I read with a smile the mention of only if you have a cable subscription. Content makers needs to wake up to the missed revenue and bypass cable. I stopped subscribing to Cable for the following reasons.
1) Too many adverts
2) As a result of too many adverts I channel hop only to find more adverts
3) Adverts 7 minutes before the end of a program, no that's not clever its very irritating to I cancel my subscription and throw money at Netflix and other content providers, it's wonderful.
So tie your subscription to Cable at your won peril, this medium is dead.
Television is about the chance for us consumers to SEE the commercials. The shows are just there to bait us into watching. If they could get away with only showing commercials there would be no shows. It's NOT about the shows.
If the business of Cable is dead, say hello to all that cable revenue becoming added broadband bills AND paying someone like Apple to be the new cable middlemen.
I can gripe about commercials right with you, but that's other people- not you or I- paying money toward the artists that make the stuff I do want to watch. Most of those commercials run on those channels "we" aren't watching, but those subsidies are being paid anyway and that money helps make the stuff "we" do want to see. Kill those commercials and that revenue needs to be made up OR the quality and/or breadth & depth of programming will need to fall accordingly.
We frame cable companies as the bad guys but what we think we want doesn't work if:
-we get a huge discount off of what we pay now and
-we kill the subsidy revenues of commercials and
-an Apple gets to inject itself into the mix and take a big cut
unless there is a dramatic drop in quality (can you say youtube-like productions and/or more Kardashian-like reality programming?).
Some of us are getting away with "cord cutting" now because the masses aren't doing it. As soon as the masses move on it, broadband rates will make up for cableTV subscription revenue shortfalls (and where are you going to go for alternative broadband?) AND we'll also be paying an Apple as a new middleman injected into the "new model" chain. It is not a recipe for much cheaper monthly pricing to get everything "we" want commercial-free unless what we want is something like youtube quality stuff or mostly B-movie and in-the-can programming on services like Netflix.