Until streaming services have live content, cable will continue to be streamed illegally online. Live content is migrating to the internet anyways, the Super Bowl was streamed online and there are a number of sports packages you can subscribe to online that are straight up better than their television counter parts.
Cable is dying a painful death.
as someone who has investigated "cord-cutting" quite a bit, and is also a sports fan, there's one big problem with this. you really cant cord cut and get your dose of live sports.
it sucks but it's a hammer the cable cos unfortunately have.
if you're not a sports fan, then you're good. cut away.
I could get the NFL Sunday ticket and drop cable, I think it's like $360 a year. That's 30 a month, and you lose espn and every other channel in return in such a scenario. Might as well keep cable. and i'm not even sure what other sports options there are for NBA etc and how much they cost.
not even to mention the way it's set up, if you have cable internet too, and i'll wager most people do, there's not so much incentive to remove your cable, because then your "package savings" evaporate. I'll give you an example, my bill after taxes etc is like $128. That is broken down as something like $50 for high speed internet and $60 for cable tv on the bill (the other 18 the endless taxes and fees).
The way it's set up is if I remove my cable, then I lose my "bundled" discount, suddenly my internet alone doesn't cost $50 anymore it costs $75. Maybe my bill is $85 after taxes/fees.
So for "only" an extra 40ish bucks a month, sadly, I might as well just keep my cable TV. It's of course, set up that way on purpose, to extort you.
if there was stand alone internet competition, i could go elsewhere. the problem is it's pretty pitiful where i live. i think dsl maxes here at 6mb/s (vs 15 for my current cable connection). and i think there's actually no dsl available where i live despite it being a suburb! I think copper phone lines are basically seen as a dead thing and nobody puts any investment into them at all any more, nobody cares.
you MIGHT be able to try to get something over the 4G airwaves, but IF anything is available in that respect it'll be limited as hell at this time.
I'm hopeful in the future for more competition over the airwaves since clearly nobody is really laying down physical lines anymore (despite highly publicized crap like fios and google 1 gbit, that stuff is actually rare), but they'll probably find a way to screw us on that too. Just like how the Telco's screw us on our data plans now.
so, you are more or less fucked. corporatocracy.
we need ala carte systems..., i should only pay for the programming i want, and internet competition too to handle the other side of the equation.
