Since Comcast has a competing product, the only cost is opportunity cost.
Between Netflix and the ocasional pay-movie on Amazon... I’m not about go anywhere near some pricey HBO, Cinemax, etc. subscription. Seems like we’re getting closer to just buying access (i.e. internet connection) and getting the a la carte content (vs. tons of channels I could totally care less about).
Yes it does. I grew tired of having to pay for full service just to watch the half dozen or so channels that I enjoy. It was especially aggravating to be forced to buy a separate package to watch, say, the Military Channel, a separate package for National Geographic and so on. Customers have been demanding a la carte since the beginning of cable and the cable companies have steadfastly refused to offer this. Now they're paying for this refusal.
While Netflix is still in it's infancy, I've gotten very used to be able to select from a wide range of content and watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it.
Reconfigured the cable package 3 months ago. Well, we dropped the cable TV and havent looked back. Whats to miss?
Bumped up the internet speed and we watch what we want, when we want. It only took about 30 minutes to start not missing all the friggin’ commercials. and we havent even caught up with half the tv shows that we missed along the way. Now I “need” to upgrade the computer so I can get the TV to stream from the CPU and....(they get their $$ out of you one way or another, I guess.)
But I havent been warned about my 4 hour erections being a medical emergency in so long Im beginning to think it may have never been a problem in the first place.
Cable TV is the next tech dinosaur.
They are getting squeezed out by over the air HD TV on one side (free, and a lot more channels than the past—we’ve go 50 over the air channels in our area) and internet view on demand video on the other side (free or cheap depending on the service).
25 years from now, the idea of a cable provider that has 200 that shows programs on their schedule (not yours) will be as strange to teenagers as only having 3 over the air TV channels (ABC, NBC, & CBS) seems to teenagers today.
If you want to see how over the air HD TV is killing cable, go to zap2it.com, put in your zip code, and choose broadcast (antenna). You’ll be pretty stunned just how many broadcast stations there are. And, over the air HD is as good or better than any cable HD.