With options and choices, brings more competition and better services. This ultimately leads to the downfall of the weaker services and the up rise in the greater services. Its basic economics, but as of late its having a big effect on cable companies. Just in Q3 of this year, Comcast alone lost over 275,000 customers subscribing to basic cable. Sure you can factor in tough economic times and people cutting costs of luxuries at the home, but when you look at the stats of the up rise of other competing services, it’s clear, cable is on the downfall.
At one point cable was the only option for TV shows and movies in the home, short of buying or renting DVDs. But even rentals are on the downfall, look at blockbuster who went bankrupt fairly recently. Sure you can tailor your cable service plan to your needs, with their different tiered packages, like a movie package, sports package, or HD package. All of which are fairly considerable additional fees on top a basic fee which many in this tough financial time find hard to justify.
Nowadays there are many options of digital entertainment in the home. Netflix now accounts to 20% of internet traffic, beating out YouTube, iTunes, Hulu and even p2p file sharing (both legal and illegal). Services like Netflix, ESPN3, Hulu, Xbox Live, Google TV and many more offer a better than cable experience for much less of the cost. ESPN 3 for example, streams many college games, mlb, mls, golf and many other sports games in HD all for free, given you have internet. From a cable company it would probably cost well over $100 a month and not everything would be in HD quality.
Personally my biggest gripe with Cable TV is that not every channel is HD, how can they not provide everything in HD in this day in age. 720p should be a minimum standard for the rates they charge. With 1080p screens as cheap as they are these days, almost everyone has one, and anything of lesser quality being played on one just looks horrible.
Cable companies also make you sit through endless advertisements which are usually only associated with free services and yet here you are paying a considerable amount of money every month for advertisements squeezed into the media you actually want to watch. Hell they sometimes cut scenes out of movies just to fit in the commercials. Let’s not even get into all the edited for TV content which we all know is nowhere as good as the uncut versions.
The choice is always ultimately up to the consumer but in this writer’s opinion, the choice is obviously clear. Cable is a dying technology unless they bring about a drastic and competitive change. The Stats show, I am not alone in my opinions and many others feel the same, there are much better cable TV alternatives out there.
Will the cable services make these necessary changes to remain competitive? It’s highly unlikely, because the majority of cable provides offer internet, their customers are ultimately stuck with them. Internet is a service everyone needs; it’s almost become a necessity of life, at least if you intend to be successful. Not to generalize, but those who don’t have internet in their home, most likely go to a local hotspot, library, or school to get use of it and those who don’t fit in one of those categories likely has never used a computer.
Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) like Comcast have implemented a cap on how much bandwidth you can use per month. In this case it’s 250GB per month which is a decent amount. On a month to month basis it would be hard to reach that, however there is sometimes a random month here and there where 250GB is not near enough. With digital service downloads, things add up fast. Netflix has a good encoding compression that saves bandwidth quite significantly, so that even HD streaming doesn’t take up too much of you allotted monthly limit, although it does ultimately add up.
Services like Steam, or Direct2Drive, which are Video Game download services, can use a tremendous amount of bandwidth. Take for example the game Star Wars – The Force Unleashed. You buy the game on Steam for the cheaper than in-store price plus the convenience of not having to leave your home. Given a fast internet speed, you could be playing the game within a few hours, despite the massive 30GB download that must take place. Now say there are 3 other people in your domicile, that’s only 63 GB per month per person. There is very little freedom in what you can get off the net.
Now look at how Canadian ISP’s just started to implement this bandwidth cap in the last month or so right about the time that Netflix expanded their online streaming service to our northern neighbor, coincidence, most certainly not. The Cable companies are not ignorant, they know of all the competition mentioned in this article, they know their services are inept in comparison, but instead of a major change which would keep their current customers and establish many new and retired customers alike, they choose the easy way out. They choose to establish a block on the competition with their pure massive size and control on the telecom industry.
Whilst Government control on business is often looked upon as a bad thing, in the telecom world it’s much needed. As we all know competition leads to lower prices and better products for the end consumer, and monopolies only lead to fat cat CEO’s and a fun board game. The Telecom infrastructure is huge and cost millions upon billions of dollars to implement, such that it’s extremely difficult for any new company to start up. Thus we are stuck with the choices we have and competition is very slim but at least due to some government policies we do have these choices. We are also lucky enough to have the government preventing ISP’s from throttling download speed of those users who use more bandwidth a month.
With the switch from Cable media to Streaming Media, Internet bandwidth is more needed than ever. Right now, it’s there and there is plenty of it, they could very easily provide 100mbps unlimited service for the same price as they offer their current 10mbps capped service. However it’s these Telecom fat cats that are using their only means of control over their competitors, limiting the means in which they have access to their competitors. Thanks to them, our country has long since lost the lead in the world as far as internet speed and access go.
The decline of Cable TV is apparent and will only continue its downward spiral if things remain the same. Cable will never completely cease to exist because of its telecom backbone and thus its ability to easily compete at significantly lower prices. Also at this point in time, there is no complete alternative to cable that offers the same content. However with the increasing amount of subscribers switching services, there may be a competent alternative on the horizon. Hulu’s monthly subscription service is just around the corner which may provide a solid footprint into a complete alternative to cable. Once alternative streaming services are fully established and have a large market share, content providers such as NBC, TBS, etc will begin to tune their media and advertising revenue towards the streaming services. Many of these content providers already have a decent start to streaming services on their websites which indicate they too are aware of the impending switch to the digital streaming age.
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