB, AMC, NBA, Comcast DC, Disney, Hasboro (Discovery Kids), A&E and Food Network.

I guess how much each network will cost is the big issue. Also, the quality of the stream is an issue.

But, it is interesting.

 

And there's the rub. By the time you "spend a little extra" to get this or that or "have to get one of those Amazon Fire stick things" . . . what are your total savings by "cutting the cable/dish cord."?

Aggravation being one of the costs, too, of course. My DirecTV has its issues, but "quality of the stream" is not one of them.

 

You can get a basic Roku for approx. $50. You can get a top-of-the-line Roku (the main difference is it offers a wired connection rather than just wifi only) for $100 (same for an Apple TV). You're done at that point.

 

I don't think a la carte pricing would be anything close to the TV paradise some people seem to be expecting. If it goes strictly a la carte, I suspect you'll get about 30 channels for the same money that gets you 150 right now.

Take ESPN. Through the cable company, you're paying $5.75 a month for that right now. I believe it's going up to $7 in a couple of years. If the companies switch to a la carte you're not going to pay $5.75. That number is based on the fact that virtually everybody who has cable is paying that $5.75 regardless of whether they want ESPN -- it's part of the basic tier. Let's assume that only about half of cable subscribers care enough about sports to pay for ESPN. That means the fee would have to be $11.50 a month for ESPN alone to maintain its current level of income. All of their exorbitant contracts with the various leagues guarantee they'll want to maintain that level of funding.

Same thing with Disney. People without kids don't want it, and people with kids will pay through the nose for it.

Fox News (and every other "news" channel) will have to hike the hell out of the price, because their dirty little secret is that no one actually watches them.

The other issue is that I suspect a huge percentage of the current channels will go out of business because they'll suddenly lose funding. There are a lot of niche channels now that can survive because they're bundled with other niche channels.

 

They should bundle ESPN with porn. Good porn.

 

I got the ChromeCast for $25, and I think the Amazon Fire stick is $35. Not outrageous.

 

I got ChromeCast for free, as a birthday present.

But since the TV only has one HDMI port, I had to buy a splitter, $75, and track down an extra HDMI cable to connect the splitter to the TV and the Uverse box to the splitter along with the ChromeCast to make everything work.

No that it did. As having everything connected caused signal issues with Uverse and since I pay $350* a month for it, I unhooked everything and the splitter and ChromeCast sit gathering dust.

*Cable, Internet, two iPhones.

 

Do they still make TVs with only one HDMI port? Mine seem to have a million.

 

Well said. As an example of that dirty little secret, Fox News led the prime time cable news channels on Dec. 30 (I randomly picked a non-holiday, mid-week broadcast) with 911,000 viewers ... for the night. CNN drew a little more than half that with 550,000 viewers. By contrast, ABC Family showed the Sandra Bullock/Ryan Reynolds dynamo "The Proposal" that night and drew 2.8 million viewers.

 

I'm not doubting what you typed, but I would love to see the link you used to look around a bit.

 

http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com

 

It wouldn't matter if each channel was $1 each. The cable internet companies would just put a 1GB data cap and charge $15-20 per gig that goes over that for folks who don't subscribe to TV.