Verizon, who are well known for being affordable, honest, and "with the times", has announced they're going to bring back "cable" subscriptions - you give verizon a flat rate, and they get you all of the streaming services, presumably for less than you'd pay for them individually.

Yes, the first part is obvious facetiousness.

I wish consumer protection laws applied to cell phone providers. I shopped around a while back, and walked into an AT&T, TMobile, and Verizon store.

They all had big ass signs in the front window saying $25/month per line (with a bunch of fine print that can't be read from outside the store).

Of course, none of them will honor that pricing. Also, none of them actually publish their prices. The best I got was some hand written scrawl from the the customer service person, who had memorized their pricing table.

Of course, after handing the piece of paper to me, he said something like, "so that'll be $85 per line, but in practice your bill will probably be $110. I've seen some people end up with $115/month".

Anyway, that's a long way of saying they can offer to pay me to subscribe to their crappy whatever service, and I'll still refuse.

But you’re getting unlimited data! :)

For what it’s worth I pay $25/mo on Visible, Verizon’s discount carrier, and have been quite happy.

This sounds insane and I'm incredibly happy for the situation we have in the EU.

You see "9,99€ / month" for a mobile plan? That's the full price they will take from you each month, no more. Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.

>Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.

I haven't seen that but I have had marketing phones where they insistently tried to upsell me on random shit ("security protection") or to increase bandwidth (I had 300Mbit/s, they wanted to sell me 600Mbit/s)

> Only exception being the home fiber lines, which start at 24,99€/month but progressively increase every couple months to reach upwards of 30€/month.

I (Sweden) haven't seen this before, where has this been used?

I pay 5 euros for 5G plan with unlimited calls and almost unlimited Internet. You can even take 4 plans for 2 euros each at promotion. :)

And 10Gbit FTTH from the same provider is just 12 euros. :)

Which country/provider is that?

Romania / Digi

Consumer Cellular FTW

At this point the only people left using the infrastructure companies directly don't care about money. For each of the infrastructure providers, there are many competitively prived MVNOs. You should be able to get a posh plan for ~$40/mo, and a bare bones paygo for $10/3mo.

Disagree here. T-Mobile’s advertised price is what I pay. Yes it’s with their “autopay” discount. But they’ve not had hidden fees.

> instead of just going "pay us X per view, regardless of who you are"

Yeah and this is actually how the music industry is doing this and it works great. Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer etc all work fine alongside one another.

Sadly, I think you'll find the artists have a much less rosy view of that.

"We'll cut the people creating that art's earnings down to millicent's per stream and even screw them over on that, and we'll share all the profits equitably between the rent seeking middle men" doesn't really count as "works great" for everybody...

Isn't that how the music industry has always worked? The record labels have always screwed artists, except the biggest ones.

But anyway, it's better than getting nothing like it used to be :) Spotify and the like have really managed to stop piracy.

It s unfair to say that I think. First, an artist doesnt only work for money, there is an element of fame and love for the craft that is bigger than in other profession. Then, I mean, nobody forced them to sign a label and if there was a way to make the audience pay more they d have found it by now.

With a label "screwing them", they get more famous, practice the craft more often in front of more people, and get more money out of it.

Because let s be honest, what s the thing you can cut the fastest in your budget ? Movies, music and paintings. It s a difficult profession with a difficult billing. Labels help more than they screw, up to the artists to shop around for one that has good marketing for a cheaper fee.

Isn't that a problem of the respective companies taking too big of a cut, rather than method itself ?

"works great", maybe for consumer

... which is the person our governments should be optimizing for..

Isn't it in the consumer's best interest that the creator is also happy and well compensated as well and that a fair, competitive ecosystem of middle-men (distributors) exists?

Most of the money is going to middlemen tho. That's the problem.

It's quite fun that this is essentially the pre-50s Hollywood vertical integration again. I expect this will eventually end with antitrust legislation and mandatory licencing to third parties.

Same situation with sports broadcasting rights.

Exclusivity does not serve the customer.