Cable is a stinking pile of sog stuff. 90% of the channels are garbage and the picture quality sucks. I recently put an old-fashioned $40 antenna in my attic. It pulls in 156 channels (I’m in OC, CA about 40mi from Mt Wilson and 80mi from San Diego).

Compared with the 148 channels Spectrum provided (about 1/2 where duplicates) the quality is better on the few I watch intermittently (PBS, ABC, CBS...)

The crazy thing is my bill dropped from over $200 to $70 (for just internet).

Yea, I’m and idiot for not doing it sooner.

The only thing is, once the streaming market has dominated, there is nothing stopping it to also turning into crap full of advertisements.

I remember when cable was cheap and as-free.

The transition looks good because it has too (to lure customers away from cable). My bet is that it’s only a matter of time till “personilized ads” are forced upon you.

YouTube has definitely become more and more ad-ridden since its inceptions, and the ads are definitely personalized (though badly). There are now videos with multiple ad interruptions, a bit like ye olde TV. I do think one difference here is that on YouTube, if a video is full of ads, I won't keep watching long unless the content is solid and interesting. I, as a watcher, have a choice as to what I watch. Though of course, YouTube could fix that by imposing the same amount of ads on all videos.

I use YouTube Red, no ads, ever. And you get access to the entire Google music library.

Can't beat it for $7.99/month.

I use uBlock Origin. No ads, ever. And you get access to all the music uploaded to YouTube.

$0.00/month

For many years I've used a few shell scripts to turn YouTube into a "radio" of sorts, basically going through search results for a specific term (usually a music genre) and playing each one. It works pretty well, and the only ad-like experience is when it decides to play something not-really-related-nor-actually-music that just showed up in the results, but IMHO the "what was that?" aspect is part of the fun.

I'm clearly not the only one who came up with such an idea:

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

It makes me sad your comment is being downvoted. If people aren't happy with ads, they aren't happy paying for anything, then what's the alternative? I don't see any. Those people need to get paid for their work somehow.

...or he got downvoted because it’s a solution that doesn’t work for all (I haven’t downvoted). I tried to subscribe to premium, but there’s no such option for me. It’s not available in my country.

It's getting downvoted because paid options grow ads, like most cable channels did. (Not all of them. I think TCM is still ad-free.)

Plus, a comment sibling to this one said YouTube Red has ads, so there's that.

What does grow ads mean? FUD?

YouTube Premium is ad-free, it says so in their frontpage. Are you saying that's a blatant lie?

That doesn't address my point that content producers should get paid.

From YouTube Premium ad: "Ad-free YouTube, and our new music streaming service, YouTube Music. Services: No ads, Downloads, Background play."

It's YouTube Premium now, and it's $11.99/month. Also, without resorting to APK hacks I don't think it's possible to use on my Amazon Fire Stick. Otherwise I'd love to pay for YouTube to watch YouTube without advertisements.

On Fire TV you can use the web version of Youtube in the browser (Silk or Firefox) and it works pretty well as it's formatted for the larger screen. I'm not sure if this doesn't apply to Fire Stick.

Ah, for some reason I just assumed that YouTube Premium didn't work with Firefox, which is what I use now, and you had to have the native Android App. I think the problem I had the last time I tried this had to do with the fact that I had a YouTube creator account, and Red wouldn't work with it.

Anyway, now I'm putting my money where my mouth is and am happily watching ad free YouTube content (which I love dearly) on my TV. Totally worth it.

Don't forget about Google Music as well. Overall a pretty solid subscription package.

I have red, still plenty of ads.

What? I’ve had YouTube premium for well over a year and literally never seen an ad that wasn’t part of the actual video I was watching, added by the creator.

Ad thats part of the actual video is an ad too.

That obviously doesn’t count, as there really isn’t anything YouTube can do about that.

Google could respond by forcing them into an AdWords-like program and making embedded ads unskippable.

That absolutely count. Youtube can ban this kind of video.

... which you can pretty easily fast forward through.

Just today I swear I was served an ad that didn't have a yellow bar, so we can all look forward to that hell. At least cable is produced to have ad breaks that make sense, as opposed to cutting sentences in half.

What's the point of the yellow bars? I'm a little surprised they exist in the first place. What were they added in response to?

To let you skip the ad before it's over. You typically have to wait a few seconds but it's less than the full wait.

Adblockers (and youtube-dl and newpipe) still work on youtube, fortunately. It'll be a sad day when they ban those.

In the last two weeks youtube started having problems with uBlock. If it's on, youtube refuses to play videos that have ads on. At least for me. Maybe they are testing the ad-block-blockers, and I'm one of the subjects.

any videos in particular not having any issues myself

youtube-dl already violates the ToS, of pretty much any service it supports. But I doubt it'll ever make up a noticeable amount of traffic and it's certainly very useful, so my personal bet is tools like this will mostly continue to work unless they somehow become a threat to services in some way.

Of course, Youtube is free, unless you have a Youtube Red subscription, in which case you don't see ads.

And the fact of the matter is, the ads they do have don't produce enough revenue to support most creators.

I suppose you could argue that's because Google's cut is too high, but in Youtube's case (as opposed to, say, Apple's App Store), I feel Google is providing a substantial service—hosting, encoding, and distributing a huge amount of data.

I pay for Premium because I have zero tolerance for ads. I think PBS Eons, Kurgesacht, Rogan podcasts and random searches for stand-up are worth their weight in gold. I'll pass on insurance and web design ads, thanks.

I have a Play Music subscription which includes YouTube Red. I haven't seen an ad in years.

>> My bet is that it’s only a matter of time till “personilized ads” are forced upon you.

Unlike cable TV in the US currently, which is either a monopoly or duopoly, there is a decent bit of competition on streaming. Currently, there is Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, among others. Yes, the content is often only partially overlapping, but the point is -- there is competition. This is much more promising for customers than the current situation -- where you often have one and only once choice and they can do whatever they want.

Overall, I'd say advertisements are the least of worries for me. The greater worry is you sign up for a $90/mo plan and the bill magically becomes $120/mo. You are forced to watch TV on their schedule. You sign up for a 12 or 24mo plan which you cannot cancel, even if you lose crucial channels (e.g., Disney) And the thing is near-impossible to cancel without spending hours in call-wait hell.

It will only take one company to jump the gun, introduce advertising and the rest will follow after a huge increase in revenue. People won’t just leave automatically, especially if their locked to service specific content.

I actually miss the good old days of cable with few ads. Turn the TV on, view your favorite channels, and you know the shows are going to be good, especially during prime time.

Easy fix if ads do come along: cancel your subscription.

I pay to watch what I want, not what other people would like me to see. If I’m paying to see what people would like me to see, then I will stop paying. It really is that simple.

Won't matter, a much larger percent of the frogs won't leap out of the pot. Then it becomes "normal" to charge and have ads and no "rationally behaved" corporation will do anything less.

It's hard to use it after using Netflix or similar...the amount of commercials is just over the top. Even skipping them with DVR/FF is highly irritating.

It's somewhat reminiscent of Uber/Lyft vs taxis, minus the sketchy business practices. The convenience and personalization of streamed content is so far superior to the previous solution.

Business models change. Cable was a good business to get into 40 to 50 years ago. But it was a flash, soon to be replaced by the onward March of progress. I don’t stream anything regularly, because I find there are better things to do with my time than to veg out in front of a t.v.

With regards to your dismissal of the old school transportation companies:

The cab company I drove for dominated the market because it was basically reliable. There were problems at surge periods (rush hour and drinking holidays), but for the most part people could order a cab and expect it to arrive. The automated phone system worked fairly well to order a cab to an address your phone number had used previously.

The upstarts fixed the 12-hour shift problem: their drivers can start and stop working whenever they want, whereas most taxi companies used 12/24 hour leases or week-long leases.

The upstarts have not fixed the fact that cars are expensive and depreciate rapidly. Our little team put 100,000 miles a year on the cab we shared...

The upstarts have also not figured out how to make driving pay well for the drivers. In the old days, drivers could buy their own cab and make a little bit more every week, and lease it out to other company drivers for the times they needed to take off.

I think the transportation upstarts are going to run out of money. I’ve heard the old taxi company has reworked their business and is making more money than ever. Fewer employees (maintenance, etc) because now their drivers are using their own vehicles to take their contracted fares around.

When/if they need a fleet again (after the upstarts run out of money) I’m sure they’ll figure something out.

Is this even really a comparison? You only watch broadcast channels, and now that you set up an antenna to receive those broadcasts, you're able to get broadcast channels. This has nothing to do with cable TV, premium networks, streaming platforms, etc.

I get only about 60 free channels with my antenna but I pay $30/month for my internet... I also pay for Netflix though...

If you use Comcast, you could probably lower your bill by visiting https://ns.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/

156 stations with one antenna in one location, really?

I know right? It’s amazing how many side channels it stacked up. I’ll admit there’s a lot of garbage and languages I don’t speak - that I should delete..

Which antenna did you end up using?

We switched to digital OTA in part because it’s narrower. We can fit a lot more channels into the OTA TV bands than we used to. Too bad there’s so few people taking advantage.

192 in Sunnyvale, but I typically delete all but 30 or so.

The attitude towards streaming and the whole video on demand idea 10-15 years ago reminds me so much on the attitude towards electric vehicles today:

- Quality is too low

- speed is too slow

- many people want to own their movie, not just rent it

- people don’t want to watch movies on a computer

- the large studios and cable companies will never allow it

And within little more than a decade that all changed.

Three things would have prevented streaming from gaining in popularity:

- Slow Internet speeds. This has changed.

- Cable bills not increasing. If cable was cheap no one would care about Netflix. But when it gets around $200/month most people start questioning why they need cable TV. I did and changed my plan to Internet only, and have not regretted it. Cable TV is garbage and it's cheaper to pay $10/month for HBO GO or STARZ rather than have to have a $75, $80, $100 specific cable package and then pay $10 to get it on your cable box. OTA TV has improved and is a lot better than it used to be, at least where I live.

- Netflix and other services not being available on practically anything with a screen and CPU. I think most people who watch Netflix on a computer are broke college students with no other choice or doing so at work, but most are using their smart TV, Roku, game console, or other similar devices.

Slow internet speeds have not changed for all of America.

But the blame goes back to the cable companies there.

If you're in range of a 4g LTE tower, an mvno data only plan is more than sufficient. The only wired internet available to my house is dsl, and the company could only guarantee 4mb speed because I'm at the tail end of their network. I found ubifi [1] which was perfect as att are the only strong signal around here. Streaming video is no problem, though large downloads such as VM images really suck.

1 https://www.ubifi.net

Internet speeds are higher, alas the latency is still perceptibly there and for the set of games I play you cannot really beat the speed of light: It does matter.

Regardless, what bothers me and many others is streaming games becoming the industry standard due to the DRM benefits and taking away ownership from gamers. That would be really shitty.

Why would latency be an issue with streaming recorded video - the subject of the post?

You'll be happy to know that the current latencies are about two orders of magnitude higher than what going at the speed of light will offer. That makes me think that we will easily see a 10x improvement in latency in 15-20 years.

Source to that? My napkin math tells me speed of light across US is ~10ms, my experience tells me latency is ~100ms (certainly not 1s), so that's only one of of magnitude.

You are not going to stream games from the west coast to the east coast. It will be more like a data center in/near your city to your home (..say.. within a 50km radius). Currently, that pathway isn't very well optimized and I routinely see local services having a latency of 30+ ms in the bay area.

I am suggesting this will be significantly more optimized, not how fast you can communicate over long distances.

How do you get two orders of magnitude? Round trip for light is ~150 ms. Using a cable it is slower, so more like 250 ms. Current latencies are only like 2x that.

Even with free space speeds and tunnels through the earth you only get like one order of magnitude.

you think we'll able to communicate faster than light?

No, the poster is saying that latencies are about 100x the theretical minimum latency due to speed of light, and thinks that will reduce to 10x.

I don’t know if these numbers are true, but poster was not claiming faster than light.

There are several reasons why Internet latency is inflated over direct-route speed-of-light latency. Some reasons may change others may not.

1) speed of light in fibre is 2/3c - unlikely to change soon 2) fibre is laid in the ground on a circuitous route - rarely changes but does happen 3) queueing delay - that's often the main culprit, changeable, but hard (see the buffer bloat debate)

Quality is still an issue for streaming. Anyone who's ever compared a blu-ray to what Netflix offers knows it's night and day, especially for grainy old films. Netflix so-called "1080p" frequently has compression artifacts, and banding (most visible in dark shots). There's also disturbing aliasing (most visible in logos and on-screen fonts, causing jagged edges) which is more reminiscent of DVD-era MPEG-2 encoding than modern codecs. I'm constantly put off anytime I find a title on Netflix the minute I compare to it bluray screencaps (good resources are blu-ray.com or caps-a-holic) and notice the glaring contrast in quality.

And this is only for the titles Netflix offers in HD: there are many, probably due to licensing issues, which are offered only in SD resolution (which can be confirmed during playback vie the web player debugger). Netflix originals, while seemingly having the most consistent quality, still suffer from poor encoding issues I've noticed, which makes me think most of all that this is aggressive bandwidth management if even their own titles aren't given a proper encoding treatment.

And then for 4k playback on PC, it's required you have not only a compatible browser or app (4k playback in Firefox will not work), but also a recent CPU that supports hardware DRM - just awful. The future of streaming is bleak if you ask me, albeit convenient for the average consumer. And I guess that's the real demographic.

Most people don't even set the right aspect ratio on content. They don't care about quality.

I've seen people watch warped video because they, for some reason, prefer it to bars on the screen.

It's well known that netflix is serving low quality bitrate. What they sell as HD is approaching the 480p from youtube from years ago.

It's marketing bullshit and cost savings, slapping the word HD on everything to lure the customers. Cut the bitrate to save on bandwidth costs.

Many homes don't have the 8+ Mbps required to stream high quality videos, they couldn't get HD even if they wanted to.

Doesn't mean people were wrong 15 years ago. At the time most of those things were real issues. Especially speed.

As Real "buffering ..." Networks found to their chagrin.

Speed and data caps. 100GB doesn’t last long when you’re streaming Netflix and YouTube all day.

Same arguments are made against streaming gaming today! Even on HN

Self driving cars is probably a better example

2 weeks ago I was about to sign up for Xfinity cable and internet. At the end of long phone call with a data center rep where I carefully chose every package that I thought I would need, (for a total cost of ~90 $ before tax), the rep informed me that there was a 9 dollar "broadcat TV fee" and a 6 dollar "live sports fee" that were applied to every single cable package offered (but not mentioned in any of promo ads. I was so disgusted I cancelled right then and there. Oh, and that 90$ was a teaser fee with a 1 year contract (I've had a contract with direcTV but never cable). The entire experience was so dishonest that I didn't care if they were offering the best price (they weren't). Over the next week I demoed slingTV and the streaming direcTV service before setting on youtubeTV. Never going back.

20 years ago I worked on a project for streaming films in South America. It was simply not viable: the few that had internet used dialup. A few years later, ADSL started to show up. This year I myself cancelled cable and switched to streaming as sole source of video.

I'd like to know the thinking behind streaming films in South America 20 years ago please!

This particular project was about distributing European films in Brazil. It wasn't a bad idea (obviously), it was just a bit ahead of its time. In each state you'll find that about a third or even half of the population lives in or around the capital (where the infrastructure is best). The problem was that you couldn't get a fast enough connection into people's homes.

Non-American here. Why are cable and satellite under 2 different categories? Aren’t they the same providers, offering the same services? For example in Australia we have Foxtel, depending on where you live you will get connected to the service either by cable or with a satellite dish, so it wouldn’t make sense to put satellite and cable into different categories. Maybe in the US it’s a different situation?

Different providers typically but the same service in the end.

Thank you, yes I just did some research and I can see that there are several providers, many of them offering only one type of connection (satellite or cable). I agree with your statement "same service in the end" since the television channels on offer are mostly the same.

I always said the university made some sort of mistake when they gave me a math teachers masters and, let's face it, that was decades ago.

But still. This article has an inconsistency that doesn't require any particularly high level of math understanding.

> world’s entertainment market — encompassing both theatrical and home releases — grew to a new high in 2018: $96.8 billion

repeat:

> consumers spent $96.8 billion on entertainment around the world.

compare to:

> cable subscriptions still rake in the most money, increasing in 2018 by $6.2 billion to $118 billion

Erm, what?

And I checked the original PDF, the same sort of headscratcher is in there: apparently people spent more on cable subscription than on entertainment which is obviously (?) impossible.

The $96.8 billion is just talking about movies, and the cable subscription total is just for sub fees.

Nope.

> on entertainment around the world. The international theatrical box office grew to $41.1 billion (spending in the US and Canada grew to $11.9 billion), while home entertainment hit $55.7 billion internationally.

Right. Box office being when someone sees a movie in a theater. Home being when they rent or buy a movie. Still doesn't mean the cable _subscription_ numbers have to be smaller.

This is surprising to me. I had thought that streaming surpassed cable long ago.

I wonder what those numbers would be if everyone had broadband. Everyone I know who has satellite or mobile hotspot internet can't use streaming media. For them it's impractical or too expensive.

Didn't see anything regarding what they consider a subscription. Are hotels, hospitals, bars, nursing homes etc. lumped in with the figures?

I haven't watched TV in almost a decade. We keep ourselves entertained with Netflix, Blurays, Prime, HBO Go, and the occasional torrent for content that is not available in our country.

And because of MPAA, there are still no DRM-free stores to buy video today.

And yet, without my cable company I could not stream.

I do wonder how Netflix can stay competitive in this market. They already have lots of debt, new competitors coming up, stock price is quite high. It seems they need to produce or license new content, so people do not cancel. But licensing content gets harder as competitors start their own services.

85% of new spending at netflix is for original content. That's building a huge moat that will be hard for others to cross. I'd personally cancel our Hulu or HBO subscriptions before we touched Netflix.

That’s the problem. Any original content that Netflix funds it only has one way to recoup it - subscription sells.

Any money that Disney makes from Disney+ is just additional profit. It’s already recouped most of its costs through theatrical releases, commercial network tv, video on demand, etc.

Netflix also has to borrow money externally. The other companies getting into streaming have free cash flow to prop up streaming.

Even Apple can operate its streaming service at a loss and its just a rounding error.

I wish they would have a cheaper plan for non-original content only.

Netflix takes in 1.4 Billion dollars every month. All the content they add stays and builds up value. If they want to branch out, they can start doing live events.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273883/netflixs-quarterl...

I'm shocked that they haven't started streaming women's football (soccer). It's growing like crazy and compared to the men's game it's extremely cheap.

That would be just momentary money throughput, there would be zero long tail accumulation. Redistributing sports is a "now" business without any story about why tomorrow will be golden to tell investors. If you lose money today streaming sports you will lose money tomorrow, because there is no way to assume that right holders will ever agree to better conditions. Every growth you may have will just be absorbed by them. It might still be a path for a bootstrapping streamer, but for an investment heavyweight like Netflix it would just dilute growth potential.

To be fair. Their soon to be largest competitor, Disney+, parent company Disney does $3B+ profit per quarter. And $15B+ revenue per quarter. This is before their additional Fox profits and revenue they’ll get. So soon they’ll be even more of a mammoth compared to Netflix.

$1.4Billion a month in revenue is about what Disney makes in profit. Disney+ is going to be Netflix’s largest competitor. They have decades of evergreen content and now they have Fox’s library.

They could leverage the edge cache they have to get into streaming games. Or maybe build a YouTube competitor.

What would be a compelling differentiator from what YouTube offers?

Better customer service and content management? YouTube's system for handling copyright claims is a huge mess and they don't have much incentive to fix it without a serious competitor. They've burned a lot of creators and some people would jump ship if there was a fairer alternative.

Netflix could also leverage the same strategy Hulu or the Epic Store has... pay/incentivize creators and partners for exclusivity. I hate this strategy as a consumer, but it does seem to be effective.

Higher-brow comments?

Not incentivizing propoganda directed at children?

There aren't many YouTube competitors because the upfront investment is high. And building a userbase from zero is hard.

Netflix already has most of what's needed in terms of infrastructure and talent.

It wouldn't need to beat YouTube. It could also offer something like what Vimeo does.

Edit: I wonder if buying Roku would be a good move. Their competitors all have players.

It seems lately that there's been a lot of hate for YouTube, with it's demonetizations and copy right strikes.

I can see them basically poaching top YouTube talent and telling them, we'll pay for your show, just it has to be on our platform.

Netflix would need completely new discovery mechanisms if they wanted to give YouTube level content any form of visibility without throwing the perceived overall quality of their offerings under the bus.

And YouTube has this weird moat: people know and accept that almost everything YouTube offers is crazily bad clickbait, but this is what enables the exotic gems. People just know to focus on the good parts and not hold the rest against the platform. YouTube only got there through a combination of boiling frog effect and an extremely forgiving audience back when the novelty factor of streaming video dominated their perception. Any new competitor would be instantly burned for even just 10% of the crap ratio that nobody is even noticing on YouTube.