Why do you still pay for cable TV?
That’s what today’s New York Times asks, while noting that as the price of damn near everything increases—food and fuel most notably—so, too, does the price of sitting at home and watching TV. Since 1996, price of a cable TV subscription has risen about 77 percent, to an average of $60 per month. (I pay right around $100 for digital cable and Internet access with Time Warner.) The cable TV industry claims that the price is right in line with inflation, but then you have to ask yourself: just what are you paying for, really?
Wasn’t the Internet (and digital distribution) supposed to change all this?
For some of us, it has. My setup: an iMac hooked up to a broadband connection, from which I can grab all the episodes of “Lost” and “The Office” and “John Adams” I want, or whatever Hollywood movie I fancy (not too many of those, to be honest) in wonderful HD (via x264 compression). That’s hooked up to my big screen TV via a cheap HDMI cable; sound goes from the iMac to a proper surround system so I can watch HD rips in full DTS or Dolby Digital. Quite literally, I’m recreating a movie theater in my apartment without any loudmouth strangers ruining the experience. Why “consumers” don’t do this, I’ll never know. For the cost of two cables you get free, on-demand entertainment in glorious quality, legal issues notwithstanding.
Or, you could buy a media extender or Apple TV or that Roku box to accomplish the same thing. The point is, you don’t need to pay for cable TV to watch TV. Yet people do.
The same NYT article says a lot of consumers still see TV and Internet/computers as two different things, oil and water never meant to mix. Sentiments like, “when I come home from work, after sitting in front of a computer all day, I don’t want to see another computer until the next day.” Why people do people such hang-ups with computers?
I could also ask why people pay for cable TV when 99 percent of it is just garbage. Like, I have on in the background DiscoveryHD’s “Jeremy Piven’s Journey of a Lifetime.” Who in their right mind is gonna sit in front of the TV for hours on end watching Piven knock about Southeast Asia? It’s ruubish.
But I have the feeling that I’m already talking to the converted, those who use keenly Hulu and BitTorrent to augment (or supplement) their cable TV watching. Hooray for us.
Why do you still pay for cable TV?
Live sports.
Well Internet TV like (http://www.freetube.us.tc) fits the bill it’s free and that means a saving of $100 for me.
Live sports is my reason, too… I TiVo everything else. If there was a great alternative for live sports, I would be all over it.
Anything but sports. The sports crowd are aimless retards looking for pie in the sky heroes that do not exist. What a retarded click-now if I can only save my niece from this mindless mindset.
That bittorrent box thing looked, cool couldnt actually find one but still, looked like a good alternative, but the legality is questionable
are these x264 rips legal?
Old, bad habits of other people I have to live with, like the importance of watching sports events live, or watching Top Chef with someone else across the country on the phone.
None of that is necessary, or even convenient. We have a DVR. Why does a TV show still make people trash their schedules? Because “it just not the same” to do it with a DVR. It feels like “cheating.”
In five years we’ll have a hell of a lot more people who don’t have these irrational anti-DVR emotions living in prime marketing demographics, and live TV will fall out of favor. I hope. I might be able to pry my friends away from the TV to go outside and live by then.
Once I can get live sports in decent quality over the internet that will be the end of me ever paying for cable/satellite TV.
To be honest, I am just not impressed by traditional TV as a format. I am not normally in during the hours of prime TV here in the UK (about 8-11pm), and so miss most shows when they are on anyway.
I make a big use of the online services (BBC iPlayer, 4OD, etc) and they are going in the right direction – if only they would use something better than the terrible Kontiki for downloads I would use that over the streams, but that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. Fingers crossed they develop something in-house for Kangaroo…
I used to use Bittorent for a few shows, but there isn’t much from the states that I really watch at the moment – it comes in waves I suppose. Now as my Bittorrent is throttled I get these shows via file sharing/storage sites (you know the ones…). For most TV shows, I am happy with a 350MB XViD quality (a similar file size but h.264 would be better obviously) and it is pretty quick to download. Someone needs to find a way to monetise online TV, keeping TV free as people are used to. For me to pay $1.99 (or £1.99 as it no doubt will equate for no good reason) I would have to already really like a show (so have already seen most of a season at a minimum) and I don’t think I’m in a minority with that view.
Films-wise I go to the cinema relatively regularly, watch Film4 (free film channel in the UK that has ads but actually shows decent films regularly) every now and again, and rent the odd DVD. It is all about on demand though with films as with TV, and the marketplace is calling out for a legal outfit to offer good quality streams on demand (like you used to be able to get form Stage6 and still can through a few others but legal). Film is something that does benefit from better quality and sound – and people aren’t used to them being free like TV – so pay for options are more viable in my opinion. But studios need to work out that people are not going to pay the same price for a DRM’d download as a DVD or Blu-Ray title. If they sold titles that were time limited (for maybe 2 weeks) for something like £0.99 or $1.99 then I would happily pay that – but the DRM can’t be too restrictive and make me need extra hardware/software to use.
If I want a film or TV series to keep then I buy the DVD (and then rip them for ease of access/storage) – to make me buy them online they would have to have NO DRM at all, impressive HD video and surround sound and be notably cheaper (so $5 or $6 per film). Distribution costs are basically zero (ok maybe $0.10 for them – but that is pretty close) and there doesn’t need to be a middleman like Amazon/HMV/Play/etc involved to take a cut, so they should be able to get them out for under half price.
I just hope a studio/network just stands up to be counted on a new method and to try new things. If they sell time limited downloads (limited to 14 days) then if it ends up not working, they only have to support the system for 14 extra days of no sales – so not annoying customers (yes you MSN Music), or if they sell completely DRM free downloads in encoded in high quality open source codecs then even if they shut down the consumer can continue to use their downloads. The risks are quite low for them in these distribution methods, I just wish they would realise that and try new things. Something should work.
Last summer I went without cable or satellite tv. When fall hit I bought a tivo and got comcast. Why? The present state of getting content over the internet takes to long and is still too complicated. With tivo – it grabs – without fail – the tv shows I want. And when I get home I click a button and the shows play. A computer requires too many steps. In addition – when I have guests or people watch my house they can figure out tivo.
The other deal is the delay factor. Waiting around for the final episode of the sopranos to be uploaded so I could grab it was painful. The same goes for other shows I watch like Top Chef. With new content providers like AppleTV the availability of shows is unpredictable. Sometimes they are immediately sometimes it takes days.
So the answer is simple – availabilty of content and ease of use is still unmatched. But I see that slowly changing.
I partially disagree. I say partially, because the solution I have in mind is only available for the Mac right now, but there may be similar tools for Windows. I honestly don’t know.
My wife and I have been without cable/satellite TV for almost a year now. We get all our shows (about 30-40 of them) through Bittorent each night. Using a program called TVShows.app, we setup “Season Passes” similar to we did on our TiVo. The app then goes out and looks for the most recent episode of that particular show.
It works flawlessly. When I get up in the morning, all my shows are read to go. What’s even cooler is that they are in DivX/Xvid/MP4 format already, and so they’re even easier to put on a music player.
We could easily wirelessly stream these to the TV, but for now, we just simply copy them to a USB stick and play them in our USB-capable Philips DVD player.
This has worked great for us, and without fail, gets the shows we want by the next morning. I’ll also not that live sports can easily be remedied with a $20 antenna in MOST cases. It’s much easier to get a signal with the newer ATSC tuners–for the most part, the signal is either there or its not, and when it is, it looks great.
I could easily save money forgoing cable and purchasing the shows I watch on Amazon Unbox or iTunes and have the added benefit of no commercials and still save some money over the subscription of cable and satellite, but there are two reasons I won’t.
1. As someone mentioned, live sports.
2. Channel surfing. During television hiatus time, particularly the strike, I come across programming by flipping channels. Some are crap, but I have come across some interesting shows this way.
Internet TV has come along way but still has some way to go before most people will give up the cable.
I think the main reason that people still pay for cable TV is because they want that experience of just turning on their TV and flipping through channels. Often times I get frustrated when I want to watch something but I don’t want to make a decision as to what I want to watch from the things sitting on my Apple TV, and yet if those same things were all on television at the same time I would be able to make that decision because ultimately a guy sitting in a room at NBC made the decision for me.
It is a lot easier to watch TV when someone else makes your decision as to what you want to watch, when you have seemingly limitless options as to what you can watch you don’t want to settle for less than the best, and when you can’t actually find what you want to watch or you don’t know what you want to watch getting it on the internet can be a little frustrating.
If you’re still addicted to TV (including live sports), get an HDTV with a QAM tuner and a basic, basic, basic level of cable service (the unadvertised, $12 per month, coax-cable-from-the-wall-into-your-TV flavor).
You’ll have to program the channels yourself, but you’ll receive all your locals in Hi-def (PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox), plus about 40 of the mainstream cable stations in 480p resolution.
And if you’re really excited about such things, then hook that coax cable from the wall into a QAM-tuner, then the QAM tuner into your Mac, and run EyeTV software to use your Mac as a DVR. Then run your Mac’s display out to your 1080p projector and there’s your live sports in 100 glorious inches, sonny!
So I checked my TV and it has a ATSC/Clear QAM digital tuners. So I am set? I should get Hi-Def broadcast?
I guess I would ask the same question to the author.
You admit that you’re paying for cable, yet right an article that sounds like you think people are stupid for doing that very thing.
I know why I’m paying for cable. Why are you, Nicholas?
Some much cheaper in France: Internet + Internet tv with movie chanels is 40€
Funny timing, I’m looking at my cable box, remote on top, sitting on my dining room table right now. I spent one too many days pilfering through the guide only to find nothing worth watching. Then came AppleTV which I am replacing soon with a Mac Mini. With EyeTV for the local HD (read: Super Bowl), who needs it anymore.
live sports gets my vote for why i stick with the traditional cable setup – tho the internet is moving in the right direction on this one (example – MLB TV).
@Michael – how is surfing the internet aimlessly any different than flipping through the channels? I’m not saying that its a viable alternative yet – but i think the line will ultimately be blurred for those that like to ‘flip’ through the channels aimlessly once the billionaire executives finally decide to offer everything on the internet as they do on TV.
Why do you even need broadband? Local stations already broadcast in HDTV and the signals can be picked up for free using a inexpensive HDTV antenna. I get 10 different HDTV stations in St. Louis.
And the beauty is that is a true uncompressed signal – not compressed like broadband, cable or satellite.
And no HDMI cable is required. A standard 75 Ohm RG6 cable with F-connectors does the trick. I am willing to bet that you already have the cable in place. Just make sure you have an ATSC tuner on your new LCD or Plasma.
Here is a great link to find out what HDTV stations are broadcast in your area.:
http://www.showmecables.com/showproducts.asp?category_id=147
Can’t exactly sit around a computer with your family and flick through the channels, not to mention download limits or else I’ll get shaped.
hi sup people go to myinternet.com ang there you go