Ask Lemmy

You won't get an attractive price for internet only. Those companies spend tons of money on broadcasting licenses, and as long as they do, you're going to pay part of that bill, whether you have a TV subscription or not.

You have that in several European countries. I subscribed to only internet service. However , in many European countries the telecoms work as an oligopoly and sometimes as a cartel. And afraid of losing money with the internet only packages, they make it intentionally less appealing because for more 5€ you get all the other services and sometimes with better internet.

Regulators work like crap in my country

Everyone here is negative, but I don't know why cable didn't die 25 years ago when Netflix showed up. I certainly have not had any interest in it since then. Then again, I play games far more than I watch movies, so I am not a typical consumer.

Never. Carriers and ISPs will never let themselves turn into a metered service. They’ve been fighting for years to charge whatever they want, create overinflated packages and generally keep things the way it was with cable.

OP... AOL still provides dialup. Cable companies arent ditching cable any time soon just because the internet is a thing.

This honestly is dependent on alot of different factors, including the type of your ISP, thier national footprint, and what other lines of business they have.

Let's first start with what type of ISP you have. The main 2 today are cable and fiber. If you have DSL/Satellite/Fixed wireless, they don't really carry cable tv as part of thier infrastructure. Anyways, Fiber has a serious edge over traditional coax cable in bandwidth. Light has a much higher bandwidth limitation, whereas copper wire is very limited in comparison. So far, cable has been able to keep up with Fiber's download speeds, and with DOCSYS 4 rolling out, hopefully they'll get closer to symmetrical uploads speeds. This will allow them more bandwidth to keep up with the fiber companies, though I suspect one day, the limits of copper coax wiring will catch up to them. Consider too, some companies like Comcast are putting in fiber to the premises in select areas, though it seems pretty limited at this point.

Another thing to consider is thier national footprint. Larger ISPs are probably going to be the last ones to get rid of traditional cable, simply because they'll have enough customers to keep it viable longer. We're already seeing smaller ISPs drop them and bundle a streaming service instead (more on that later).

The other factor to consider here is what other lines of business they own. One I'm thinking of in particular is Comcast. They own NBC/Universal. They've been pushing Peacock hard, though it's not really profitable yet. I suspect the day they get rid of cable is the day they require you to pay for Peacock instead, and Peacock will probably cost more so it isn't hemorrhaging money. Other ISPs are also partnering with streaming services, and it wouldn't surprise me if they start buying up streaming services too to complete with Comcast. We already saw AT&T try to buy Time Warner back in 2016.

So, it's really anyone's guess, but the death of cable is really just going to be replaced by forced subscriptions to streaming services. When they drop the actual cable tv is largely dependent on how fast they get outpaced by Fiber internet providers.

Most likely when the boomers and older gen-Xers die off.

Part of the problem is the cable / internet oligopoly which actively works to inhibit competition from smaller providers. It's been a problem over a decade and only recently have some regional governments been pushing for better competiton.

In Sacramento, my place is a couple blocks from the end of local fiber. I'm on the fringe of a comcast regional monopoly.

So long as cable providers can block competition theyre going to overcharge and bundle legacy services.

What move TO streaming? People are starting to hate it and for good reasons so streaming started it's decline. Surely a quick search can find some articles