What is Cable TV?
Well cable also provides Internet access.
Where else can you get 100 Mb connections?
I won’t part with mine.
I believe there is a close connection between many cable companies and liberal politics.
Comcast owns MSNBC for example.
Time Warner owns CNN
etc
Generally when crony capitalism is involved, change won’t happen quickly.
I know some people up in Brooklyn who pay over $80,000 a year for an apartment and $5000 a year for media connections. They make under $200,000 a year combined, and a huge chunk of that goes to taxes. Take away another $10,000 for their annual island vacation, and they live like paupers.
ABC in some tiff with Time Warner cut off the video feeds for 1 week after airing. My sister loved watching her soap opera on the Iphone.
Oh well.
The last straw for me was watching "Inglourious Basterds" on AMC, I think it was. It took them four hours to show the movie because they had nearly an hour and a half of commercials in between. To add insult to injury, they even cut out or censored key parts of the movie!
That's one night of my life I'll never get back.
I basically stick to Netflix now. Either through my MacBook Pro (phenomenal picture) or through my Roku when I want it on the TV. Sure, your choices are limited on Netflix with respect to movies but most of the popular TV series are on there and you can watch them at your leisure. So what if they are a season behind. I'm still working my way through "Lost" even though it left the air years ago.
Even if you wait a month to finish an episode of say, "Breaking Bad" - it will be sitting for you right where you left off. And if you want to go back to the beginning to see the episode or entire season once again - go for it!
On demand is the way to go and if cable TV doesn't change their business model, they will eventually go the way of the record industry - which is now owned by Apple, Google and Amazon.
$250 a month is obscene.
I am surprised that my cable company spends a lot advertising their On Demand, but the contents are slight for most channels.
I prefer On Demand because I can start and stop programs when I want.
More and more, channels are offering their programs On Line. Some require viewers to sign on through their cable provider, however.
The Wall Street Journal already discovered that Amazon have a Roku-like set top box in the works, and now they’ve followed through with some details of what the device will get to carry.
According to their latest report, Amazon are brokering deals for live TV content, wanting to secure the channels of “three big media conglomerates.”
In effect, it would be cable TV but delivered over the internet. I’m assuming it would be provided on a similar basis to Amazon’s current on-demand subscription service, which is to say, bundled with the annual Prime shipping deal.
Supposing those “three big media conglomerates” are on a par with Disney, Viacom, NBCUniversal or Fox then this service could well lure a lot of folk away from cable and into Amazon’s arms.
It’s a trend that’s already started, it would seem, with NPD reporting a 4% increase in American households subscribing to Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu Plus services between march 2012 and August 2013 while, concurrently, the percentage of cable subscriptions dipped by 6%.
I’m not sure this is a good move for Intel. OTOH, cash in the hand.....