AT&T TV Now raising prices by 30% next month

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Re: AT&T TV Now raising prices by 30% next month

Post by rusty » Sat Oct 19, 2019 9:52 am

I guess they won't have any subscribers left after next month. :biggrin
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Re: AT&T TV Now raising prices by 30% next month

Post by tvroadmin » Mon Oct 21, 2019 11:55 am

The illusion that migrating from a satellite/cable pay TV service to a streaming pay TV service will result in huge savings for the TV consumer is now being shattered. It is like one sheep promising to protect another sheep from a pack of wolves. :lol:

And it gets worse than the higher prices. It is now being reported that the telecom grids throughout the USA are saturated with video content, so much so, that many are complaining they can hardly watch streaming TV content during peak TV viewing hours (6-10pm) without serious buffering and freezing? So, who will pay to upgrade the national telecom grid to subsidize the hoards of TV streamers (aka cheapskates :mrgreen: )? :scratchingmyhead:

Although there is no such thing as a free lunch, you'll come pretty damn close with a C band satellite dish!
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Re: AT&T TV Now raising prices by 30% next month

Post by Victoria » Wed Oct 23, 2019 4:45 am

tvroadmin wrote:
Mon Oct 21, 2019 11:55 am
And it gets worse than the higher prices. It is now being reported that the telecom grids throughout the USA are saturated with video content, so much so, that many are complaining they can hardly watch streaming TV content during peak TV viewing hours (6-10pm) without serious buffering and freezing? So, who will pay to upgrade the national telecom grid to subsidize the hoards of TV streamers (aka cheapskates :mrgreen: )? :scratchingmyhead:

What the heck are you talking about? The "telecom grid" ? The Internet's fiber backbones have plenty of bandwidth to serve up streaming video services, even during peak hours.

My fiber connection never drops below 600 Mbps during peak hours. When I had a 1 Gbps connection from the cable company, it also never dropped below 600 Mbps. The days of the Internet being too congested to reliably stream videos are over and DOCSIS 3.1 has ensured that even the most over-subscribed, heavily congested cable nodes still have more than enough bandwidth to stream multiple video streams from streaming services during peak hours. :spin

The main problem with linear television has never been about the wires or wireless waves that carry it to your house.

The problem with traditional television services has always been with the inflexible structure of linear TV.

Having to follow a schedule and worry about missing episodes vs. just watching anything you want on demand any time you want starting from episode 1, the commercials, the irritating channel logos and twitter hashtag spam and other nonsense they plaster over the screen, the sat/cable companies not carrying the channels you want, over-compression caused by catering to people with outdated equipment because the broadcasters and cable companies are too cheap to upgrade their equipment. MPEG-2 should have been a dead video codec a decade ago yet still it lives on today, 16 years after the advent of H.264, because cable companies still have ancient receivers in the field they don't want to pay to replace...

Linear television is on its way out the door and flexible on demand streaming services like Netflix are king! I never watch anything "live" and haven't in over a decade. Even everything I tune from my satellite dishes, I end up just streaming the recorded copies from my Plex server and I watch my satellite recordings any time I want on demand in a Netflix-style interface:

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The future of television is in on demand streaming services, not in linear TV services. Linear TV services that are delivered via the Internet solve none of the problems that caused people to flee to services like Netflix. I only still have a C-band dish because there is still quite a lot of material uplinked to the C-band in qualities higher than you can find on any service. NHK World HD is a great example. The copies they make available to stream on their website are utter trash quality and their uplink on 58W looks so much better. So I go out of the way to record NHK World from 58W and archive recordings from that version of their channel on my machine while ignoring their website entirely.

C-band is still king for live events like concerts, sports, and reality show/documentary material that doesn't typically make it to services like Amazon or Netflix. But for scripted television series and movies, C-band is blown out of the water in the quality department by the streaming services and by Blu-ray releases for that content.

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Re: AT&T TV Now raising prices by 30% next month

Post by tvroadmin » Wed Oct 23, 2019 12:18 pm

FTTH (Fiber-to-the-home) is still quite rare, even in the metro areas. The biggest problem is the last mile. Most of you have copper (twisted or coax) coming over over this last mile and into your homes (your internet provider can call it fiber internet, but it really isn't). The longer the cable run, the less data it can carry. So until upgrades are made, rural America will be stuck with speeds of 2-3 Mbps at best.

The fiber backbone and terminal equipment is also a problem. The last major upgrades were undertaken just over two decades ago to bring DSL broadband to the masses. Certain assumptions about bandwidth consumption had to be made back then, like for example, how much bandwidth is used per customer to browse the internet and exchange emails? Maybe on average 0.2Mbps? Today those assumptions are no longer valid. If each household requires a minimum of 4Mbps (h.264) HD per streaming device, the telecom designers would have to upgrade the network to accommodate at least 20Mbps (if not more) for each last mile connection at peak capacity. Multiply that by a factor of 5x if you want to accommodate 4K transmissions. This means the backbone has to be upgraded too.

Someone will have to pay for it. 5G wireless connectivity is suppose to be a band-aid solution for the last mile. Rather than laying fiber to each home, they will zap you with highly directional microwave antennas and reuse spectrum they are in the process of stealing from the C band satellite operators. It still won't be as good as FTTH and I don't think they will find sufficient spectrum for 4K TV. The smart money is betting on ATSC3.0 for the widespread adoption of 4K linear TV.

There is already quite a bit of 4K linear TV on C band (see 101W), but nothing from the streaming linear TV providers yet, even though they have access to h.265 encoders. This should tell you a LOT about the current state of the internet infrastructure in the USA.

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Re: AT&T TV Now raising prices by 30% next month

Post by tvroadmin » Wed Oct 23, 2019 2:52 pm

Victoria wrote:
Wed Oct 23, 2019 4:45 am
The future of television is in on demand streaming services, not in linear TV services.

Doubtful. We know that millions are cancelling pay TV every couple of months. We also know that only a small fraction of those actually sign up for a streaming service. Those pay TV streaming services (e.g. Netflix and Sling) will be the next to collapse (Directv Now has already collapsed). It is easy to connect the dots and see why this all transpiring when you understand that labor is treated like GARBAGE in the USA. :boo!

Goodbye Middle Class: 50% Of American Workers Make Less Than $33,000 A Year
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