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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

That’s weird. Are you really paying more than $100 per month for cable in the US? I was confused there because I really couldn’t imagine that of all things the cable bill would be a reason to ditch the TV. You get your standard maybe thirty useful and seventy crappy TV stations in Germany for 15€. Probably because pay TV never really caught on in Germany. Except if you are really into soccer. I don’t even know what I could get by paying beyond soccer. No HBO in Germany.

Having public broadcasting doesn’t seem to be too bad, after all :)

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I think I was paying about $150 to my cable provider for the ISP cable content combo. I dropped the cable content and upped my ISP service to 20Mb/s and pay $85 per month and now get all my video from the internet. I use Comcast which has a 250Gb monthly bandwidth cap. Currently, I use 150GB to 200GB per month.

45€ for 25Mb/s unlimited internet and unlimited landline calls. That’s probably not even as cheap as you can get. How is that possible? Just because the US is such a huge and (compared to Europe) sparsely populated country? Are costs in densely populated areas lower?

Maybe it’s just some random stuff and you really shouldn’t compare international prices :)

I live in the Washington DC/Baltimore area which has a dense population. Not sure how price varies across country. I could have knocked off another $10 per month if I would have eliminated basic cable. So I could have gotten the cost down to $75 per month. In my area that would be the cheapest service that would let you stream 480p and download GB size files in minutes.

I can also get a 30Gb/S Verizon service in my area for a similar cost with no bandwidth cap.

Voice service for Comcast costs an additional $15 per month.

US ISPs seem to be only bested by Canadian ISPs for their willingest to take advantage of their customers.

I live in the Washington DC area (northern Virginia) and pay $45 per month for 25Mb/s on Cox cable, and something like $30 a year to Skype for "landline" calls from my computer. I could add a phone line through Cox for ten or twenty bucks, bringing it closer to your package, but I'm not sure why anyone would do that when VOIP is so cheap, if they already have reasonable bandwidth.

Cox seems about $30 per month cheaper than the best price I found from Comcast. Unfortunately it is not available in Annapolis.

for 60€ you can get the whole sky package which includes all the live sports (bundesliga, premier league, cl, euro, formula 1, boxing, basketball whatever ...) all the movie channelns, all the side channels (discovery, disney etc) and all the hd channels (movies, sports, disney etc).

so add the ~16€ you have to pay for basic digital cable access and your at 76€ ~ $100. voila :) but on the other hand i know maybe two households that have this setup here in .de

Yeah, I know quite a few people who get sky for the Bundesliga, other than that, though …

the problem is that they bundle it with so much bullshit and you cant just get bundesliga alone so you end up paying 35€ minimum :(

$50 for basic cable here, another $50 for extras (discovery channel and comedy network) HD and movies get a lot more expensive. Then sport - ouch.

There is only one cable provider and it has a monopoly. I just watched TV on the net after the companies intro $10/month offer ran out.

The monopoly thing is similar, the one big cable provider claims, though, that it is only very small compared to the big ISPs with their newfangled IPTV offers :)

That difference to the US is altogether really strange. You can buy additional stuff in Germany now, but there just doesn’t seem to be any original content (like Mythbusters) above and beyond all the soccer stuff.

But private TV stations are also a relatively new thing in Germany – the first one got started in the early eighties – and our cable network was privatized only a little more than ten years ago. Will be interesting to see how that all develops.

That's all in the standard package here. €16,45/month for 60 channels, including discovery channel, comedy central and sport. The most popular channels come in HD for free, but to get Discovery, National Geographic and History in HD you need to pay extra (€4/month). Maybe we pay the difference with taxes?

I had basic cable (required for later parts) @ $50, "HD service" for $10 (OTA channels only) and another $10 for mandatory HD-DVR. I paid for additional HD channels like Discovery/History, but I forgot how much it was. When I dropped CATV/HD/DVR I saved roughly $80 per month. I figured I could just buy the boxed sets of my favorite shows on DVD for that price. (I haven't - I just torrent the shows and then delete them)

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