For a lot of families, channel
surfing is an olympic sport, and it’s becoming far to expensive for a lot of us to continue. Today the average American family is paying $80 or more per month for Pay TV services from Cable and Satellite providers. These rates are expected to climb to $123 by 2015, and $200 per month by 2020.
The reasons are somewhat murky, but after doing a bit of research, here are some of the reasons these bills keep going up.
1: Content providers such as News Corp and Time Warner continue to raise their prices, to pay tv providers. This increase is passed to you the consumer.
2: The U.S. Government has failed in working to maintain competition in the pay tv business. Essentially many cable operators have monopolies in many cities. Therefor they face no real competition.
3: Cable networks have zero incentive to provide Ala Carte pricing at this time. The reason for bundling is many cable networks are subsidized by the more successful ones. In other words if you want to provide your customers with Comedy Central, you may have to purchase Spike TV and others to get it.
Cindee, and I have decided to try to cut the cord so to speak. I recently purchased the fantastic Mohu Leaf indoor antenna. It was about $50 on Amazon,. It works great, and looks far better than the old rabbit ears of yesterday. Our new “cable” box is is the Xbox 360 with the Netflix and Hulu+ apps installed.
Netlix offers unlimited streaming of tv programs and movies for $7.99 per month. We have added the $8.00 one DVD rental at a time option, which I highly recommend. We have also added Hulu+ which allows us to stream some of our favorite tv shows. Beware though that many cable tv programs are not available on Hulu+ or can only be watched on the computer. Our new “cable” tv bill will go from $87.50 per month to $24.00 per month for a savings of $762.00 per year, at current prices.
Is this going to work? Well it’s a lot different. Instead of channel surfing, now we must seek out the tv shows and movies we want to watch. It also means for now we will not have a DVR. Another issue is that the whole arrangement is more complex. However, we think we can get quickly used to it.
One last point. Pay TV operators are losing 5 to 6 % of their customers each year. Much of this loss is blamed on “cord cutters” such as ourselves. They are trying to fight back. A favorite tactic is since most cable providers offer broadband interent service, that Netflix and Hulu+ require, why not just cap how much data you consume. Streaming hours of high definition movies, and tv shows can use a lot of data in a short time.
Mohu Leaf: https://store.gomohu.com/the-leaf-indoor-hdtv-antenna.html
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