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I now know more people without cable or dish than I know people WITH it.
We're still cable subscribers for now. For now.
I'd love for ESPN to just go away. I'm tired of subsidizing a channel I never watch. If it was only a buck or two a month, fine. But $35-$40? Get the eff out of my wallet.
Cable/satellite companies need to let viewers select a la carte programming. People should be able to select the exact stations they want, instead of only having the option of large packages. If I could select my own, I'd probably have about 20 stations tops. It would no doubt be more expensive per channel, but less expensive than the current ridiculous bill I pay for a bunch of channels I never watch. Doing this would probably enable cable companies to retain some of the customers they're currently losing.
I have no use for cable and rarely even watch TV. However, my cat likes to watch it when I'm away and seems to prefer the premium channels, so I'm kinda stuck with it.
Cable/satellite companies need to let viewers select a la carte programming. .
This generally isn't possible because the media companies won't allow it.
For example Disney owns ESPN. They also own A&E, History, H2, Lifetime, ABC, and TV stations in numerous cities. For a cable company to show any of these, they are usually required to carry all of them and in the case of ESPN it used to be required that it be put into every plan the cable company offers.
There are only 6-7 companies that own about 90% of everything on cable. Though these arrangements are secret, it's generally known they all require the cable companies to bundle popular channels with unpopular ones.
The problem in my area is finding internet service apart from the cable companies. We could do without TV completely, but need the internet for business, school, etc.
Almost all cable companies offer just Internet service as a stand alone service. This is what we get from TWC.
The average NBA player makes $5,000,000/per year. And where does that money come from? Your INVOLUNTARY pocket through outrageous prices for cable TV.
Everyone who is not interested in having overpaid useless athletes pick their pockets should go through their cable bill and drop down to tiers that do not contain sports networks, or as few as possible.
I will be cutting all of this out effective January 1st. I will drop down to the lowest tier possible. We pay for these stupid sports contracts through the back door. No more.
Hopefully, cable companies will wise up and offer subscribers alternatives so they will only pay for channels they watch. I cut mine off when I realized I was watching maybe 4-5 channels and paying for about 200.
Surely you know that if this becomes pervasive, you'll pay for for few channels no matter what you do.
Instead of paying say $40 for 200 channels, you'll pay $9.95 per channel. Do you really think that subscribing to fewer channels will reduce prices? Not a chance. Perhaps in the beginning a little but after that, knowing which channels you find "essential" and are hooked on, they will also raise the prices just for you since you'll have individual billing.
I stopped using cable a long time ago. You can get by without it quite easily. What will happen though is that the major networks will do what the oil companies do, start maintenance programs, reduce power consumption and thereby reduce the broadcast power and so on.
NBC did it during the last Winter Olympics. There was broadcast right until the games started and then during viewing hours they simply reduced broadcast power or otherwise made sure their broadcast wasn't very good, enough to make watching them worthless.
Right after the games were over, back to normal.
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