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I say that by the end of this decade you will have to stream your tv or their won't be any tv. IF they get broadband through out the country with the infrastructure Bill passed and especially in the rural areas , there will be less reason for anyone to have cable or satellite. The downside to cable and satellite is all the extra FEES for dvr and for additional receivers. This is the attraction to streaming. No extra fees. Add the app on any roku or fire tv or stick and you can watch it any room in the house as long as you have wifi.

Now DISH could convert their service into a more streaming channels like Sling tv but also provide satellite locals or streaming locals. Then there would be less reason for all the satellites except for sat locals. But sooner or later they could maybe just stream the locals too. It might mean working new deals with all the cities again to stream the networks instead of by satellite. But they need to find a way to get around the restriction on how many streams at a time for your programming. Like Sling tv has the blue pack with 3 streams and the orange pack with ESPN channels has only 1 stream at a time.

Maybe they could combine the Sling tv cloud feature and their channels with the Hopper plus . With the hopper plus you can add any app , even Sling tv. Then you would get the dvr hard drive and the cloud feature dvr too. This would also up-convert the hd to 4k with the Hopper plus since most of Sling tv channels are 720p.

So the more things change the more they stay the same. All the media companies have bundled themselves and merged themselves so you have to pay to get channels you might not even watch. This is cable model we have had for years now. What ever happened to true ala carte? In Canada they use ala carte but offer the bundle for those who want it. So you can literally add just the channels you want. But at the rate the tv channels are becoming just infomercials and network rerun tv, who knows how much longer anyone will keep the old cable /sat model?

MikeD-C05 said:

So the more things change the more they stay the same. All the media companies have bundled themselves and merged themselves so you have to pay to get channels you might not even watch. This is cable model we have had for years now. What ever happened to true ala carte? In Canada they use ala carte but offer the bundle for those who want it. So you can literally add just the channels you want. But at the rate the tv channels are becoming just infomercials and network rerun tv, who knows how much longer anyone will keep the old cable /sat model?

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No, what we've traditionally had is "Here's a whole bunch of channels mixed together from various companies -- it's our standard bundle. And here's an even bigger bunch of channels, which includes everything from the first bunch, plus even more -- it's our super bundle. And then here are a few premium channels which you can add a la carte to either of those first two options. If you want to watch content on-demand and avoid ads, you can pay extra for a DVR so you can record shows and then fast forward through the ads."

What we're moving to is: "Here are 5 or 6 different competing mini-bundles of content, each one spanning different kinds of series and movies (and most also containing news and some live sports). Each bundle mainly focuses on content made by the company selling it. You can buy however many of them you like, mix and match as you see fit. It's easy to add and drop these bundles on a monthly basis, although you do get a discount if you prepay for a year at a time. Everything is automatically available on-demand to watch on your schedule. You can pay a lower price for a bundle and have unskippable ads or you can pay more and not have the ads included at all."

I obviously think the latter system is better because it gives consumers more options and flexibility and also because it produces more competition, which keeps prices in check and incentivizes them to keep improving their product. In the former system, the big players (e.g. Disney's ABC and ESPN, Fox's Fox and Fox News, WBD's CNN and HGTV, Paramount's CBS and Nickelodeon) are engaging is what I'd call "cooptition" -- sort of a cross between cooperation and competition. All of those channels, to some extent, benefitted from the others being in the same forced bundle. In the latter scenario, it's pure competition.

Is it cord cutting when it is Netflix?

ncted said:

Netflix customers canceling service increasingly includes long-term subscribers - 9to5Mac

New research highlights that the number of Netflix long-standing subscribers canceling the streaming service rose in the past few years.

9to5mac.com

Is it cord cutting when it is Netflix?

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Yes. Especially if you drop satellite or cable systems. Netflix was my gateway into streaming before it exploded. Now it is in need of changes to make it easier to find something to watch instead of doom scrolling for hours on end. The quality needs to improve on their shows and movies as well. The cancellation for their original series tv is high as well.

MikeD-C05 said:

make it easier to find something to watch instead of doom scrolling for hours

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What is "doom scrolling"?

TheKrell said:

What is "doom scrolling"?

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For instance someone who watches the news feed on their phone and keep looking at nothing but doom stories like" Covid will kill us all!" and now "Monkey pox will kill you too !" and the "Russians and the Chinese are going to attack us here at home!" They can spend hours looking at their phone getting more and more crazy with anxiety and the glass is half empty and nothing but negative stories . As Dr. Smith on Lost in Space would say: "Woe is me!" and then he would start screaming like a female.

But in my case I was talking about when you're trying to find something to watch on Netflix that sounds good and just start scrolling and scrolling for an hour. Finally you just give up and leave Netflix and go to another service to watch or you turn off the tv/tablet/phone and call it a night.

MikeD-C05 said:

But in my case I was talking about when you're trying to find something to watch on Netflix that sounds good and just start scrolling and scrolling for an hour. Finally you just give up and leave Netflix and go to another service to watch or you turn off the tv/tablet/phone and call it a night.

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Yeah, this exactly! That happens to me all the time. Add in the multiple apps and I could easily spend hours scrolling through an endless supply of content and still not find anything I want to watch. At least with cable, it only took a few minutes to scroll through the channels they provided.

MikeD-C05 said:

I say that by the end of this decade you will have to stream your tv or their won't be any tv. IF they get broadband through out the country with the infrastructure Bill passed and especially in the rural areas , there will be less reason for anyone to have cable or satellite. The downside to cable and satellite is all the extra FEES for dvr and for additional receivers. This is the attraction to streaming. No extra fees. Add the app on any roku or fire tv or stick and you can watch it any room in the house as long as you have wifi.

Now DISH could convert their service into a more streaming channels like Sling tv but also provide satellite locals or streaming locals. Then there would be less reason for all the satellites except for sat locals. But sooner or later they could maybe just stream the locals too. It might mean working new deals with all the cities again to stream the networks instead of by satellite. But they need to find a way to get around the restriction on how many streams at a time for your programming. Like Sling tv has the blue pack with 3 streams and the orange pack with ESPN channels has only 1 stream at a time.

Maybe they could combine the Sling tv cloud feature and their channels with the Hopper plus . With the hopper plus you can add any app , even Sling tv. Then you would get the dvr hard drive and the cloud feature dvr too. This would also up-convert the hd to 4k with the Hopper plus since most of Sling tv channels are 720p.

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I am getting rid of my big dish this Summer as I no longer need it. I haven't in years. I started with a Roku in 2014 when we got high speed out here and I haven't looked back. Between 33 OTA channels and all of the free material on streaming services, plus a pay service a person can get when they want, with no extra fees. At in Cloud DVRs, the handwriting is on the wall.

anex80 said:

Yeah, this exactly! That happens to me all the time. Add in the multiple apps and I could easily spend hours scrolling through an endless supply of content and still not find anything I want to watch. At least with cable, it only took a few minutes to scroll through the channels they provided.

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With cable, I often never found anything to watch, especially as time went on, and channels like History, Discovery, TLC, etc. ruined their programming.

MikeD-C05 said:

I say that by the end of this decade you will have to stream your tv or their won't be any tv. IF they get broadband through out the country with the infrastructure Bill passed and especially in the rural areas , there will be less reason for anyone to have cable or satellite. The downside to cable and satellite is all the extra FEES for dvr and for additional receivers. This is the attraction to streaming. No extra fees. Add the app on any roku or fire tv or stick and you can watch it any room in the house as long as you have wifi.

Now DISH could convert their service into a more streaming channels like Sling tv but also provide satellite locals or streaming locals. Then there would be less reason for all the satellites except for sat locals. But sooner or later they could maybe just stream the locals too. It might mean working new deals with all the cities again to stream the networks instead of by satellite. But they need to find a way to get around the restriction on how many streams at a time for your programming. Like Sling tv has the blue pack with 3 streams and the orange pack with ESPN channels has only 1 stream at a time.

Maybe they could combine the Sling tv cloud feature and their channels with the Hopper plus . With the hopper plus you can add any app , even Sling tv. Then you would get the dvr hard drive and the cloud feature dvr too. This would also up-convert the hd to 4k with the Hopper plus since most of Sling tv channels are 720p.

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I can easily see locals being streamed by Dish in the future. I think Direct already is do that, plus other streaming services. Diginets stream.

NashGuy said:

No, what we've traditionally had is "Here's a whole bunch of channels mixed together from various companies -- it's our standard bundle. And here's an even bigger bunch of channels, which includes everything from the first bunch, plus even more -- it's our super bundle. And then here are a few premium channels which you can add a la carte to either of those first two options. If you want to watch content on-demand and avoid ads, you can pay extra for a DVR so you can record shows and then fast forward through the ads."

What we're moving to is: "Here are 5 or 6 different competing mini-bundles of content, each one spanning different kinds of series and movies (and most also containing news and some live sports). Each bundle mainly focuses on content made by the company selling it. You can buy however many of them you like, mix and match as you see fit. It's easy to add and drop these bundles on a monthly basis, although you do get a discount if you prepay for a year at a time. Everything is automatically available on-demand to watch on your schedule. You can pay a lower price for a bundle and have unskippable ads or you can pay more and not have the ads included at all."

I obviously think the latter system is better because it gives consumers more options and flexibility and also because it produces more competition, which keeps prices in check and incentivizes them to keep improving their product. In the former system, the big players (e.g. Disney's ABC and ESPN, Fox's Fox and Fox News, WBD's CNN and HGTV, Paramount's CBS and Nickelodeon) are engaging is what I'd call "cooptition" -- sort of a cross between cooperation and competition. All of those channels, to some extent, benefitted from the others being in the same forced bundle. In the latter scenario, it's pure competition.

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With cable & satellite people are paying for commercial channels like USA, Nick, etc. Free streaming services offer many of these same services. Not always the same content, but still a free streaming service with ads. I always didn't like paying for a commercial channel on satellite/cable. Now Xumo, Pluto, Free Sling, etc all have lots of commercial channels for free. That is the way it should be.

mwdxer1 said:

With cable & satellite people are paying for commercial channels like USA, Nick, etc. Free streaming services offer many of these same services. Not always the same content, but still a free streaming service with ads. I always didn't like paying for a commercial channel on satellite/cable. Now Xumo, Pluto, Free Sling, etc all have lots of commercial channels for free. That is the way it should be.

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Yep, there's a ton of high-quality content that you can stream for free with ads. The acronym the industry seems to be using for those apps/services is FAST (free ad-supported television). It's becoming an increasingly big part of the TV landscape.

My prediction is that the national broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox -- will eventually stream their national content both live and on-demand in an associated FAST app. Fox already has Tubi as their FAST app. Paramount (CBS) has Pluto TV. NBCUniversal has the free tier of Peacock. Disney (ABC) will eventually have one too. (My suggested name for it: Magic.)

What I think will slowly happen over the coming years is that nearly all sports content -- which is the expensive, high-value content -- will be shifted from the broadcast networks to their associated pay cable and subscription streaming outlets. Disney has already largely done this, with very little sports any more on ABC. Monday Night Football, for instance, was moved to ESPN and ESPN+. Look for CBS, NBC and Fox to gradually do the same with their sports. (Fox owns cable nets FS1, FS2 and Big 10 Network but currently has no subscription streaming app.)

The result of this shift will do a couple things. First, it should shift some of the overall cost of cable TV from the "broadcast TV fee" to the main part of the bill for cable channels. Programming for the broadcast networks will go down as they carry fewer expensive sports and more cheap-to-produce news/talk/reality/competition/game shows. This should allow cable companies to sell a cheaper locals-only channel package as an add-on to broadband. Around here, Comcast charges an extra $28.65/mo ($10 + $18.65 broadcast TV fee) to add the locals-only TV package (with HD and 20 hrs cloud DVR) to standalone broadband. Which is ridiculous.

But the other effect, of course, is that fewer folks would quit cable TV and just use OTA antennas to watch some sports for free on the local broadcast stations. Because they wouldn't have much sports on those channels any more. (A major exception, though, is that the NFL currently requires all games featuring the local team to air on a free OTA station.) Folks would still quit cable but they'd pay to watch sports as part of a subscription streaming app like Paramount+ or Peacock or ESPN+. (And starting this year, Bally Sports is going to start selling their regional sports networks for MLB, NBA and NHL via a standalone subscription app, no cable needed.)

So cord-cutting will go on. And at some point, the major media companies will have shared or shifted pretty much ALL their high-value content on their broadcast and cable networks to their subscription streaming services. That content will either be available for streaming at the same time it debuts on cable or it won't be on cable at all, just exclusively on the streaming service.

What will be left on the four broadcast networks will be cheap, lowest-common-denominator shows that will also be available to stream for free on their FAST app. Like I said, live stream ABC primetime on "Magic," CBS primetime on Pluto TV, NBC primetime on Peacock (or whatever it merges into), Fox primetime on Tubi. Whether you're watching for free via their OTA stations or via their FAST app, you'll be watching enough ads for that content to be profitable. This all happens at the point, of course, when cable TV as we know it pretty much implodes. I give it maybe five years, 'til 2027.