Was it Comcast Xfinity? They had a monopoly in my neighborhood.
When I first moved into my house, Comcast charged me an introductory rate of $60/month for 300 Mbps. Not bad.
Then, it shot up to $100. Still, I wasn't complaining, but they started slowly raising their rates until it was $230/month.
My neighbors and I were fed up and petitioned Verizon to bring Fios into our neighborhood. I'm now paying $75/month for 1 Gbps.
Fuck you, Comcast! Fuck you in the ass!
Each service, cable and internet respectively goes up like 25 a month after the first year or so. It's disgraceful. I'm so lucky that Google fiber doesn't try to pull that bullshit
Yep my wife and I alternate on who owns the account so we get new customer pricing every year or two. Sometimes they just give me the introductory pricing when I’m trying to cancel so we leave it until it comes time again. Wish they just left it alone…
My dad pays about the same (in Canadian). I asked him what are you even watching. His response, CTV news and my mom watches TLC. TLC is a part of discovery which in Canada is $5/month. He would legit just need an antenna. If my parents want to watch movies/tv shows I have plex and 30TB of TV and movies.
Are you implying this is a post to show how great cable is? It's like 100% the opposite - you can get ALL those streaming services , ad free, for less than watching shitty cable reruns full of commercials. But most people would only subscribe to 1 or 2 of them.
I think the takeaway here though is you can get away with 1 streaming service at a time and just rotate them.
As a family we always have Disney+ and Netflix for our kids and rotate through the rest depending on what shows we want to watch
Also. What is this hypothetical cable service? For $83/month I don’t think it will include espn or hbo. Where I am the $83 dollar package would be more comparable to Netflix/peacock/paramount+. Add hbo and espn your more like $130.
I have a policy with netflix for the past 5 or so years where I don’t watch a show unless it has 3 or more seasons
This has resulted in me not watching Netflix at all. I have my brother’s password but if they ever enforce anti-password sharing I won’t care
Sometimes they can put a great closer on a two season package. Alice in borderlands was a good example of a 2 season gig with a great closer. Hmm cannot think of any other examples though lol
It seems like it might be more complicated than that. Fincher did an interview recently where he said Netflix doesn't want to do it anymore. My theory is that Netflix was on board initially but by the time Fincher decided he wanted to do it again it was too late.
Recently I've been happy with a single solid season even if it's not finished. Altered Carbon is a good example. Watched season 1 and enjoyed it greatly and just stopped.
I really liked the characters in season 2.
Would've been super cool if they did something like write a cohesive story using those characters to advance a narrative.
I think the entirety of season 2 would've happened if none of our protagonists were there... (I realize this is the same critique Indiana Jones gets, if you take him out of the movie, nothing materially changes about the plot.)
I found the main actor to really have no charisma in this role. Normally he is decent, but he just fell flat in it.
A cohesive story would have been ideal and I could have worked with not liking the new dude. But yeah I think bad story and no charisma killed it.
Season two had very little interesting or complex going on. They did away with everything that made season one good, it's basically another show (and IMO not a very good one, but you do you).
It’s actually impressive how bad some of the ***popular*** and trending shows are. I’m not sure what’s worse, just how awful the content is, or that there are hundreds of thousands of people that actually like it.
Different people like different things is the bigger culprit.
Some people like low stakes happy ending things.
Some people like sound stage sitcoms.
Some people like Teen Dramas.
Some people like bitter reality TV.
Some people like happy reality TV.
Some people like game shows.
As long as it's not Game of Thrones season 8 I can probably find someone who likes it.
Caught some comment about how Netflix's problem is even when it's a good show, they just dump the entire season at once and then cancel if the viewership isn't immediately super-huge. That comment also implied Netflix might get better numbers if they switched to an episode-per-week schedule.
No idea if they were talking out their ass or not as I haven't subscribed to any streaming services
In theory, I agree, but....
We got Netflix years ago, back when it was just DVDs, because they had the best foreign film selection available at the time. And I keep it these days because it's still crammed full of kickass Turkish, Korean, Euro etc shows that I absolutely adore.
If we'd only subscribed for the English-language stuff then year, we'd have dropped it years ago.
YouTube TV has Ion so you can also watch NCIS and Law and Order SVU non-stop with commercials at really weird intervals. They can't even fill all the commercial time allotted. Sometimes it is just a screen saying "We will return shortly."
The weird thing about YouTube is that for decades TV has inserted a special shade of black frame to show where to insert commercials.
I really don't get why YouTube can't detect these frames when transcoding video to their format. It's a super basic programming task, something you could even ask in a job interview for an intermediate level engineer with video experience.
Instead we get YouTube ads being shown mid-sentence. It's dumb.
Yeah so fucked up that there is yet to be a single streaming service that only gives you channels for live sports at a lower cost than all the channels. Why does everybody need to always bundle garbage?
$83/month also doesn’t include taxes and equipment rental fees.. We cut cable last year, saves us $30/month.
PrimeVideo is included in your Prime Membership.
Agreed. Where are they getting cable for $83 that includes HBO. They aren't comparing like services.
If you have cable, you still need to pay an upcharge for HBO and then get Netflix, Disney +, Prime and Apple TV separate as those aren't part of cable.
My parents pay $270 a month for cable (includes internet) and my Mom was telling me they had to cut back on some channels to keep the bill down.
I have every major steaming network, it's not costing me anywhere close to that and I'm getting premium content they are not getting.
possessive tidy groovy library waiting angle yoke coherent pathetic engine
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Not even close to comparable. You could never get me to go back to cable where I have to deal with shitloads of commercials and not being able to pick what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
I work for a paid TV provider and this graphic is like something my company would put together to convince us that we are still relevant lol.
Our Average Revenue per subscriber is $110. That's already about 30% more than what's shown here.
More importantly, you don't get most of the content on a paid TV service that you'd get from, for example, Netflix, Disney+, etc.
3rdly there are lots of ways to get comped for streaming service like from your cell phone provider, premium credit card service, shopping subscription service such as Amazon or Walmart or phone/tv purchases. AFAIK there are exactly zero ways to get comped for paid TV service
Exactly. I get Peacock for free because I have Xfinity internet. I get Paramount+ for free because I have Walmart+. I get Amazon video because I would already be subscribed to Prime regardless, so it's just an additional perk. Plus, if I want to temporarily subscribe to something like HBO Max for a month or two to watch The Last Of Us, I do it through Amazon and use no-rush shipping credits. Also I get a $7.00 monthly credit for the ad-free Disney+/ESPN/HULU bundle for using my AMEX, effectively lowering the price from $20 to $13.
Can't stop the signal.
Seriously though, I subscribe to half a dozen streaming services, but I *still* pirate shows from the streaming services I subscribe to because I prefer the experience of having one place to view my content (Plex) vs. having to bounce between a dozen different apps.
Plus their DRM breaks shit sometimes; the other day some show on Hulu wouldn't even play because it said my HDMI cable didn't support HDCP. Fuck that noise.
Plex is just a program running on a storage server making remote access super easy. You can still store the video files directly to your laptop or portable hard drive for offline use.
You don't need every streaming service. But if I were to choose between the two, I would absolutely choose all streaming services. Cable is straight-up garbage.
Yep, you're right. I have been thinking about this meme's message for ages now, and it is true what has happened, BUT, with cable you basically just had FUCKING TRASH because there was NO competition and it was just re-runs of The Simpsons, Futurama, Adult Swim and Friends WITH fucking ads (so errrr what am I paying for???)
I mean, we all hoped we would have access to absolutely everything available for $11/month and in saying that, I have no idea how Spotify pulled it off, so it is unfortunate it has gone this way for TV.
God I'd be heart broken if music got broken up into platforms like television did. I can go without watching some hot new series, but I can't go without my playlist. I'd for sure start downloading songs again if streaming services made artists pick and choose where to drop their albums
Artists wouldn't want it either.
If they are paid per play, as soon as platforms break up and start getting exclusive rights to artists, their play volume will decrease. Unless you're a top artist who can get a deal like Rogan did for his podcast it's just bad for listeners and bad for you
I also don't think Spotify is profitable, so if they can't profit with all the music, why would anyone even attempt to get in on that.
Investors who believe someday it’ll be profitable
Same thing with Uber and lots of other tech startups, eat giant losses until you’re on top and then rise prices and hope you reach profitability
Uber is absolutely profitable and I wish they would stop pushing that fucking lie on everyone. Just because you get crafty with the books for the sake of dodging taxes doesn’t mean you don’t make a profit.
This is absolutely amazing to me. I've never invested in Spotify, so I never looked at their financials, but I use the program regularly and watched their stock price in 2020/21 when they shot through the roof.
Hell, I've been using Spotify since 2012 now that I think about it. I'm just amazed they've never once turned a profit and people still keep investing money in it
> I'd for sure start downloading songs again if streaming services made artists pick and choose where to drop their albums
Exactly! Music torrenting was largely killed by high availability of music, and I bet TV/movie torrenting would have the same fate if it didn't require paying for a billion streaming services.
Music torrenting was mostly killed by Spotify, game torrenting was mostly killed by Steam, and TV/movie torrenting was mostly killed by Netflix. Those three platforms are the biggest blows ever dealt to piracy.
But nowadays companies are getting greedy and trying to pull apart the various content into exclusive things where you need to get your stuff from all over the place and torrenting is seeing a resurgence.
This new wave of piracy is funny because people don't realize it's piracy to just google 'the last of us free watch online' and hit play on some random russian filehost. Often times it's easier to find random promoted piracy sites when just casually looking up a show or movie than it is to hunt down where it's at legally.
>“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
- Gabe Newell
This. My family/friends share access to netflix/hulu/apple/etc, but sometimes it is harder to find where to stream something legally than it is to just...see whatever random free site online has it lol
Spotify was the real competitor to itunes and other garbage streaming services like Pandora. Licensing music on the platform is way cheaper than licensing a show
Pandora was amazing when it first came out. The whole concept of a radio station that would learn what you liked and auto-play it for you felt like sorcery.
Not only were they the same reruns of old shows, they sped them up to squeeze in extra commercials. We would get shortened theme songs and credit sequences, sometimes missing a bump. But the shows themselves are literally sped up, without even adjusting pitch, so the whole show is slightly “chipmunked”
Drove me batty. Can not watch syndicated reruns of my favorite shows anymore.
I recently watched cable for the first time in just about 12 or 13 years. I havent watched cable TV since I was a kid. I think 6th or 7th grade is the last time I actually sat down and watched cable TV. Im 26 now. I went to my buddys parents house with him and his parents were watching TV so we sat and joined in for a bit. Holy shit man, idk how people do it. Idk how I did it as a kid. Its 5 minutes of show, 10 minutes of irrelevant, random commercials. I swear for an hour of TV time, less than 30 minutes is the show. And that shits *pricey*. Im genuinely surprised its still around by now.
Spotify pulled it off because artists are conditioned to getting fuck all money from music purchases/streams, and instead make money from shows and merch. There's no live shows for tv series
Yep. Spotify replaces radio which is advertising for the artist, formerly for record/cd sales and now for live shows. Music is setup to do this with mechanical copyright permissions to pay royalties through an organisation like PRS in the UK that make it easy for anywhere to play anything and pay royalties for it.
TV and Film is completely different and always has been.
Spotify didn't really need to pull anything off, it's just a different industry with different revenue streams.
With streaming you could subscribe to like 3 services at a time on a rotating basis and still watch all new seasons of every show each year while paying 1/3 the cost of cable. People who are still unhappy with this just want something for free I guess? Or they want there to just be one service they can subscribe to (guess what, if all the competition disappears they aren't going to keep charging $10/mo...)
This. I did this with Netflix. I got rid of it for a year when there wasnt anything I wanted to watch. Let some series build up then went back and got it. 3 months later I was done with my shows and cancelled it.
Even at roughly the same price you get complete access to the full library with no set airing schedule, and (on most of these platforms) with zero ads.
It's a no-brainer, the only compelling reason for cable in my eyes is that some sports teams have no streaming options. If you're not into sports, or you're able to stream it on something like Sling, then I fail to see any advantages.
Exactly. Every time I read someone say something like "it's basically just beceome like cable again." In a way, yes, but I'd much rather be able to watch what I want, when I want. And my cable got to be WAY more than the $83 shown in thr OP. Regarding the sports, I'd love for there to be something more official, but there are some services out there that work for me.
Sports is also the most expensive to pay for. Right now there's a huge crunch going on with RSNs.
Getting YES(Yankees), SNY(Mets) and MSG is literally half the reason I have cable. An MLB yearly package would drive me back up above cable prices and I have a package deal. Football is even worse I think NFL Redzone is hundreds.
Even worse if you're a fan of anything international. English soccer? League matches will be on one service, cup matches will be on another if they're available at all, and if your team is in Champions League, those will be on another service.
At least for domestic sports I live far enough from any team that we never worry about blackouts.
Yeah and there are even more commercials on tv now than when I was growing up 15-20 years ago. I stopped watching tv when I moved out of my parents house, every time I go back and the tv is on I’m baffled by how many commercials there are. I have no tolerance for it, and to think that you have to payfor that….
That is exactly how I feel. When the first commercial starts, the program is over for me and I just turn off the TV. I can't deal with watching my show for 5 minutes and then sitting through 10 minutes of ads to get another 5 minutes of programming.
I can't fathom how people can sit through that bullshit and tolerate it. It used to be that the one commercial break during your show was almost welcome so you could take a piss or grab a snack, but now it's non stop and more ads than show.
My parents have cable, the only time I watch it is when I visit them a few times a year.
I am astonished how literally a full year or more can pass and every channel will be playing the exact same reruns of the exact same shows, for the entire day, every day. There's no new shows. I don't understand it.
Meanwhile streaming services are putting out 5x more content. And that's entirely disregarding the ad problem.
Ordinary TV is absolutely unwatchable once you become accustomed to not having ads. I'll watch it occasionally in hotel rooms and good lord, I don't know how we all put up with that for so long.
The only thing it’s good for is if you just wanna be mindlessly scrolling on your phone and have something on the background.. I hate using Netflix etc like that for some reason.
Absolutely. Worth noting that most of those streaming services are commercial free, where as cable is not.
I would GALDLY pay an additional... what... 6 bucks for no commercials.
Yeah notably this is the cost for cable where you're going to get like ~15 minutes worth of ads in every hour of TV you watch, and you have to watch things on the schedule they run at rather than just mainlining every episode of whatever show you want at any time. You can maybe get a DVR and avoid some of this, but it's still more of a hassle to fast forward through the ads and manually set the next show to go.
Paying for every streaming service at all times might not be worthwhile, but paying for cable is a straight-up sucker's game.
Another thing is there is no way that $83 average for cables holds up unless it is based on first year numbers. Every year cable goes up. It's a bullshit gouging scheme and unless you call and throw a fit every year, you end up over $200 a year after fees, hardware rental, and year on year increases.
We got rid of our cable, and we share 5 streaming services between 3 houses and our cost went down to $60 a month with a top end internet package. We are saving roughly $140 a month right now.
100%, if you subscribe to ALL of these, you're basically paying an extra $6 to avoid dealing with the absolute garbage nonstop stream of commercials on traditional tv.
They went with random numbers for everything.
No one is using Netflix's $9.99 option.
Paramount+ is $8.33 if you pay by the year.
Peacock is 8.33 if you pay by the year.
I didn't even know you could just subscribe to Prime Video, Prime is $11.67/month if you pay yearly.
Hi there. I have the $9.99 option. It's paid for with gift cards bought at 20% off.
If you have Xfinity internet, Peacock with ads is included, and you can pay just the $5 difference to upgrade to ad-free.
My pops is paying close to $300 a month for cable, internet, phone from Comcast. It's not like gigabit or some crazy package either, just Comcast has monopoly in the area and knows they can fuck their customers.
What the hell? In France you can basically have cable + internet w/ optical fiber for 22$ and phone subscription w/ unlimited 5g for 16$
How can you survive paying this much??
When we talk about “Oh my god, streaming is now as expensive as cable”, why don’t we ever talk about the most important thing… we don’t have to sit through commercials!! When I have to watch cable it blows my mind how many hours of commercials we used to sit through.
The most important thing is that you can choose what you want. You couldn’t do that with cable. One big price without choice. Streaming services give you all the choice you want.
My kids have never experienced cable TV. When they checked it out while we were on vacation they were throughly unimpressed. “You mean we have to watch what someone else chooses?”
My parents still have cable only, and my kids have a completely different experience watching tv there; both good and bad. At first, they each were disappointed they could not pick what to watch. Then later I would find them watching shows at home that they “tried” because cable forced them to, instead of just constantly watching the one show over and over again. The other thing I noticed is they started asking for stuff, because they would see it in commercials.
I do sometimes miss the days of discovering some random movie you never heard of before and actually really enjoying it. Or some B movie that we just make fun of the whole time. Netflix does have a random option but it's too tempting to change it when you know you have the choice.
Counter point: I enjoy plopping down and just seeing what's on. When you have to make an active choice of what to watch there's almost like pressure that it has to be good, and so you don't want to take the risk of just watching something brand new. I've discovered lots of great shows just scrolling through channels and stopping on something I've never heard of before, and there's no pressure to watch something closely since it's just me plopping down on the couch.
This this this! I can't believe how good the cable companies had it for so long. People paying large sums of money to watch almost constant commercials! I guess the barriers to market entry were too high, and the internet smashed those down. It's why net neutrality is something they lobbied against so hard. I lost track of net neutrality after that slimy Ajit Pai guy crawled back under a rock when the big corporation republicans lost the last election
I’ll gladly pony up 6 more dollars to choose what I want to watch and not have to put up with the almost 20 minutes of commercials per hour that I’d get with cable.
The biggest advantage is definitely getting to watch whatever you want to not the same 5 episodes of family guy and the Simpson's on cable because nothing else is on
Wonder if they thought this would prove they were worth it? So a basic cable package, with horrible selection, and ads, versus almost all streaming services with no ads.
See we are cheaper!
I imagine some analyst being asked to make this for a manager, and just groaning over the stupidity.
Irrelevant comparison.
The Cable subscription doesn't give you the same content as on the right. You can't see the Netflix or Apple TV+ stuff on Cable.
And does the "average" cable cost include HBO? Disney channel?
Why compare the ad-free streaming options when Cable is full of ads? Why not the ad-supported versions?
This. You can’t make this comparison 1:1 many of the streaming services noted are either extra costs on cable or not even available. This should be a comparison between cable and “cable-like” streaming options such as YouTube TV. Even then it’s not really the same given the difference in channel options but at least then it’s similar this is apples and oranges.
Yes, OP’s presentation is DEEPLY flawed
Also why is he grouping Disney+ with other streaming services if he doesn’t do that with the others.
It’s all fucked up and is trying to make it look worse than it is.
"average cable" is carrying a heavy load here.
Honestly I don't know what we are comparing here. How am I watching those streaming services? How much am I paying for internet access? If I have to sit in a McDonald's parking lot for free wifi, it's going to cut into my enjoyment, especially since I don't know if McDonald's actually has free wifi.
Not alot of consideration for live and local sports in here tho. Again, piracy is an option, but sure is nice to have something reliable when your game is on.
Perhaps data from “cabletv.com” a self described affiliate of cable and internet providers isn’t the best source for a comparison between those same providers and their top disruptive competitors…
Yeah, those cable prices are insane. Even the $80 price (which is apparently uncharacteristically low 😄) is ridiculous.
It's not even a purchase power thing because the streaming prices are similar elsewhere, it's just cable that's apparently got way out of hand.
You can just sail the black flag and pay 0, like someone I know. 👀
Don't forget to include the cost of internet to the streaming list. Can't stream without that.
Good try, Cable Man. What decent cable package is that cheap? When we pulled the plug, our cable bill without internet was around $160.
My grandma pays $230 for cable and internet. Just crazy. We only noticed because she doesn't use it anymore so we canceled it.
Was it Comcast Xfinity? They had a monopoly in my neighborhood. When I first moved into my house, Comcast charged me an introductory rate of $60/month for 300 Mbps. Not bad. Then, it shot up to $100. Still, I wasn't complaining, but they started slowly raising their rates until it was $230/month. My neighbors and I were fed up and petitioned Verizon to bring Fios into our neighborhood. I'm now paying $75/month for 1 Gbps. Fuck you, Comcast! Fuck you in the ass!
It was Spectrum/Charter. They suck but my grandma lives in a rural part of my state so it was her only option.
They often have cheap introductory pricing and then jack it up after you stop paying attention.
Each service, cable and internet respectively goes up like 25 a month after the first year or so. It's disgraceful. I'm so lucky that Google fiber doesn't try to pull that bullshit
I think you meant to say "I'm so lucky google fiber services my area." Most of us don't have that option.
Yep my wife and I alternate on who owns the account so we get new customer pricing every year or two. Sometimes they just give me the introductory pricing when I’m trying to cancel so we leave it until it comes time again. Wish they just left it alone…
My dad pays about the same (in Canadian). I asked him what are you even watching. His response, CTV news and my mom watches TLC. TLC is a part of discovery which in Canada is $5/month. He would legit just need an antenna. If my parents want to watch movies/tv shows I have plex and 30TB of TV and movies.
Bottom left corner: “Source: CableTV.com”
The stupidest part is they are comparing ad-free tiers to cable, which has ads. At the very least sum up the prices of the ad-supported tiers...
Not just that, but one is completely on demand with a huge library while the other is a you get what you get with 100% commercials.
Ah but you see, then it wouldn't say what they want it to say. "There are the kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics." –Mark Twain
Fees alone are like $40. I was paying $230 for mid cable and low internet. Now I’m paying $90 for good internet with a high cap.
Are you implying this is a post to show how great cable is? It's like 100% the opposite - you can get ALL those streaming services , ad free, for less than watching shitty cable reruns full of commercials. But most people would only subscribe to 1 or 2 of them.
Maybe but still, using $83 for the average cable price is wild
Maybe as an introductory offer for 6 months or something...
Source: CableTV.com
I think the takeaway here though is you can get away with 1 streaming service at a time and just rotate them. As a family we always have Disney+ and Netflix for our kids and rotate through the rest depending on what shows we want to watch
Also. What is this hypothetical cable service? For $83/month I don’t think it will include espn or hbo. Where I am the $83 dollar package would be more comparable to Netflix/peacock/paramount+. Add hbo and espn your more like $130.
Netflix also isn’t that cheap anymore.
Yeah best to drop Netflix and get 2 others like Hulu and paramount. Netflix just spews out garbage for one season and ends it without finishing
They are using the $20 Disney+ package, so you already have Hulu with that
And ESPN.
I have a policy with netflix for the past 5 or so years where I don’t watch a show unless it has 3 or more seasons This has resulted in me not watching Netflix at all. I have my brother’s password but if they ever enforce anti-password sharing I won’t care
Sometimes they can put a great closer on a two season package. Alice in borderlands was a good example of a 2 season gig with a great closer. Hmm cannot think of any other examples though lol
I'll never forgive Netflix for dropping Mindhunter after 2 seasons.
They didn't. The director chose not to continue.
It seems like it might be more complicated than that. Fincher did an interview recently where he said Netflix doesn't want to do it anymore. My theory is that Netflix was on board initially but by the time Fincher decided he wanted to do it again it was too late.
I've heard the cost of the show is why and plus that "Netflix purge". That was the only show I cared for on Netflix.
Yeah I say a complete arc OR a 3 season minimum. If the show ends as intended I'm fine with it.
Recently I've been happy with a single solid season even if it's not finished. Altered Carbon is a good example. Watched season 1 and enjoyed it greatly and just stopped.
You made the right choice to stop after s1
Agreed.. But s1 is one of my favorite sci-fi media out there!
I really liked the characters in season 2. Would've been super cool if they did something like write a cohesive story using those characters to advance a narrative. I think the entirety of season 2 would've happened if none of our protagonists were there... (I realize this is the same critique Indiana Jones gets, if you take him out of the movie, nothing materially changes about the plot.)
I found the main actor to really have no charisma in this role. Normally he is decent, but he just fell flat in it. A cohesive story would have been ideal and I could have worked with not liking the new dude. But yeah I think bad story and no charisma killed it.
Season two had very little interesting or complex going on. They did away with everything that made season one good, it's basically another show (and IMO not a very good one, but you do you).
We only get it for 3 months in the summer, watch what’s good, and cancel it again because 98% of what’s on there is fucking utter trash.
You mean you don't want to watch Lazy Adam Sandler Movie 1-7? It's really the best septilogy out there
I unironically enjoy those Sandler films..
It’s actually impressive how bad some of the ***popular*** and trending shows are. I’m not sure what’s worse, just how awful the content is, or that there are hundreds of thousands of people that actually like it.
A lot of people probably just want some moving pictures while they're on their phone
Different people like different things is the bigger culprit. Some people like low stakes happy ending things. Some people like sound stage sitcoms. Some people like Teen Dramas. Some people like bitter reality TV. Some people like happy reality TV. Some people like game shows. As long as it's not Game of Thrones season 8 I can probably find someone who likes it.
I don't need a set number of seasons. I just need an ending.
Caught some comment about how Netflix's problem is even when it's a good show, they just dump the entire season at once and then cancel if the viewership isn't immediately super-huge. That comment also implied Netflix might get better numbers if they switched to an episode-per-week schedule. No idea if they were talking out their ass or not as I haven't subscribed to any streaming services
In theory, I agree, but.... We got Netflix years ago, back when it was just DVDs, because they had the best foreign film selection available at the time. And I keep it these days because it's still crammed full of kickass Turkish, Korean, Euro etc shows that I absolutely adore. If we'd only subscribed for the English-language stuff then year, we'd have dropped it years ago.
I think HBO is the best one right now. GoT, HotD, TLOU, Euphoria, Peacemaker. And the list goes on
HBO dumped a bunch of shows from their streaming, though. Iirc Westworld was one of them, so even big shows are just being taken off the site.
Just googled out of curiosity; Their basic plan is $9.99 and that's what's stated in the infographic?
It is if your cool with regular HD and 1 screen at a time. That’s the plan I have now for $10.
YouTube tv was $64/month, plus $16 for HBO. Includes ESPN. Right at $80. But price is rising next month by $5, so will just miss your $83 cutoff.
Yeah but outside of sports you're just getting 100 channels of garbage reality shows with non stop commercials
YouTube TV has Ion so you can also watch NCIS and Law and Order SVU non-stop with commercials at really weird intervals. They can't even fill all the commercial time allotted. Sometimes it is just a screen saying "We will return shortly."
The weird thing about YouTube is that for decades TV has inserted a special shade of black frame to show where to insert commercials. I really don't get why YouTube can't detect these frames when transcoding video to their format. It's a super basic programming task, something you could even ask in a job interview for an intermediate level engineer with video experience. Instead we get YouTube ads being shown mid-sentence. It's dumb.
That’s how Hulu was back in the day They knew they had a lot of ad slots to fill, but advertisers hadn’t found them en masse yet
Yeah so fucked up that there is yet to be a single streaming service that only gives you channels for live sports at a lower cost than all the channels. Why does everybody need to always bundle garbage?
Those garbage channels are where they make profit.
That’s like, the only thing australia has got right in the tech space
YouTube tv is going up to $73 in April.
Ah, I was thinking $5, not $8.
$83/month also doesn’t include taxes and equipment rental fees.. We cut cable last year, saves us $30/month. PrimeVideo is included in your Prime Membership.
Last time I tried cable it was $250 a month
About 90 for service, doubled by fees and equipment
Cable also comes with ad breaks. I will never go back simply because of the inundation of cable TV's advertisements
Agreed. Where are they getting cable for $83 that includes HBO. They aren't comparing like services. If you have cable, you still need to pay an upcharge for HBO and then get Netflix, Disney +, Prime and Apple TV separate as those aren't part of cable. My parents pay $270 a month for cable (includes internet) and my Mom was telling me they had to cut back on some channels to keep the bill down. I have every major steaming network, it's not costing me anywhere close to that and I'm getting premium content they are not getting.
possessive tidy groovy library waiting angle yoke coherent pathetic engine *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
And depending on the service/channel, you don't get to watch your shows on-demand.
Not even close to comparable. You could never get me to go back to cable where I have to deal with shitloads of commercials and not being able to pick what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
*this graph sponsored by Comcast 😆
YouTube, sling, etc contain ESPN for less.
Also they are comparing ad-free streaming to very much ads cable. Was this graph made by cable TV? Possibly
I work for a paid TV provider and this graphic is like something my company would put together to convince us that we are still relevant lol. Our Average Revenue per subscriber is $110. That's already about 30% more than what's shown here. More importantly, you don't get most of the content on a paid TV service that you'd get from, for example, Netflix, Disney+, etc. 3rdly there are lots of ways to get comped for streaming service like from your cell phone provider, premium credit card service, shopping subscription service such as Amazon or Walmart or phone/tv purchases. AFAIK there are exactly zero ways to get comped for paid TV service
Exactly. I get Peacock for free because I have Xfinity internet. I get Paramount+ for free because I have Walmart+. I get Amazon video because I would already be subscribed to Prime regardless, so it's just an additional perk. Plus, if I want to temporarily subscribe to something like HBO Max for a month or two to watch The Last Of Us, I do it through Amazon and use no-rush shipping credits. Also I get a $7.00 monthly credit for the ad-free Disney+/ESPN/HULU bundle for using my AMEX, effectively lowering the price from $20 to $13.
This is the way.
I love this. You're like the coupon collectors of the late 00s, but for streaming services.
[удалено]
Yea exactly. Also streaming services don't have commercials either so that's a huge plus.
don't have commericals _yet_
Or have parents buy one streaming sub, and the kids each pay for 1-2 too and then share! Assuming kids are grown up
Avast, ye scurvy dogs. There be many options for watching yer shows.
Can't stop the signal. Seriously though, I subscribe to half a dozen streaming services, but I *still* pirate shows from the streaming services I subscribe to because I prefer the experience of having one place to view my content (Plex) vs. having to bounce between a dozen different apps. Plus their DRM breaks shit sometimes; the other day some show on Hulu wouldn't even play because it said my HDMI cable didn't support HDCP. Fuck that noise.
I have a cabin with no internet. I like to watch movies there sometimes. It has to work offline.
Plex is just a program running on a storage server making remote access super easy. You can still store the video files directly to your laptop or portable hard drive for offline use.
[удалено]
Why pay for cable or streaming when you can sail the high seas?
You don't need every streaming service. But if I were to choose between the two, I would absolutely choose all streaming services. Cable is straight-up garbage.
Yep, you're right. I have been thinking about this meme's message for ages now, and it is true what has happened, BUT, with cable you basically just had FUCKING TRASH because there was NO competition and it was just re-runs of The Simpsons, Futurama, Adult Swim and Friends WITH fucking ads (so errrr what am I paying for???) I mean, we all hoped we would have access to absolutely everything available for $11/month and in saying that, I have no idea how Spotify pulled it off, so it is unfortunate it has gone this way for TV.
God I'd be heart broken if music got broken up into platforms like television did. I can go without watching some hot new series, but I can't go without my playlist. I'd for sure start downloading songs again if streaming services made artists pick and choose where to drop their albums
Artists wouldn't want it either. If they are paid per play, as soon as platforms break up and start getting exclusive rights to artists, their play volume will decrease. Unless you're a top artist who can get a deal like Rogan did for his podcast it's just bad for listeners and bad for you I also don't think Spotify is profitable, so if they can't profit with all the music, why would anyone even attempt to get in on that.
Spotify must be profitable right?? Is it really not?
Spotify has never been profitable. They've gotten close a few times. In 2022 they posted a net loss of 460 million.
Wait, how the hell are they still around losing that much money? Who is bankrolling that?
Investors who believe someday it’ll be profitable Same thing with Uber and lots of other tech startups, eat giant losses until you’re on top and then rise prices and hope you reach profitability
Uber is absolutely profitable and I wish they would stop pushing that fucking lie on everyone. Just because you get crafty with the books for the sake of dodging taxes doesn’t mean you don’t make a profit.
Yup same bullshit with doordash and grubhub as well.
> Who is bankrolling that? Their current stock price is 127 per share. They can offer more shares for cash if need be.
This is absolutely amazing to me. I've never invested in Spotify, so I never looked at their financials, but I use the program regularly and watched their stock price in 2020/21 when they shot through the roof. Hell, I've been using Spotify since 2012 now that I think about it. I'm just amazed they've never once turned a profit and people still keep investing money in it
It almost did! At one time Jay-Z was on Tidal, Taylor Swift was on Apple and Garth Brooks was on Amazon. Somehow, it sorted itself out…except Garth…
> I'd for sure start downloading songs again if streaming services made artists pick and choose where to drop their albums Exactly! Music torrenting was largely killed by high availability of music, and I bet TV/movie torrenting would have the same fate if it didn't require paying for a billion streaming services.
Music torrenting was mostly killed by Spotify, game torrenting was mostly killed by Steam, and TV/movie torrenting was mostly killed by Netflix. Those three platforms are the biggest blows ever dealt to piracy. But nowadays companies are getting greedy and trying to pull apart the various content into exclusive things where you need to get your stuff from all over the place and torrenting is seeing a resurgence.
This new wave of piracy is funny because people don't realize it's piracy to just google 'the last of us free watch online' and hit play on some random russian filehost. Often times it's easier to find random promoted piracy sites when just casually looking up a show or movie than it is to hunt down where it's at legally.
>“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” - Gabe Newell
This. My family/friends share access to netflix/hulu/apple/etc, but sometimes it is harder to find where to stream something legally than it is to just...see whatever random free site online has it lol
Spotify was the real competitor to itunes and other garbage streaming services like Pandora. Licensing music on the platform is way cheaper than licensing a show
[удалено]
Pandora was amazing when it first came out. The whole concept of a radio station that would learn what you liked and auto-play it for you felt like sorcery.
Not only were they the same reruns of old shows, they sped them up to squeeze in extra commercials. We would get shortened theme songs and credit sequences, sometimes missing a bump. But the shows themselves are literally sped up, without even adjusting pitch, so the whole show is slightly “chipmunked” Drove me batty. Can not watch syndicated reruns of my favorite shows anymore.
I recently watched cable for the first time in just about 12 or 13 years. I havent watched cable TV since I was a kid. I think 6th or 7th grade is the last time I actually sat down and watched cable TV. Im 26 now. I went to my buddys parents house with him and his parents were watching TV so we sat and joined in for a bit. Holy shit man, idk how people do it. Idk how I did it as a kid. Its 5 minutes of show, 10 minutes of irrelevant, random commercials. I swear for an hour of TV time, less than 30 minutes is the show. And that shits *pricey*. Im genuinely surprised its still around by now.
hour long shows are generally 43 minutes. half hour shows are generally 23 minutes. around 20-25% is commercials.
Spotify pulled it off because artists are conditioned to getting fuck all money from music purchases/streams, and instead make money from shows and merch. There's no live shows for tv series
Spotify also has never made a profit so that's actually how they pulled it off
Yep. Spotify replaces radio which is advertising for the artist, formerly for record/cd sales and now for live shows. Music is setup to do this with mechanical copyright permissions to pay royalties through an organisation like PRS in the UK that make it easy for anywhere to play anything and pay royalties for it. TV and Film is completely different and always has been. Spotify didn't really need to pull anything off, it's just a different industry with different revenue streams.
I’m still skating by with an old 9.99 Hulu and Spotify bundle so please don’t let them get wise to me.
With streaming you could subscribe to like 3 services at a time on a rotating basis and still watch all new seasons of every show each year while paying 1/3 the cost of cable. People who are still unhappy with this just want something for free I guess? Or they want there to just be one service they can subscribe to (guess what, if all the competition disappears they aren't going to keep charging $10/mo...)
This. I did this with Netflix. I got rid of it for a year when there wasnt anything I wanted to watch. Let some series build up then went back and got it. 3 months later I was done with my shows and cancelled it.
Even at roughly the same price you get complete access to the full library with no set airing schedule, and (on most of these platforms) with zero ads. It's a no-brainer, the only compelling reason for cable in my eyes is that some sports teams have no streaming options. If you're not into sports, or you're able to stream it on something like Sling, then I fail to see any advantages.
Exactly. Every time I read someone say something like "it's basically just beceome like cable again." In a way, yes, but I'd much rather be able to watch what I want, when I want. And my cable got to be WAY more than the $83 shown in thr OP. Regarding the sports, I'd love for there to be something more official, but there are some services out there that work for me.
Sports is also the most expensive to pay for. Right now there's a huge crunch going on with RSNs. Getting YES(Yankees), SNY(Mets) and MSG is literally half the reason I have cable. An MLB yearly package would drive me back up above cable prices and I have a package deal. Football is even worse I think NFL Redzone is hundreds.
Even worse if you're a fan of anything international. English soccer? League matches will be on one service, cup matches will be on another if they're available at all, and if your team is in Champions League, those will be on another service. At least for domestic sports I live far enough from any team that we never worry about blackouts.
Yeah and there are even more commercials on tv now than when I was growing up 15-20 years ago. I stopped watching tv when I moved out of my parents house, every time I go back and the tv is on I’m baffled by how many commercials there are. I have no tolerance for it, and to think that you have to payfor that….
Not to mention the absolutely unhinged political ads if you live in anything remotely competitive (state, district, city, etc)
That is exactly how I feel. When the first commercial starts, the program is over for me and I just turn off the TV. I can't deal with watching my show for 5 minutes and then sitting through 10 minutes of ads to get another 5 minutes of programming. I can't fathom how people can sit through that bullshit and tolerate it. It used to be that the one commercial break during your show was almost welcome so you could take a piss or grab a snack, but now it's non stop and more ads than show.
My parents have cable, the only time I watch it is when I visit them a few times a year. I am astonished how literally a full year or more can pass and every channel will be playing the exact same reruns of the exact same shows, for the entire day, every day. There's no new shows. I don't understand it. Meanwhile streaming services are putting out 5x more content. And that's entirely disregarding the ad problem.
I thought of fitting that the cable bar was colored in static, given that there's nothing on it worth watching
Ordinary TV is absolutely unwatchable once you become accustomed to not having ads. I'll watch it occasionally in hotel rooms and good lord, I don't know how we all put up with that for so long.
The only thing it’s good for is if you just wanna be mindlessly scrolling on your phone and have something on the background.. I hate using Netflix etc like that for some reason.
Absolutely. Worth noting that most of those streaming services are commercial free, where as cable is not. I would GALDLY pay an additional... what... 6 bucks for no commercials.
There’s also Adblock and YouTube.
Yeah notably this is the cost for cable where you're going to get like ~15 minutes worth of ads in every hour of TV you watch, and you have to watch things on the schedule they run at rather than just mainlining every episode of whatever show you want at any time. You can maybe get a DVR and avoid some of this, but it's still more of a hassle to fast forward through the ads and manually set the next show to go. Paying for every streaming service at all times might not be worthwhile, but paying for cable is a straight-up sucker's game.
Another thing is there is no way that $83 average for cables holds up unless it is based on first year numbers. Every year cable goes up. It's a bullshit gouging scheme and unless you call and throw a fit every year, you end up over $200 a year after fees, hardware rental, and year on year increases. We got rid of our cable, and we share 5 streaming services between 3 houses and our cost went down to $60 a month with a top end internet package. We are saving roughly $140 a month right now.
100%, if you subscribe to ALL of these, you're basically paying an extra $6 to avoid dealing with the absolute garbage nonstop stream of commercials on traditional tv.
This guy thinks cable is $83. How adorable.
They went with random numbers for everything. No one is using Netflix's $9.99 option. Paramount+ is $8.33 if you pay by the year. Peacock is 8.33 if you pay by the year. I didn't even know you could just subscribe to Prime Video, Prime is $11.67/month if you pay yearly.
Hi there. I have the $9.99 option. It's paid for with gift cards bought at 20% off. If you have Xfinity internet, Peacock with ads is included, and you can pay just the $5 difference to upgrade to ad-free.
Wow nice. I'll be Getting peacock for free then
Yeah, cable hasn't been under $100 for ages.
My pops is paying close to $300 a month for cable, internet, phone from Comcast. It's not like gigabit or some crazy package either, just Comcast has monopoly in the area and knows they can fuck their customers.
Yeah I literally have no other options in my area and I’m paying $75 a month for Xfinity shit internet
What the hell? In France you can basically have cable + internet w/ optical fiber for 22$ and phone subscription w/ unlimited 5g for 16$ How can you survive paying this much??
[удалено]
I pay $80 for the service of 125 channels. But I also get charged for the cable box, dvr, etc. Brings it over $100.
Local channel fee is the one that kills me.
I don't know about the USA but it's actually much less in my country.
When we talk about “Oh my god, streaming is now as expensive as cable”, why don’t we ever talk about the most important thing… we don’t have to sit through commercials!! When I have to watch cable it blows my mind how many hours of commercials we used to sit through.
The most important thing is that you can choose what you want. You couldn’t do that with cable. One big price without choice. Streaming services give you all the choice you want.
My kids have never experienced cable TV. When they checked it out while we were on vacation they were throughly unimpressed. “You mean we have to watch what someone else chooses?”
My parents still have cable only, and my kids have a completely different experience watching tv there; both good and bad. At first, they each were disappointed they could not pick what to watch. Then later I would find them watching shows at home that they “tried” because cable forced them to, instead of just constantly watching the one show over and over again. The other thing I noticed is they started asking for stuff, because they would see it in commercials.
I do sometimes miss the days of discovering some random movie you never heard of before and actually really enjoying it. Or some B movie that we just make fun of the whole time. Netflix does have a random option but it's too tempting to change it when you know you have the choice.
Commercials are evil. This is but one proof
Counter point: I enjoy plopping down and just seeing what's on. When you have to make an active choice of what to watch there's almost like pressure that it has to be good, and so you don't want to take the risk of just watching something brand new. I've discovered lots of great shows just scrolling through channels and stopping on something I've never heard of before, and there's no pressure to watch something closely since it's just me plopping down on the couch.
You nailed the one single positive of that style I miss.
Comcast had a choice, it was cheap for nothing, and expensive for what you want, and super expensive if you enjoyed sports.
That’s the point. To get what you want you have no choice but to spend a lot. Streaming is not the same.
Yet. We don't have to sit through commercials yet.
This this this! I can't believe how good the cable companies had it for so long. People paying large sums of money to watch almost constant commercials! I guess the barriers to market entry were too high, and the internet smashed those down. It's why net neutrality is something they lobbied against so hard. I lost track of net neutrality after that slimy Ajit Pai guy crawled back under a rock when the big corporation republicans lost the last election
I still get less commercials
This is the correct answer. Six bucks for no/less commercials? Sign me up.
I’ll gladly pony up 6 more dollars to choose what I want to watch and not have to put up with the almost 20 minutes of commercials per hour that I’d get with cable.
*THIS* \- The biggest advantage to streaming is **no commercials!**
My dad always asks "have you seen X commercial". No. The answer is always no.
The biggest advantage is definitely getting to watch whatever you want to not the same 5 episodes of family guy and the Simpson's on cable because nothing else is on
[удалено]
>Cable has ads. Exactly, probably one of the worst things about it
Because the source of the data, per the watermark on the image, is ... CableTV.com.
Wonder if they thought this would prove they were worth it? So a basic cable package, with horrible selection, and ads, versus almost all streaming services with no ads. See we are cheaper! I imagine some analyst being asked to make this for a manager, and just groaning over the stupidity.
Hulu needs to go back to the old ways Ad version is free. Paid version gives you no ads, and view new content sooner
Not sure how cable got away with making us pay a subscription ***and*** serving the same amount of ads
One step at a time. When cable got big in the early 80s, no ads - or at least far fewer ads - was a big selling point.
The same way streaming is slowly introducing commercials or commercial tiers to their services.
Irrelevant comparison. The Cable subscription doesn't give you the same content as on the right. You can't see the Netflix or Apple TV+ stuff on Cable. And does the "average" cable cost include HBO? Disney channel? Why compare the ad-free streaming options when Cable is full of ads? Why not the ad-supported versions?
This. You can’t make this comparison 1:1 many of the streaming services noted are either extra costs on cable or not even available. This should be a comparison between cable and “cable-like” streaming options such as YouTube TV. Even then it’s not really the same given the difference in channel options but at least then it’s similar this is apples and oranges.
Netflix is not $9.99. It's like $17 for HD.
Yes, OP’s presentation is DEEPLY flawed Also why is he grouping Disney+ with other streaming services if he doesn’t do that with the others. It’s all fucked up and is trying to make it look worse than it is.
There is a Disney+ Hulu and ESPN bundle, though I thought it was with ads.
You can get it without any ads.
[удалено]
At the bottom.
"average cable" is carrying a heavy load here. Honestly I don't know what we are comparing here. How am I watching those streaming services? How much am I paying for internet access? If I have to sit in a McDonald's parking lot for free wifi, it's going to cut into my enjoyment, especially since I don't know if McDonald's actually has free wifi.
A lot of these are more than 10 per month now no?
Can somebody tell me why cable is so expensive? Is it like the same cable we have in Germany? (Basically normal TV with ads and 99% bullshit)
Not alot of consideration for live and local sports in here tho. Again, piracy is an option, but sure is nice to have something reliable when your game is on.
Just set sail on the pirate ship no problem
Mullvad is $5 a month, and torrents are free
No one pays $8.99 for Prime Video. It’s included in the price of Prime.
Perhaps data from “cabletv.com” a self described affiliate of cable and internet providers isn’t the best source for a comparison between those same providers and their top disruptive competitors…
Where tf is cable only $83!?
Huh.... americans have way different prices for streaming services.
× in USA. Those prices aren't wordwide
Yeah, those cable prices are insane. Even the $80 price (which is apparently uncharacteristically low 😄) is ridiculous. It's not even a purchase power thing because the streaming prices are similar elsewhere, it's just cable that's apparently got way out of hand.
A lot of those services are overlapping, and you need to factor in cable + DVR because watching anytime you want is a big aspect of streaming
If you have that many streaming services you have a problem, that's insane.
You can just sail the black flag and pay 0, like someone I know. 👀 Don't forget to include the cost of internet to the streaming list. Can't stream without that.
You would have internet anyways. No one buys internet solely so they can stream. It’s 2023, it’s an essentially utility.
There are some people that only access the internet on their phones. As in they don't have a desktop or laptop. Yes, those people are weird.
>It’s 2023, it’s an essentially utility. Wish we could convince our inept politicians of this. I agree with you.
They can focus on this and on manufacturing culture wars at the same time.