This isn't really true at all. When I had Comcast, I used their streaming website, which provided on demand access to any channel on their lineup you were subscribed to. Ad content was about on par with other online services.

My new ISP relies more heavily on individual channel streaming sites rather than hosting their own central portal for it, but again, the on demand experience is more or less the same I was familiar with from Hulu, CBS All Access, and other online sites I've used.

In fact, if there is any issues with the comparison, it'd be that a real TV service will let you watch things live if you want to, whereas streaming sites often won't carry something until the day after. And if you get a DVR, you can hold live TV almost indefinitely, whereas on demand services tend to expire shows after several weeks.

Hulu and CBS All Access have an ad free tier. I had CBS All Access when I had Sling but DirecTVNow has all of the networks live in my market (NBC,ABC,CBS, Fox, CW) I could deal with the ads and awful on demand features of DTVNow for the one or two shows I watch on CBS. For everything else I have Hulu and the Cwl

I still contend that in many ways, traditional cable subscriptions offer more for your dollar than a pile or cord cutter products. At the very least, the competition is closer than one might be led to believe.

Funny enough: My friends who never see television ads, I sometimes feel like they miss out on a lot of meme-worthy things. Sometimes I'll reference a commercial (like Grammarly, which is pasted all over YouTube), and people don't know what I'm talking about. It's weird. As annoying as ads are, they've become a significant part of our culture and it's odd when people don't see them.

Imagine if you happened to not know what the Geico gecko was or have heard the commercial from which the pronunciation "diabeetus" came from.

I'm a cable cutter (I refuse to call myself a cord cutter), but I agree. I would have Netflix regardless of whether I had cable or not but I wouldn't have DirecTVNow or Hulu ($47/month) even with the bogus fees and when you consider the bundled discounts, cable is not a bad deal for most people. My dad came up and he fell in love with my Roku TV so I got him one for Father's Day. I had to go down and set it up for him because between the individual TVAnywhere logins, the flaky WiFi (they have both slow DSL and cable internet service long story), it was really confusing for him.

On top of that, they understand when cable goes out it just happens. But if thier internet went out and they couldn't watch TV, they would be really frustrated. Besides they live in a small town with a 150GB cap on thier DSL and a 300GB cap on thier cable internet. My family blew right through that when we stayed with them for the summer.