Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisBob | Hacker News Reader

I expect that Comcast will try and get their $100/home if you are interested in TV or not. The price will just shift and you will pay more for internet. Saving money by dropping the TV portion is a fallacy and at best temporary.

I don't pay for cable TV, but I am fully aware that I only get with that because I have an account I can borrow to watch subscriber-only content.

View on HN

I am part of the group of people who would go back to the cable companies if they would budge on their channel packages. I would pay per channel if I could just customize my listing.

I bring this up because you are totally right, but at the same time if the cable companies will evolve to what consumers want, they may not have to take this route.

If not, we can hope they dont charge too much more, they are already making the US look stupid on the world stage of internet access prices.

"Unbundling" is completely stupid. Be careful what you ask for because you are going to wind up paying the same amount for your 20 channels as you do now for your 200. That's just simple business and economics. The marginal cost to deliver you a channel is zero.

Imagine there is a channel - BlubTV - that NOONE would subscribe to if it were unbundled. Yet the cost of producing it is not zero. Unbundling eliminates the tax we pay to support useless TV that people only watch out of pure desperation.

It's the opposite. A channel with limited appeal would likely need to pay the cable provider to get included. This is all very basic economics and human behavior.

Cable companies don't decide on the channel packages they offer. They're sold to the cable companies by the media conglomerates that own the stations in bundles. No ABC without ESPN, etc. It's not their product to unbundle, in other words.

Why a la carte cable won’t save you as much as you think: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/30/w...

We were an internet only house. Then we looked at prices and we could upgrade our internet 70/35 and add cable TV for an extra $20 a month. I think it ended up being cheaper to add cable than to just upgrade the internet. Once we added DVRs and whatnot it ended up being more expensive but to us it just didn't make sense to keep the cord cut. Especially for me because I like sports.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com