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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

The one big advantage beyond on demand hs scheduled programming is a la carte pricing. Consumers asked cable for a la carte pricing for years and it was never an option because no one would subscribe to a 200 dollar package then. People only really watch 5-10 channels.

With that said this was the perdictable end. These companies are going to want to grow their revenue and they are all peaking in subscriber growth so increasing pricing is the logical step.

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I've worked in the cable TV industry in the past. For the most part, the cable companies have little control over the channel bundles, they really wouldn't mind offering a la carte options, but they are forced themselves to get channels in bundles from the content owners. Much of this has changed in recent years with NBC/Comcast and Charter owning more of the source content, but a lot of the other channels are sill provided by outside companies, who do not want to unbundle them.

I feel like I got into the habit of watching way too much TV during the pandemic, and haven't managed to shake it yet, but still only have like 2-3 shows in the queue at any given time. How are people watching 5-10 channels?

If you are a sports person you might watch just one team but it could be spread across multiple channels. Then you might watch a couple of shows each on a different channel. And then maybe you have one or two other niche channels you like.

Ah, I forgot about sports. Well, that sounds pretty annoying!

My sports teams are LSU, the New Orleans Saints, and the New Orleans Pelicans.

LSU has games on CBS and ESPN.

The Saints have games on Amazon, ESPN, CBS, NBC, and ABC.

The Pelicans have games on NBC and TNT.

And when I say ESPN, that could be ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN-U, The SEC Network, etc.

And for tennis if you go pure browser, no set-top boxes:

Normal tournaments on tennistv.com for 15€/month.

Australian, French and US Open on Eurosport (online over Eurosportplayer) for 7€/month.

Wimbledon however is only on Sky, that's 35€/month, I skipped that. (That is for Germany).

It's a lot of content, affordable, and you deal with slightly broken websites. Why can't they just show the unspoiled bracket, a notification if a match is complete or ongoing, allow manual unspoilering of individual matches or rounds, and a direct link from the bracket view to the individual match video or stream? /rant

Even without sports, my spouse and I watch a bunch of shows that air at different times of the year, on different services. We watch a bunch of AppleTV+ shows (For All Mankind, Severence, Invasion, Ted Lasso, etc.), a few shows on Netflix (Stranger Things, Umbrella Academy), a few shows on cable channels (Home Town, The Gilded Age, etc.), a few over-the-air shows (The Good Doctor), etc. Like you say, there are only 2 or 3 available at a time, but they're still spread all over the place. I don't mind too much. We actually had a lull so we subscribed to Hulu for Reservation Dogs and Only Murders in the Building. When those end in the next month, we'll cancel and move on to something else.

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