The problem I have always had with cable TV, and now with streaming, is the advertisements. I understand why free services inject ads into their video stream; they have to make a profit somehow. I don't like it, and I'll block the ads, but I understand it.

Having experience what ad-free entertainment is like, be it from Netflix years ago, renting movies online, or Youtube with Adblock, I will never pay for a service that's going to show me ads. Either make the service free and cash in on ad revenue or sell the service for an appropriate price that you can afford not to show ads. Sticking to the old model of "pay for cable TV and watch commercials" is never going to work, be it cable or streaming. I don't think I'm in the minority here, either; I've heard this sentiment from plenty of others.

The cable giant is also selling the streaming service bundled with its cable service or with its recently released streaming bundle that combines Comcast’s Peacock with Netflix, Apple TV+, and ads for $15/month.

We have closed the loop, officially coming full circle. And what an absolute shocker, Comcast is right smack in the middle of it.

Cable companies have seen the writing one the wall with Cable TV for quite awhile. They had the perfect product to pivot to with broadband. Had they offered a great product with great customer service, they'd have had the market forever especially how much consumers felt burned by telecoms abusing their market dominance with with early broadband.

Instead, cable companies doubled down on the lock-in and bundle model with deceptive pricing and horrible customer service ceding ground to wireless providers and even the same telecoms that were hated before.

Our household cut the cord on cableTV/satellite about 14 years ago, but kept cable modem service since then. Now that the local telecom has laid fiber at 500Mb/s for $49/month we dropped any relationship with the cable company. Two months before the fiber came in, cable suddenly dropped the price of our 100Mb/s service and increased the speed to $300Mb/s. At $80/month it was still better for us to ditch the cable company and go with the telecom fiber connection.

Good riddance you greedy time vampires.

When the fuck are these companies gonna look at the quote "Piracy is a service problem" are they too greedy or something???

The streaming services are just operating the same way cable providers did now anyway. Worse in some cases.

Full circle.

How is this news in 2024? Haven't they been bleeding for a decade +?

Streaming is new cable now anyways with fragmentation of media, ads slowly sneaking into various platforms etc. The golden age of streaming was brief.