Comcast has to constantly transmit all the channels, no matter who's watching. And their fixed costs are rather large. How many thousands of $$ does it cost to put up & maintain a single street's worth of cable? And how much can you recoup from that, especially when you have a massively variable amount of money coming from each customer (including 0 for those on the street who don't subscribe). Plus the license fees for all those channels..

Netflix can also multi-home closer to their customers to reduce bandwidth costs. Comcast is stuck burying cable.

In even a moderately lower middle class neighborhood, I would think that the majority of people have cable or internet. It's not like thier is much competition.

Some apartment complexes and even HOAs force all of the tenants/homeowners to pay for internet + TV.

When I stayed in an apartment part of the lease agreement was that you had to pay $100 for a cable + Internet package and then had to pay more for extra boxes, etc. the complex racked on the minimum payment as part of rent then you paid any overage to Comcast.

We had a 300MB cap and the only way we could get internet without a cap when they first started was to get a business account. But you still had to pay the mandated $100 for cable to the apartment complex and then had to pay extra for the business account. We moved shortly afterward.

One of the requirements when we were looking for a house was that Comcast was not the only option.

http://www.condoassociation.com/blog/is-cable-tv-contract-wi...

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-08-19/business/os-c...