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Comment by AgentConundrum | Hacker News Reader

Distribution power, maybe, but they're probably still significantly disadvantaged financially, since $8/mo is considerably less than anybody (who has cable) pays for cable.

I was looking into this just last night, actually. I'm not with Comcast, I'm not even American actually, but I wanted to add a couple channels to our account and I went looking at pricing. For the basic crappy channels - the first 20 or so, I think - I was $25. Our roommate, by which I mean by would-be brother-in-law, controls the account so I don't know how much it all comes to, but looking at the different packages, I'd say it's got to be at least $80-100, not factoring in any discounts for bundling with internet and all that.

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> Distribution power, maybe, but they're probably still significantly disadvantaged financially, since $8/mo is considerably less than anybody (who has cable) pays for cable.

Not entirely true. I'm part of a growing number of people that have cable tv who don't actually use cable tv. Let me explain. Once I explained to Comcast that my household no longer watches cable tv and that I'd rather spend the money I used to spend on cable tv for faster internet (up to 50 mbs). They in turn explained to me that if I have super basic cable plan for $9.99 / month, they would give me a $15 discount off my entire monthly bill. So for a $5 monthly discount, Comcast gets to keep me as a ghost cable tv subscriber.

It seems they really don't want to start a trend of "people that don't have cable tv".

Yep. A nice bit of statistical obfuscation there. This might mean that comcast actually has less subscribers than netflix.

I saw this with Verizon fios too. It's $85 for 25mbps Internet service. It's $75 if I get the same thing bundled with tv service.

Fair enough, but I doubt that adds up to enough that there's a real impact to the spending ability ratio of the two companies.

You're paying negative $5 for cable, but how many other people are doing that. I don't know the going rate for Comcast cable, so I'll use the $25 basic service fee from Eastlink in Canada (my service) as the exemplar.

Assume there are only two possible monthly payments for Comcast. You can get the basic service for $25 or you can get the "they quit the service but we're keeping them on the books" service for $-5. Given these prices, you would need to have 3.4 subscribers at the latter price for every one subscriber at the former price before Comcast and Netflix would be making equal money off subscriptions alone. I seriously doubt 77% of Comcast subscribers are ghosts like you, so I stand by my argument that Netflix is massively financially outgunned by Comcast.

> I seriously doubt 77% of Comcast subscribers are ghosts like you, so I stand by my argument that Netflix is massively financially outgunned by Comcast.

I don't disagree but time is not on Comcast's side. Anyone who went to college in the 90s and younger is a huge threat to cable tv.

I'm sure they'll piss a bunch of people off when the inevitably raise prices again. However, in 6 months when those people realize that cable still sucks and there is no viable competition they'll sign back up.

If netflix cost exactly the same thing as cable I would happily pay because they distributes content in a way that is convenient for me and they don't run commercials to subsidize their income at the cost of my enjoyment.

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