SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Cable and satellite TV providers are ringing in the new year with an unwelcomed gift: higher cable bills.
Comcast, for instance, says customer bills will rise 2.2 percent, on average, in 2018. AT&T is raising DirecTV's prices by up to $8 a month in mid-January. Smaller providers are planning increases, too.
Over the past decade, prices for TV service have risen almost twice as fast as inflation, according to an analysis of government data. Data provider S&P Global Market Intelligence says customers' cable and satellite TV bills have soared 53 percent since 2007, to $100.98 in 2017.
Annual rate hikes are as guaranteed as death and taxes. But you can push back and trim your bill.
What are you gonna do instead, read?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Why Cable Bills Are Rising Again and What Can You Do
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 60 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday January 06 2018, @01:59AM (8 children)
You folks know Over The Air television is still around, right? Perhaps they should put the word "wireless" in front of it and put a blue LED in the box or antenna then people would flock to it.
I get the major networks and the main TV shows. Hardly anything worth watching on cable anyway. Good enough to turn the 5 o'clock news on and see what I am supposed to be afraid of today.
The only downside is reception if you live out in the country. Oh, and the pile of retarded religious channels that have to be filtered out, but those are probably on cable too. Someone needs to tell these sick idiots that their magic god-thing does not actually exist.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Saturday January 06 2018, @02:09AM
You mean American Gods [wikipedia.org] don't actually exist?
Hollywood will go crazy! They thought they were the new Gods.
(Score: 2, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Saturday January 06 2018, @02:57AM (2 children)
I'm far enough outside the closest major city that your "reception if you live out in the country" applies to me.
I ditched my paid service and set my television up with an antenna. I had forty channels including CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox. A few years later it was down to fifteen channels including CBS and fuzzy ABC but not NBC or Fox. I switched antennas, moved both antennas around, switched televisions, it didn't matter. I'm happy to live without television, period. But my wife wants some shows at first run. So we're back in the grind, going to try Youtube TV first.
(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
So much for Youtube TV. My little Chinese Android box can't run Youtube TV because Youtube TV requires location services to be on, and the gadget doesn't have a GPS. I bought a Chromecast, but it turns out you control them from other devices and the only remote integration is pause and play. As a result I'm returning it.
Okay, to get scammed by Comcast or one of the satellite providers? Decisions, decisions...
(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday January 11 2018, @12:07PM
Everybody stopped paying attention by now, but for the sake of completeness: I had been using Tivo with my HD antenna. I called Tivo to cancel the service, and they talked me into working with one of their support technicians. He had me reset my Tivo box, disconnect all cables and leave it off for five minutes, plug it all back in, and go through channel setup again. I got every single missing channel back. I am happy I won't need to buy Youtube TV or paid cable service to keep my wife and kids happy. I would be happier if the Tivo hardware would not require these periodic resets.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @04:52AM
"[...] Good enough to turn the 5 o'clock news on and see what I am supposed to be afraid of today." [...]
In my neck of the woods, that would be fat, pudgy female reporters that 'no habla ingles' very well.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @12:21PM (1 child)
That is why they are starting to sell tv's with no tuner. Locks you into some provider. Also, there are plans to enable charging for over the air channels. Thank you republicrats your pro wrestling like acting is distracting the country while its citizens are robbed to poverty levels.
https://www.consumerreports.org/lcd-led-oled-tvs/new-vizio-smartcast-tvs-arent-really-tvs/ [consumerreports.org]
https://freetvblog.com/2017/03/13/atsc-3-0-is-coming-and-maybe-its-not-all-good/ [freetvblog.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Sunday January 07 2018, @12:23AM
So... monitors then.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Saturday January 06 2018, @03:52PM
CNN isn't that bad. Hillary unfortunately exists. If you hate Jesus you can avoid him, but it seems impossible to avoid the overall human susceptibility to religious belief. The "hippie fundamentalists" on CNN that I see on the TVs at the gym are kind of like a MAD magazine parody of reality.
Not for long. There was a big mobile/wireless auction about a year ago, and locally almost half the OTA stations are closing up shop. Some channels are already gone.
Its kind of a race right now, which will close down first, legacy newspapers or legacy OTA TV?