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Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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I seem to remember getting cable after we bought our first house in 1978, though it was available before then. I also remember that it was about $15/month but we paid $8 more for HBO, the only premium channel offered at the time. There was no box or DVR, just a coax cable that ran to the back of the TV, and it got about 20 channels. Now we have 165 channels plus streaming, and pay about $70/month, plus the cost of the DVR box and other s adapter boxes. As a cost per channel, it was about $0.75/channel back then, now $0.42/channel, much less. Unfortunately though, we are paying for probably 100 channels that we will never watch. This is how they make money, so won't let you pay only for those channels you want.
70's nothing, we did not have cable (about 8 channels)
80's I think it was around $19.99/month Extended basic round 40 chans
90's $~30/Month Extended basic around 40 chans
00's $~60/Month Extended Basic & Internet around 50 chan's
10's Over the air and streaming, Internet $60 about 60 chan;s , Netflix's
20's Over the air and streaming, Internet $100 (1Gb-sec/unlimited data) 70 Chan's + prime, Hulu $~20.month
I remember paying around $30 - don't know the timeframe. Today it's $275ish (Comcast changes it monthly) - that includes internet, but it's way too much.
I don't remember exact prices. I had cable in Vermont in the 1970s - $30? I seem to remember "a buck a day for entertainment cost." With my Betamax and the films shown on Canadian tv, it was worth it.
Once I moved south, work was a blur and I rarely got to have time to watch, so other than recording VHS copies of TCM movies, the value was OK. IMO, the golden age of cable and satellite TV was probably the 80s, about the time that MTV was just starting up, and through the first four years of tivo availability.
I started to actively dislike satellite tv when Directv started changing bandwidth allocations. The TCM movies, which had previously been fabulously clear, suddenly looked more like late night over-the-air movies from a city 100 miles away. I called to complain and found that in order to broadcast more channels of crap, and football in the greatest possible resolution, they were stealing bandwidth from TCM. From that point on, things just got worse with increasing cost, more ads on the channels, and repeats of repeats. New channels like the Science channel would pop up, start out with quality new programming, then descend into cheap programming, repeats, and infomercials. Newton Minnow is probably swimming in his grave.
I think I was paying around $45/mo with taxes and fees back in the late 90s, which looks to be around $75-80 in 2021 dollars. I can get something like YouTubeTV or Hulu+ today for under that, and get many more channels and built in cloud DVR. We instead opt to just rotate a handful of streaming services like HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, etc.
Of course we need internet service to do that, but I’d have that regardless of whether I had cable or a streaming service.
We got cable in 1987. Don't remember the price or how many channels.
We cancelled it a few years later. We had great over the air reception--we could see Sutro Tower from the living room window, which gave us at least 5 or 6 channels.
Before cable, 1970s-early 80s here in the Chicago area there was ON-TV and Spectrum or SpectraVision. Both were over the air subscription services that used a descrambler box to show first run movies. Iirc, it was $15-25/mo. They only lasted a few years.
Had Hughes Satellite for a while in the early 90s, forgot the cost.
Finally got cable around 2003 @ $40/mo. Now cable and internet is $125/mo
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