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Comment by mrzimmerman | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this misses the point of people who no longer buy cable. I don't personally know a lot of people who do it to save money (I'm sure they exist). Everyone I know just prefers the convenience of watching when you want and not having to have a single dedicated device (a TV) where you can watch things.

This isn't really any different than people ditching land lines in the late nineties and early two-thousands. It wasn't a question of cost so much as it was annoying to have multiple lines, numbers, and bills, not to mention one of those phones was only usable in a very specific way and the other could be used anywhere, whenever you felt like it.

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I also hate commercials. I won't even pay for Hulu+ because it has commercials. Commercials should exist to subsidize a free product, and they have no place in a paid product.

I feel the same way about magazines. It's dumb that they are packed with ads and yet you still have to pay for them.

I feel the same way about magazines. It's dumb that they are packed with ads and yet you still have to pay for them.

This is basically the same fallacy as a Google user who thinks he is Google's customer. Magazine readers are the product for the magazine main business of selling advertising space. The reason they charge money is because paying readers are considered more valuable than non-paying readers. This sort of thing is why you'll often see magazine subscriptions selling for a few bucks on Slickdeals.

I agree with your point that paid products should be commercial free, though what about the insidious placement of commercial products embedded within the content (song lyrics or any item with a logo on it in a movie or tv show)? It seems like those commercial placements are much harder to avoid in pop culture and will likely only increase in frequency in the future. It can skew the creative process of the artisans producing content and unless true commercial-free content is rewarded in some way, this is inevitable.

I'll agree here. The $50/month I'm saving by not having cable included isn't really going toward savings, and we could certainly afford it. It's just that it had a detrimental effect: we'd watch things that we weren't all that interested in, we'd sit through hours of commercials. My wife and I were generally annoyed with the whole experience, but because it was available and easy we were sucked into it.

We cancelled the cable and we are less annoyed. We spend an extra 15 minutes downloading what we want, and we spend less time as vegetables just passively accepting what's coming down the pipe. Less time spent watching commercials that annoy us. It's very much worth it. (Although I miss watching live sports in HD... but not enough to pay for it)

You can solve the live sports issue for the most part by getting free basic channels. You can do it in a lot of ways, one of an easy ones is get a $10 antenna. All local channels will be available to you for free, in HD. Then you can watch most sports:

- NFL: all football games with your local team, and a lot of others. You won't be able to watch Monday Night and Thursday Night football, but if it's your local team playing, they'll have that game on a free channel.

- MLB: depends on your market, but generally there should be at least one game a week on free channels. Plus, AL/NLCS and WS are on FOX.

- NBA: less available, but there's usually two games every Sunday or every two Sundays on ABC.

- NHL: usually one game a week on NBC.

Also, there's plenty of other live sports on free channels - golf, tennis, soccer, etc. For example, Olympics are going on right now and NBC has two hours of coverage every night.

Antenna is a no go in a lot of places.

I live in a town of about 100,000 people and as far as stations that have sports, I get ABC, and sometimes NBC (The transmitter is close, but they broadcast at a power of 100W (yes W, not kW). With a roof-mounted antenna I could certainly get NBC reliably).

We used to have a Fox station here, but the ABC affiliate bought it and shut it down.

I follow NFL and MLB, my wife follows NHL.

So I get Sunday night football. The good news is that MLB is very reasonably available live and online. You can even listen to your choice of home or away announcers.

Each one of the leagues has their own league pass so you can watch online. That doesn't work well if you want to watch the local team due to blackout restrictions, but it does if you just a general fan or you've moved away from your home town.

Unfortunately the NFL does not, and that's what I (and most others) really want to see (in the US of course.)

Why not both?

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