General > General Technical Chat

How to get my senior citz. parents TV without cable? 255$ month cable bill!

<< < (7/14) > >>

rdl:
Comcast will increase your price every year. It used to be around $10-15 but a few years back AT&T ran fiber through this area and the annual Comcast price hike has dropped to about $5. You can call and gripe to Comcast to get a reduced price but they make it an immense pain in the ass to do so. My rate has more than doubled in the last 10 years. I'm way overdue for calling to get a better price - mainly because I was thinking to switch to the AT&T service, but then Covid-19 happened.

SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: james_s on March 31, 2021, 09:22:17 pm ---
--- Quote from: pardo-bsso on March 31, 2021, 12:23:19 pm ---Buy the premium package and share it with the neighbours to split the bill?

--- End quote ---

That's a serious crime, get caught and you can get massive fines or even a prison sentence for it. Seems extreme to me, but it is what it is.

--- End quote ---

It's what you get when industry lobbyists write the laws?   >:D

nctnico:

--- Quote from: james_s on March 31, 2021, 09:24:35 pm ---
--- Quote from: cdev on March 31, 2021, 03:42:32 pm ---Here in the US its all about the upsell.. They want digital copy protection too. No "analog hole"

--- End quote ---

Their worry over the "analog hole" is totally ridiculous. Absolutely nobody is recording an analog video signal onto VHS or even digitizing it. HDCP was cracked wide open long ago, it's trivial to record a perfect digital copy of anything that can be displayed on a TV.

--- End quote ---
Media companies are about 20 years behind. It is only since a few years that you can buy MP3 without any kind of copyright protection. If they started doing that in the late 90's they would have killed off websites like Napster and Piratebay a long time ago just due to ease of use. It will probably be a while until you can simply download TV series from Netflix, Amazon, etc for reasonable prices.

james_s:

--- Quote from: nctnico on March 31, 2021, 11:23:57 pm ---Media companies are about 20 years behind. It is only since a few years that you can buy MP3 without any kind of copyright protection. If they started doing that in the late 90's they would have killed off websites like Napster and Piratebay a long time ago just due to ease of use. It will probably be a while until you can simply download TV series from Netflix, Amazon, etc for reasonable prices.

--- End quote ---

Yes it was one of the blunders of the century, waging a futile war against digital downloadable media and insisting on cumbersome DRM technologies that resulted in the pirated content being more convenient and easier to use on top of being free. Had they embraced the 99c DRM-free digital downloads in the first place it would have taken the world by storm and they would have raked in millions as people buy all kinds of songs. 99c is well below the impulse purchase threshold for all but the most poor/frugal people, it's not even worth the trouble to pirate if you can just buy the songs you want for that price. Instead of embracing it though they fought tooth and nail to stamp it out, accomplishing nothing other than alienating large numbers of potential paying customers by refusing to sell them what they wanted, while rampant piracy thrived. By the time they finally came around, the piracy culture had a lot of momentum and after the extortion tactics (pay us thousands of dollars or go to court and risk owing hundreds of thousands) against the public, they earned very little sympathy. A former coworker had to pay $5,000 because it some content owner claimed his young daughter downloaded a few songs, whether it was her or her friend or completely bogus he didn't know, and he was not particularly fluent in English or familiar with the US legal system so he paid up, the alternative was the risk of being ordered to pay vastly more.

rsjsouza:
Although the battle was fought for several years and at a certain point it was really clear it was futile (beginning of 2000s), you have to account for the fact that, for most of the century, they had an entire industry behind it: the disc press, artowrk and insert printing, box fabrication, distribution, etc. You don't turn this off wth a flick of a switch.

Also, the online marketing and distribution was still early and it was not universal by any means: lots of people distrusted internet transactions and, at least in Brasil, prices per song were disproportionally higher.

Despite MP3 format was king, the portable players were still raging a war pulling each to their standard - AAC, WMA, etc.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod