I believe this is just for the main ESPN channel… the others cost additional $$
I believe I’ve read that the vast majority of American leisure time (ie, time not spent at work, commuting, or preparing meals) is spent in front of the television.
DSL is more than adequate for our family to watch streaming HD content on multiple screens simultaneously. Some cable options might be faster but I doubt they’d be a better deal (unless you really like ESPN).
We have cable internet, which includes our phone. We haven’t and won’t have cable tv.
Here in Canada we have limited options on netflix etc, but what few there are more than overwhelm my limited tv time. If I wanted more I could easily get an IP masking thing going on, but I can’t be arsed. Ditto torrents etc. We live in a sea of immense content, much of it good.
The signal to noise ration on broadcast/cable television is just too small to justify paying even a few hundred a year for it. Watching ‘the latest’ episode of whatever show is just not that important to me - and I suspect more and more people. I’ll wait until a full season or three are available, then I’d watch them at my leisure. And paying for PVR is not a worthwhile option.
DirecTV charges, I think, $18 now for the first premium “channel” – although HBO is currently something like 9-10 channels.
I’d be more than happy to drop ESPN and all its variations and get $5-6 back, if that means that the people who want it pay about what I’d pay for HBO.
And while you’re at it, drop the darn shopping and religion channels. What, those MAKE you money? OK then, I’ll keep the same price if you’ll get rid of ESPN and the shills (for god and mammon).
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And this is why, after cancelling cable when I got laid off 3+ years ago, I never re-subscribed. I did a count of the channel offerings on AT&T U-verse (Comcast’s service was unreliable at my current building), and found out that over 50% of the channels in their package were sports, religion, or home shopping, i.e. channels I would NEVER use. Unbundle and I might come back. Or even mini-bundle - a sports package, a religion package, a science/nature package, a culture package, a kids package, etc. - and I might consider it.
Good point. I had forgotten one key possibility - they’re just lying to get more money.
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Yeah, I think I’m ready to jump ship. I hate all of the channels that you mentioned.
Let people who want a sports package pay for sports. On top of that, you get nickled and dimed for boxes and whatnot.
DSL can vary pretty considerably by distance to DSLAM and copper quality. Some locations, it works just fine. Some…well, at least it’s not dialup…
(In my case, Verizon cut all the copper when they installed FIOS in the area, so Cable internet is actually the cheap option… I wasn’t expecting 100Mb symmetric for $20/month or anything; but I wasn’t expecting Comcast to be the relatively good deal.)
I really only like it at night to fall asleep with. That’s a time not to do anything important.
Is this where I come to complain about not being able to purchase access to HBOGo without also buying a cable subscription and HBO TV subscription?
Because seriously, you guys. You guys, seriously.
(It also sounds like this is a good place to come brag about my municipal wifi company that has great customer service, good-enough-for-me internet, and a $25 a month price tag.)
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Maybe Boing Boingers don’t care about sports, but this system also subsidizes shows you like, like Breaking Bad. These wouldn’t exist in a system where people paid a-la-cart. Commercials and DVD sales don’t come close to covering the costs. A system where networks pander to the prestige of the cable distributor produces good shows like Mad Men, which started with very poor ratings but served its purpose in allowing A&E to ask for a larger slice of the pie.
And even in an a-la-cart system, you wouldn’t avoid the problem of subsidy. I only watch ESPN for soccer. I only watch Bravo, History, and TNT for one show each. I’m still paying largely for stuff I never watch. And the price would be adjusted so the average cable viewer would still pay the same, otherwise there would be fewer networks and lesser shows on networks that still exist.
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I don’t know… changing programming on a specialty channel to turn it into something “more people would actually want” is what brought wrestling and tractor pulls to ScyFy, or whatever the frak they’re calling it now.
Giving the public what they want (or what they’ll tune to anyway) is what gave us “Real Housewives,”, “Honey Booboo” and the rest of Reality TV.
Ratings is what gave us Fox News, MSNBC and the rest of the echo chambers we jokingly call “news” these days.
No, I don’t know what the answer is, but it ain’t giving people what they think people want.
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I did that two years ago and haven’t missed it.
I was in a waiting room for two hours of “Teen Mom” not too long ago and was this close to screaming.
But… people were WATCHING it…
Makes you really doubt your fellow humans…
Indeed. TV was better in the UK when there were only 4 (or 3) channels.
Never mind the quality, feel the width.
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ESPN is a bit more immune to piracy since the nature of sports is time critical. Sure, someone could use a slingbox to share the live feed with friends, customers, random strangers, but in general, you’re not going to have a Pirate Bay type of situation where the game from three days ago is posted and causing a large reduction in live viewership. Game of Thrones on the other hand is perfect for time shifting piracy. HBO needs to come up with an alternate system because eventually technology will kill their subscription numbers.
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[quote=“kangorufoo, post:11, topic:8906”]
do something important.[/quote]
Yeah, like commenting on blog posts! Psh, television. You just sit there, staring glassy-eyed at the tube, letting the world pass you by. Who has time for that? The rest of us are too busy staring glassy-eyed at display screens, wiggling our fingers occasionally. You know, living life.
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By my math, ESPN is saying that 63% of cable subscribers wouldn’t subscribe to ESPN if it was al la carte, so we have to make them pay so that the sports lover can pay $5.54 for something that they would most likely pay $15 for. And that’s supposed to make sense?
If that’s good business, why does it smell so much like communism?
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What? Nobody remembers the pre-iPhone ESPN Phone? ESPN not only created a branded phone back in the relative stone age of 2006, but also an entire ESPN-branded network to use it on (a Sprint MVNO). They launched with a ridiculously expensive super bowl commercial.
You’ve never heard of it because it was an epic, epic failure.
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I don’t know if that’s true. AMC is doing quite well in general and especially with that show, it makes good money for them. There might be some beloved things that are subsidized, but I’d want to see specifics with numbers to believe them. As far as I can tell, a lot of the things that are surviving because of subsidizing are mostly dreck.
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