6 Things You Might Not Know About Cord-Cutting

[jl0329]

You gave some great reasons for not cutting the cord. However, I cut my cord 2 years ago, and didn't miss a thing. The only time we watch TV is during dinner, and Netflix > cable for that purpose.

 

[byte_my_bits]

TV is dead. Say it with me, "TV is dead".

The future in delivery service is make everything available to the consumer, and only charge them for what they want.

And give it to them without commercials, for FUCKS sake. Advertising is a blight on the western world, and makes our society worse off overall than it would be without it.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, your last point is completely off-base. There is already a major tech company capitalizing on this trend, Netflix. You are in the industry? You mentioned that company in your article? You must be too stupid to breathe if you don't connect that there is at least one "tech company equipped to replace cable and satellite". Or you were subversively including internet access in that theoretical supposition?

Similar to music, books, movies video games and tv...all entertainment companies need to find the new paradigm, the old model is slipping away.

 

[majorlag]

Number one reason to build a HTPC if you have kids, Christmas is cheaper!

Cord cutting is gaining popularity for many reasons, but mostly because everyone has finally started to get fed up with Cable and Satallite subscriptions. Netflex was the first successful player to show the world that you don't need to pay a huge fee to watch what you want when you want it.

Without commercials, Christmas is not so much as cheaper, but the money wasted on fad items are less, leaving more to invest on entertainment.

A little bit of initial time to set up a HomeTheaterPC properly and you can stream all those paid itunes, or your archive of DVD's/BD's to any device that can play video to as many devies at the same time. Depending how how big of a family, just build a higher end setup, still cheaper then a year worth of Cable/Sat sub.

A complete season of shows are around $40 or so downloaded from itunes or amazon, and a hard copy is anywhere from $40 to $120 for special box versions. If your paying more then $10 a month on Cable/Sat then it is cheaper to buy the hard copy special deluxe super box! Remember that to get those premium channels, your still having to buy the basic package, plus the premium channel.

This article smells a lot like Cable/Sat propaganda to try to continue to fool people into thinking that they can only get there entertainment consumption through them.

~Majorlag

 

[stingray71]

Cut the cord myself. Already had Netflix and Amazon Prime. Added Hulu + to the mix. Don't miss my $120 Dish bill at all. I do buy handful of shows on Amazon (Top Gear, Justified, Grimm, etc), but I'm still way ahead of the game $ wise. Have Locals in HD via antenna.

My humble 12Mb connection does just fine, even with modest HD streaming I'm staying well under my 250GB cap.

 

[anxiousinfusion]

This article neglects to mention that television as a medium sucks in the eyes of young consumers. So, regardless of cost, "cord cutting" is worth it.

 

[Thorfkin]

I agree with most of the other comments here. This article seems incredibly biased. I can't remember the last time I read such an obvious attempt to present the cord-cutting argument from a "devil's advocate" perspective. I got the impression the author, Jeremy, was trying his best to slog through an unusually il-concieved assignment with this piece.

I'm still proud to be a Gen-X cord-cutter. Alas I've yet to convince anyone from the generation previous mine to sever the brain-drain =D I shall continue my efforts!

 

[somebodyspecial]

I'd ask also, how much do you get paid to write this stuff?

Cord cutting in the best thing I've ever done for my entire family. Roku, netflix, playon is pretty much all you need (though I have even more crap). There is far too much to be able to watch even as retired people (IE - my parents). I hope at some point they create enough new series to totally supplant TV/Cable even for new programming. House of cards, Orange is the New Black, Hemlock Grove all three the whole family enjoyed. KEEP IT UP! KILL CABLE and TV! Thank you netflix There are so many great OTHER actors that I have no need for hollywood either, nor there ridiculous wages and prices they create on content. Tons of great content can be created cheaply with actors who just don't seem to have hollywood connections but are great actors (better in a lot of cases) and can make some great shows. Or even lower end actors who are great but usually can't get the main roles. Put 5-10 of them in a TV show with great writing and bam, you have a great series. Hemlock grove for instance, a bunch of unknowns with Famke Jansen, Dougray Scott, Lili Taylor. Only famke is pretty big, but the rest are great actors and the no namers would probably have hollywood jobs if they had Stephen Spielberg as a relative etc.

It's just like pro sports. There are not just ~1500 great baseball players in the world. There are probably thousands more that just didn't make the cut, or had a bad tryout etc. Of course there isn't enough money to probably back tons of leagues, but there is more than enough money to back lots of new content from Google, Amazon & Netflix etc.

$135 total for Netflix ($8), unlimited business internet($99/mo, you can get this at home 3yr no price hikes), and phone (vonage $27). Not a LOT cheaper than cable/phone/internet bundles but we have so much more TV/movies to watch and we have a hard time keeping the queue under 475...ROFL. We bump 500 all the time. No commercials is awesome, and if the parents actually want some (LOL) occasionally they turn on the antenna for abc, cbs, nbc, fox, ION etc (about 25 good channels of crap and local stuff). There are thousands of documentaries also, tons of complete shows, mini-series etc on netflix.

It's really quite unbelievable and they add new stuff it seems weekly or every other week. Even stuff like vampire diaries (3 full seasons so far) & Hell on Wheels (2 seasons) are on there. I expect S4 of vamp to be added as it starts up s5. They seem to add each last year when the new season of show X starts back up. I think people just don't realize just how much stuff is on netflix or more would switch and cut the cord. Not to mention the sheer mountain of stuff roku itself has via all the channels on there (500+?). With playon or plex you can stream anything from your network or from the internet tv websites (like cbs etc) to your TV. Your TV watching, YOUR WAY, on YOUR TIMETABLE. Did I mention I haven't seen a commercial in 2-3yrs?

I have no need for cable, TV or commercials. For the few things I miss, I wait for black friday and xmas sales to pick up a few seasons of whatever I want for $10 or less. Rare these days as every time I get some, half end up on netflix anyway later (brother's and sisters, bought some seasons and neflix has all 5...LOL). I'm learning to just not buy stuff too

 

[pkellmey]

Most of the older people (over the age of 50) are not technically savvy enough to cut their standard entertainment provider cords. Most younger people (under the age of 20) have already cut cords and are getting their entertainment from non-standard sources. The people in the middle don't really care one way or the other because they are doing other things while living their lives. So we should probably expect a slow creep towards the Internet or non-standard entertainment venues slowly pushing cable/satellite into new directions, but nothing that will seem cutting edge at the time.

 

[rosen380]

While Cable lost a bunch of subscribers, it appears it is more a shift than cord cutting as telcos and sat picked up a bunch of subs. In total, it was an 80k drop in the last year out of 110M. --- that is 0.07% -- or one per >1000 subscribers.

At a rate of -0.07% per year, the cable/sat/telcos will be down to 90% of current levels in 150 years. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be worried one bit -- but I think it is going to take losses at 10x+ the rate for the industry to take any serious action.

http/www.cedmagazine.com/news/2013/05/total-video-subs-decline-for-first-time

 

[TheLoneWolf989]

I cord cut years ago, streaming is free and without ads so why would I pay for the exact same thing on TV with ads. Until cable/satellite is free and there are no ads I along with everyone else of my generation(gen Y) will stick to streaming.