Yup yup and yup. The revenue has to come in for these organizations, be it through cabe subscriptions, telephone service, Internet service, etc. They are still going to need to generate $x dollars monthly per household serviced. How it plays out is an unknown now, but please don't expect al la carte service to necessarily equate to monthly cost savings for you.
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HBO to Introduce Standalone Web-Only Subscriptions in 2015
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Yup yup and yup. The revenue has to come in for these organizations, be it through cabe subscriptions, telephone service, Internet service, etc. They are still going to need to generate $x dollars monthly per household serviced. How it plays out is an unknown now, but please don't expect al la carte service to necessarily equate to monthly cost savings for you.
Exactly. But I question the concept of a-la-carte cable channels in general.
People always say "I'm paying an assload of money every month for 500 channels I don't watch."
Well guess what... even if you could select just a handful of channels... your cable bill would probably be the same.
Why? Because the cable company is still piping in all 500 channels to their facility.
They're not gonna shrink your bill if you don't want The Food Network or Nickelodeon or BET.
I think of cable subscriptions like a buffet at a restaurant: the buffet cost $10 and it has 50 items.
But they won't let you pay $5 and only choose 25 of the items.
It's all or nothing.
Hell will have frozen over when I can watch the NFL without a Comcast
subscription.
When I can watch any sports the way that I currently can with MLB.tv we will
have reached Nerdvana.
It's definitely getting cooler in hell but we're not there yet...
Not really. I want Comedy Central, Food Network, and CBS. Those three channels will cover everything that everyone in my house watches. If I paid $10/month for each of them, plus $30/month for internet separately, it would be cheaper than I pay for everything bundled with Comcast right now.
Exactly. I think the biggest issue people have is paying $100 a month and being told we're getting 250 channels, when most of those channels are crap that we would never buy on our own. 10 shopping channels, 12 religious channels, 15 news channels, etc.
Those who would say this is a step backwards, and the opposite direction of our music desires don't really understand the analogy.
Before Apple monetized digital music we had albums, (Okay, CDs) which forced us to buy a bunch of junk for $16, instead of paying a buck apiece for the two or three songs we really wanted. Music subscription services have taken that a step further. We can pay a set amount every month, and choose an a la carte selection of whatever we want from a very large cafeteria. Unbundling premium services from overpriced basic cable packages are just the first step in the liberation of video entertainment.
This. some people want a-la-carte TV, just like some people want subscription music. But obviously not everyone wants just the one or the other, otherwise Apple wouldn't still be selling hundreds of millions of dollars of a-la-carte music, they would be selling $0 and everyone would be using Pandora or Spotify or iTunes Radio or whatever.
Give people a choice, and you'll get some doing each, plus the two have to compete with each other--everybody's happy, everybody wins from the competition. I can buy my a-la-carte music, my coworker can sign up for Spotify, and the kids can play the same video on Youtube 15 million times. Perfectly viable business model, just like it worked to sell records, concert tickets, and have radio broadcasts.
Give people choice with TV and some people will still go for a subscription model that gets them 500 channels to surf through. Others, like me--who previously just said "screw it, I'll just watch whatever's on Hulu"--might now pay for HBO, or stop paying way more than they wanted to for basic cable channels they never watched just so they could get an HBO subscription when all they really wanted was HBO On Demand.
it's just change.
like everything else these days, it's a systemic problem. Change is good but we have to make sure that with change, we are not regressing. this seems the be the main effect of all this fixing lately. things are changing but they are really staying the same.
like everything else these days, it's a systemic problem. Change is good but we have to make sure that with change, we are not regressing. this seems the be the main effect of all this fixing lately. things are changing but they are really staying the same.
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It comes for free with my internet package.
I think it is $14 a month (25% VAT) otherwise.
Yep, and then data caps will start rolling out like the plague and then were all screwed paying a ton of money to even use the service, ISPs need to have some reigns put on them, and in a hurry.
This model does not work. There is a long history of why it isn't possible. Planet Money does an excellent job of explaining most of it here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/27/226891181/episode-488-the-secret-history-of-your-cable-bill
You are over simplifying a business model that is intentionally complex. There are a lot of people being paid a lot of money to make sure what you're suggesting does not happen. I'm not some conspiracy theorist; I know this because I'm one of those people being paid to keep it complex.
it's not fair to compare music and tv. and it's also not a straight comparison. none of the stuff you get on cable, you own. whereas the stuff you buy of iTunes you do own to some extent even if not outright. it's two very different business models. for it to be a fair comparison you would need to offer everything on cable for one low low monthly fee like spotify, which is not gonna happen. music sales model was pretty diluted by piracy but they make money elsewhere.
Honest question: does the model not work because it really won't work or because cable companies are keeping it intentionally complex?
HBO appears to be challenging the notion of the intentionally complex cable package. They seem to think they can make more money with this additional, unbundled plan.
I think we'll get to a point where ISPs and streaming services get bundles going. Like a discounted rate for all those streaming apps or like a pick 3 and such. That will be a great day.
The music industry is very, very different than the film & tv industry.
First of all, there are three major players in the music business. If you get the deal done with those three, you're set. The film & tv industry intentionally kept the arms split apart. You need to negotiate the same deal with many, many more players. The deals are far more complicated, by design, so that nobody finds themselves out of a job.
The film industry just watched the music industry completely screw up their business model. They are not about to make the same mistake.
Re: HBO - each of their contracts with each studio will need to be reevaluated to determine if Over the Top services like this are allowed. Offering a service like HBO Go to cable subscribers is very different than offering a service like Netflix to everyone. Fortunatly, it generally will be allowed because the deals were negotiated before Netflix existed. However, you best believe all of those deals will be a lot more expensive when it comes up for renewal. This model does not scale. It will either be very expensive, or very limited.
Only problem with your analogy is that the buffet is really: pay $10 and you can get dessert and bread. But if you want meat and potatoes with that dessert and bread, that will be $20. Now if you want a premium dessert, that will be $5 more or $25 total.
I really like the idea from another poster of paying a basic fee service that includes local channels. Then maybe an additional fee something like 10 additional channels of my choice. Not saying it's feasible from a business standpoint, but something like that would make me a happier customer.
Hey, leave me out of this "we". I prefer to support artists buy purchasing their work, not throwing them a couple cents as they busk on the digital sidewalk.
And I don't want cable at all. Just let me pay for the channels I want. If they want to offer bundles, that's fine too, but don't make me subscribe to a 20th-century delivery mechanism in order to access it.
Game of Gnomes
"All in, there are 80 million homes that ( use their grandma's HBO Go password to rip us off ) do not have HBO and we will use all means at our disposal to go after them.
I'm excited. No more hunting around the darker, more pop-up prone corners of the internet for streams of HBO shows that I want to watch. Well, in 2015 anyways.
"All in, there are 80 million homes that ( use their grandma's HBO Go password to rip us off ) do not have HBO and we will use all means at our disposal to go after them.
I'm excited. No more hunting around the darker, more pop-up prone corners of the internet for streams of HBO shows that I want to watch. Well, in 2015 anyways.
There are problems with the model you presented. The issue isn't really the cable companies. It's actually the providers--networks like ESPN--that keep the costs high. Like I said, Planet Money does a really good job of explaining this. I really recommend listening to that podcast.
However, the latter is also true. There are a lot of people intentionally keeping it complex. Studios make money off exclusivity. The simplest example is the Disney vault: movies are only available for a brief window before they are removed from the market. That makes everything in the vault worth more, and increases the likelihood people will buy the content when it comes back out of the vault. This is really similar to HBO's business model. They buy exclusivity.
Waiting to see the price. If it is comparable to netflix or hulu, and it works on my AppleTV. I am all in!
Maybe for some, but I would rather have the option to choose what I want to see, rather than pay for a lot of programing that I don't want. Right now there are about 4 or 5 cable programs that I actually watch out of thousands that I pay for.
I can only speak for myself, but I imagine there are others who are like-minded. My beef with cable isn't only the price, it's the advertisements and the quality.
At least with spotify, when I pay them $120/year I get an add-free experience, and the artist is paid per play. So the content-producer is rewarded directly based on how much I like that content.
With cable, when I pay then neary $1500/year I get commercials nearly for 20-30 minutes per hour, and my money is distributed to all the content producers using some invisible formula regardless of what I like or watch. The commercials actually piss me off the most - I feel like I'm paying a over a grand to just be sold do. F that. This is also why I refuse to subscribe to Hulu - ads or fee, you can't have both.