Comments on: Will more competition finally mean better TV?

Everyone from the the cable companies to the phone companies want you to subscribe to their networks. That's good...probably.

[cvaldes1831]

"Bewkes also noted that the most important thing is simply providing access to the content."

Now that we settled that, when will I see it on my iPod touch? Or how about my HD set at home with an OTA antenna?

I'm not paying Comcast $800 a year for programming.

I mostly watch sports, so the current online offerings are basically useless.

[monkeyfun14]

Phone companies have the TV.

But cable still holds superior in raw internet speeds. The only one who can compete with Comcast in the United States on speed is Verizon but their service is still widely unavailable and expensive.

[cvaldes1831]

Broadband Internet is horribly overpriced here in the United States.

Many other countries (Southeast Asia, much of Europe) have leapfrogged past the U.S. In some places, you are getting 10x speed at the same price that we pay.

U.S. broadband providers are pathetic.

[monkeyfun14]

@cvaldes

The thing is much of these areas are also smaller or more compact.

The United States by its could take up most of Europe.

[ricster131]

Coc communications gives me 100mbps for $50

[cvaldes1831]

@monkeyfun14:

Actually some of the countries I'm thinking about have similar population densities as the U.S. One example is Sweden -- their broadband is one of those places that's about 10x ours at the same price. They have basically the same population density.

U.S. broadband providers have no excuse.

[gsigas]

Since the U.S. has 33x times the population and 20x the area I can understand why the national averages cannot approach the same speeds as Sweden or Japan, however, there should be metro regions in the U.S. offering similar levels of price/speed and there aren't. The fastest U.S. cities are about 1/3 to 1/2 the speed they should be for about 2 to 4 times the cost. So I agree with cvaldes1831, that the U.S. broadband provider excuses only hold water when applied to the nation as a whole (I don't expect the middle-of-nowhere USA to have 100Mps) , but not when applied to metropolitan regions (I would expect every city of over 250K people in the U.S. to have much faster and cheaper broadband at this point).

[gertruded]

On the high price in the US, with inferior connections, welcome to the American version of capitalism called corporate control of government.

[Endbringer]

@gertruded

Don't you mean "government control of corporations"? Because from where I see it, the communications industry is highly regulated by the government. Also, what about government ownership of the automotive, banking & financial, soon-to-be healthcare, energy, etc.

[monkeyfun14]

@Endbringer


Look what happens in china with their poorly regulated corporations.

We get poisonous toothpaste and lead filled toys.

[Endbringer]

@monkeyfun14

Did you seriously just compare the United States regulations to China?

[Mergatroid Mania]

@Endbringer

If your government did not have partial ownership of the automotive, banking & financial, soon-to-be healthcare, energy, etc industries, they would have gone under. Are you telling me that the global recession we are undergoing right now is because of government regulation? If you believe that you're not paying attention to your history. The great depression of the 1930s was caused by greedy banks with no regulations. Afterward, the government had no choice but to regulate the greediest portion of the population (bankers) to try and prevent it from happening again. But, no, the greedy bankers found a way around the regulations and caused the current global recession, once again proving that the banking sector absolutely requires regulation or they will suck the life blood out of every other person on the face of the planet. In order to try and prevent the rest of the planet getting sucked down with them, the governments had to take partial ownership and feed them billions of dollars to try and keep them afloat and prevent another "Great Depression", the problem is the greedy bankers took those billions and put them in their pockets in the form of bonuses. How long will people like you see the obvious right in front of their noses before they realize that big business absolutely requires regulations to reign in their greed?

As for the bandwidth problem, it has to do with the area involved, not just the population density. The larger the area the harder it is to get all this highspeed bandwidth distributed to the entire population. I live in Canada, and we are the second largest country in the world behind Russia. We have even worse highspeed bandwidth than the U.S. does. Of course, being such a large country with only the population of New York State we have a hard time getting services to every area. Some areas have a huge population density and other areas have very low density, but the crappy bandwidth is basically a problem from one end of the country to the other.
What kills me is that the cable and phone companies always make large profits no matter what the state of the economy is.

[gerrrg]

I personally think that Boxee has a greater chance of making a paradigm shift in how we receive our entertainment, by merging online and offline sources, with support for windows, mac and linux. With enough prodding, cable stations may eventually move more of their content for general access online...Comedy Channel is nearly already there.

[ofmyony]

Note to internet service providers; Provide a complete ISP package, mobile and home. Verizon and AT&T can offer you one bill, which would be nice. Plus by combining packages they can offer me flexibility and cost savings.

Instead of bundling voip, cable tv, and internet access which is a dying model, they should offer home and mobile internet bundling. Time Warner and Comcast can't match what Verizon and AT&T can offer. If I was Time Warner or Comcast I would be in a rush to buy Sprint and T-Mobile. The major cable companies are going to need a mobile option to compete with AT&T and Verizon. Look for some big mergers in 2010 everything has changed.

[freemarket--2008]

Why do you think Comcast dumped a few billion into Wi-Max? The current 3G is too slow and expensive. Soon there will be a 4G wireless option for less.

[missingxtension2]

Actually, Verizon does a horrible job of billing people.
They have screwed over everyone I recommended, they literately ripped us off.
So whats the future of television? Crappy productions, and the same show rerun 20x a week.
Don't believe me? look at how many times tbs puts a premiere movie for then.
Saturday, Sunday, Monday morning, Tuesday midnight and so on into the next week until the month is over. Then they run marathons of rerun shows, then they lack original content. Reality television has already passed and left its mark, its no longer the future.
While Video On Demand is nice, they still don't provide VOD premieres.
The shows are always going to be rerun on demand, and the original producers are still going to try to milk them,
Then you will get companies like time warner that no longer want to offer services out of bundle because they spent so much on upgrades that were badly needed.
There is one good thing about the new television though, the customer is behind the drivers seat.
But is that a good thing? What happens when the customer does the work of the programing director?
I already don't watch television, i get it from the net.
So i dont have a need for television services, unless its pbs, no wait i get their content online too. The local PBS station does a horrible job.........

[worried1]

All this really means is that there are more ways to nickel and dime us to death. If you want the HD it means you need a box for each TV, better off with the over the air if you can get it. Cablevision moved 19 channels over so you can?t just use a TV no matter what type; you have to have a converter box. I used to watch SiFi on all my TVs now I can get the HD and non-HD SiFi but only via the converter box. Verizon needs a box for each TV no matter what you want to watch. What good are 5 HBO channels if they all recycle the same movies? Like someone else said most of the channels show the same reruns over and over. The only real thing these changes do for me is to get me away from the TV.

[krizhek]

All I want is a plan where I pick the channels can view them online and pie.

(This also makes me sadly remember the attempt to buy TechTV watchers back in the day, I lost hope that day.)

[ddesy]

Yay! We get to pay more money for more semi-working non-features!

Seriously, what we need for TV isn't more features. It's a price drop to make it more affordable!

[Button Boy]

It still comes down to content. Tivo has awakened everyone to the reality of alternate delivery transports, and that is all the providers offer for the most part. They all offer the same poor choices of content though.

As Bruce Springsteen once wrote "Fifty-Seven channels and nothing on"

[marvin25]

This is basically not true as there has been the conversion did with one ISP bringing broadband to rural America. The cable, telecoms and satellite companies are worried about their customers come into their area as they lose customers fast. They give true bandwidth which is no up and down which the others give and they have no cap on monthly bandwidth. Most of the content providers only care about customers of this ISP as that where most of their feeds go. There requirements have pushed Google not to have enough bandwidth. It isn't what Comcast has in streams as Google has to bring in more bandwidth to handle the load for this ISP. TV is not worried about the cable people at all except this ISP as people who go on to their service drop cable and satellite and they are trying to stop this from happening. They are also putting on customers on broadband as fast as they can get bandwidth at the major nodes. So the bottom line it not cable or telecoms controlling what is happening but this ISP growth.

[Mergatroid Mania]

Go back and reread your comment. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Do you never proofread your comments before hitting the Submit button? I would be interested to read what you actually meant to say, but your translation of your thoughts into text failed pretty badly somewhere along the line.

[cpdb]

[ "Don't you mean "government control of corporations"? Because from where I see it, the communications industry is highly regulated by the government. Also, what about government ownership of the automotive, banking & financial, soon-to-be healthcare, energy, etc." ]

Don't be so foolish as to think that our Government bailed out the most egregious examples of monopolies, oligopolies, Cooperate irresponsibility and exploitation because the government was controlling or regulating those companies. Meh, Quite the opposite, Large corporations for eight years under the GOP protection ran rough shot over regulations and practically dismantled citizens protections in every department, SEC, FDA, USDA, EPA, FCC... The regulations that remain in place are there in large part to make it more difficult for new competition to enter the market place. This why comcast ( which is owned by AT&T along with SBC in case you forgot) Can demand ridiculous prices, for inferior products and terrible customer service. Doesn't anybody wonder why only Comcast/AT&T can use the cable system here. The users/consumers have payed for that infrastructure years ago.

If Japan or S.Korea could compete in the U.S. to offer Broadband, Comcast would be as irrelevant as Mopar* inside of two years. There was a reason the government broke up AT&T in the 70's. It's because when Capital hungry Cooperate giants get to big, they Suck. They give you less and charge more, why? >BECAUSE THEY CAN!!! < and because you and people like you let them get away with it. Of coarse they want the Government to bail them out when they FAIL, but don't want interference while they're raping the country. You want better products? Don't call Comcast, call your Senators and Congress persons. I say Break up AT&T again. Free the cable lines and airwaves to small companies. Then you'll see some new products and job growth.

[wolivere]

At least where I live I can get TV either by phone, or Cable. And the phone companies system is pretty slick. http://www.mts.ca/hdtv/

But I must admit my new Cable speeds are nice 100mb down 25mb up. Although I hear MTS is shortly coming with 100mb/100mb DSL service.

The only poor side is we can't stream a lot of TV from the US...

[Mergatroid Mania]

Dude, I live in Winnipeg as well, and the "new highspeed data rates" you're referring to are an embarrassment, and nothing to brag about at all. Actually, you can pretty much take the speeds you mention and multiply them by 5. Our highest data rate for cable that I know of is 500mb if you purchase the most expensive cable package. That's still nothing to brag about.

For anyone who read my earlier rant about Canada being so big and having even worse highspeed than the U.S., you can see just how bad they are. The funny thing is how these large companies can convince a population that doesn't know any better that their current speeds are so good. The city we live in has a population of only 500,000, so we only have five over-the-air TV stations, none of which are digital or in HD. The only way we can get HD is to pay the extortion fees for the way overpriced HD services from either cable or phone companies.

You guys in the U.S. have it better than you think you do.

[ppenberthy]

I find it interesting that Comcast says it wants to retain it's customers. In Seattle they are forcing the digital box on thier customers even if you have a digital TV. It feels like I've gone back in history 20 years to the days when you had to use a set top box to watch cable tv. I hate this. My TIVO has now become useless and if I want it to work I was told I had to rent a digital converter from them for $10 a month. I was a satisfied customer before they made this change.

[ssco00]

I already have cable with several hundred options. Most are re-runs shown repeatedly with what seem to be even more and longer commercial breaks than in the past. Some channels are nothing but non-stop commercials and others have hours a day of the same. There is very little new material and most of that is trash.

[hhs2112]

"People spend an average of six hours a day in front of the TV"

[nocman]

Comcast owned by Att and SBC? don't you mean cingular which was the cellular phone company.

It wasComcast and Time warner cable that did some fancy foot work in swapping territories.

Att uverse is in direct comptition with comcast cable via ip technology.

[disco-legend-zeke]

More Channels than i can watch. Some i can't even understand (Korean and Spanish) 24 hours a day of home shopping, a channel devoted to Old Tv shows, a music channel...

All free over the air. And there would be twice as many if our government had not SOLD the bandwith to the greedy cell phone companies.

[worried1]

In reply to the COMCAST complaint and their pricing; Cablevision did the same thing that is forcing you to use a converter box for many non-HD channels no matter what type of TV you have. Like I said before I lost 19 channels but I can get as many of the infomercial channels I want without the converter box som bargain.

[setjeff15081947]

Big Market? Yep! Small Market, like mine, is still a backwater dominated by Charter Communications, consigned to bankruptcy and dedicated to taking as much of my money as possible and giving as little in return as they can get away with, and a bunch of fly-by-night satellite providers who provide nothing except monthly bills.
Video On-Demand; reliable high-speed internet; viewing options of where and when I wish to. Never heard of ?em ? and I believe it will be many decades before I do.
But, being a slightly vengeful person, I hope I will eventually get that opportunity ? and a chance to kick ol? Charter Communications in their arrogant behind.
HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! ? Down the drain, you !@#$%^&*().

[Captain Bebops]

Welcome to the United States of Scamerica. The cable, satellite and phone companies behave like they're the descendants of the snake oil salesmen of the Old West. Maybe they are. What happened to genre type program packages? They used to have those. More is not better. It is just a way to scam you into helping their golden goose.

I was looking at a Canadian satellite provider site recently and they have genre
packages at $8 a pop and $5 for five or more. There are family, sports, movie, documentary, variety, news, etc, packages. That would work much better for me. My HD DVR costs me $40 a month rental though they say it is $10 but you can't have it unless you have the extended basic $30 package. So if I want basic cable and a couple of premium channels I still can't have the DVR. I believe that is known as three card monty.

I would throw a block party if these companies went bankrupt. They so richly deserve it.