"Does this mean cable TV is officially dead?"
It's not officially dead, but it's getting there. Frontier dropped their cable TV offerings a while back also. Streaming is the future. Comcast even offers a free streaming box with their Internet, so they know that's the way things will be going forward. The major providers are transitioning from cable to streaming. Content providers have been holding cable companies at gunpoint to get more and more money from them and that's driven down profit margins while increasing costs. Cable TV companies are in business to make money and if they can't make money they get out of the business. And the way things are going, they can't make money.
In the good old days of the cable TV industry when there were few channel slots open, the cable companies made a lot of money. Our original cable used the TV's VHF tuner so there were twelve possible channel slots (2-13) with most taken up by local channels. Then they switched to a two cable system with an A/B switch and suddenly the number of changes doubled to 24! There were a lot of channels that wanted to be on one of those channels and they would buy the space from the cable companies. Why would they pay to be carried? Their ad rates would vary depending on how many systems they were on, so the more systems they were on, the more ad revenue they'd generate. If they wanted to sell ads, they needed to be on lots of systems.
Then along came MTV to ruin it all for the cable companies. They'd been willing to pay to be carried then decided, no. We want the cable companies to pay us. It was the "I want my MTV!" campaign. Cable companies had gotten people used to having MTV and now when faced with having to pay to air it, or take it off, they agreed to pay to air it. Uh oh! Now every channel decided, "Hey, if MTV gets paid, we should get paid!"
Pretty soon every channel wanted to be paid and with new digital cable boxes offering hundreds of slots that cable companies needed to fill, the downhill spiral started. Cable companies lost a source of revenue and what had been income now became an expense. If they wanted to keep the channels their users wanted, they had to pay up more and more and more. Every new contract came at a higher cost. That's why cable bills went from under $10 a month to now often well over $100 a month.
Streaming takes the costs and moves them to the consumer. If you want ESPN, then you buy a package that includes ESPN. If you don't like ESPN, you can buy a package without it. The cable companies had to pay for ESPN for everyone. Even those who never watched it.
Cable TV isn't totally dead yet, but it's getting there.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
Blogs & Forums
