• BuckFutter@timeyak.com
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    1 day ago

    Yah literally everyone with more than two brain cells saw this coming…start out cheap to suck you in to kill competition and then raise prices every quarter…

    • OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I got a bone to pick with this kind of statement. Before they started raising prices exorbitantly, the techbros (mainly) all over social media would bite my head off for even suggesting their beloved tech companies would dare do so such things. It was a minority of voices who said they would inevitably follow the cable model. Did that ever chap some asses.

      I was right.

      Quite frankly the period roughly spanning the 2010s was wild with how enamored everyone was with tech companies.

      • BuckFutter@timeyak.com
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        1 day ago

        Hahahaha oh my god, i remember those conversations and I also remember taking the same stance you did and told everyone that would listen it was only a matter if time before the honeymoon phase ends and the extortion begins…hell wasn’t there a meme going around back in the 2000’s that showed this exact thing happening

    • Sunshine@piefed.ca
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      1 day ago

      Yup, while attacking the older generation from educating the young about the good things in the past, can’t let those pleb kids have physical bank notes.

  • Deacon@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    And what additional value are consumers getting in return for these ludicrous price rises?

    Nothing but shit and slop.

  • BooBees@fedinsfw.app
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    1 day ago

    Excuse me while I grab my fainting salts, I am so SHOCKED to find exactly what I expected has occurred!

  • Sunshine@piefed.ca
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    1 day ago

    They took away my headphone jack and now they’re taking away my PlayStation disc reader so they can force me to stream movies and video games.

  • blackberry28@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    They can get away with that simply because there are enough lazy people who don’t care about the price hikes. I swear we have reached a form of late-stage capitalism where corpos have indoctrinated people in such a way, that they don’t even consider the thought of simply not consuming something.

  • thenextguy@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Still, cable was like $75 - $100 a month for me, iirc. Streaming services I pay for one at a time until I run out of things to watch, then switch services for a while.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Cable also had difficult connection and disconnection processes. You had to call the company, schedule an installer (maybe take time off work). When you canceled, your bill didn’t stop until you drove the cable box to the cable company. Oh, you had to pay monthly to rent the cable box and even rent the remote too!

        Streaming, for all its faults, is still a superior experience.

        • The_v@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          They tried to charge me for the free digital conversion boxes they sent out when they converted their basic cable from analog to digital. That was a fun conversation with the poor box collection service that called me.

          “Hold on, you are trying to collect the FREE boxes, that had NO charge on my bill, that I was expressly told were FREE. If I don’t return them, you want to charge me $200 for the FREE boxes they sent me?”

          “As they were sent to me for FREE, not for rent, they are mine. If you want them back I will sell them to you for $400.”

          • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 day ago

            None of that matters. Equipment being offered for free doesn’t mean it’s yours and doesn’t mean your not contractually obligated to return it.

            • The_v@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              Without invoicing a nominal amount they forfeited ownership in my jurisdiction. They later changed to charging $1 a year for them for new customers. They also had to send the invoice with-in a year. I had them for like 7 years.

              At the change-over the government forced them to offer them for free.

              • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                22 hours ago

                Wait, your jurisdiction has a law requiring corporations charge for required equipment. Do you not see how that is anti-consumer?

                Bizzare. You got lucky. Everyone else has to pay for something the company didn’t want to charge for.

                • The_v@lemmy.world
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                  21 hours ago

                  It’s a pretty common law in many countries.

                  Mailing an item to someone without a charge or an agreement of a charge means that it’s their property. You can not charge people for an item delivered for free after the fact. This is to stop scammers from sending you an item for “free”, then sending you a surprise huge bill a few months later. It was a pretty popular scam historically.

          • adarza@lemmy.ca
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            1 day ago

            they were ‘free’ as in no per-month rental fees… for an undisclosed period of time, anyway. they certainly would have started charging monthly for them at some point. the cable company would not ever willingly send out free, no-strings-attached electronics equipment you never had to return and was yours-to-keep.

            • The_v@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              State forced them to send them out as part of the digital conversion. It was a condition of allowing the change.

    • adarza@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      25 years ago, i had cable with all the ‘premiums’, and internet… for less than what that same company gets just for the slowest ‘available’ internet (only) today. despite the cost to deliver bits to the home being lower now. yes. it’s faster today but the speed i had before was enough to watch a stream in realtime. it’d still be enough to watch an hd stream today (and then by extension, ‘fast enough’ for anything else i care to do at home). i never asked for faster, i wanted to keep the ‘cheaper’ but that’s not an option. they want their 90 percent pure profit. the shareholders demand it.

      • thenextguy@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I had just spectrum Internet for years and the price and speed just kept going up. I agree I don’t need 300mbps.

        I switched to 5g mint mobile for a third of the cost and half the speed.

        When I quit spectrum they said I should just call them whenever the price was too high and they’d give me some promotional price for 12 months or so. That just pissed me off more.

  • Axolotl@feddit.it
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    1 day ago

    Streaming is just cable but you can choose what to watch rn, heck you even get ads on lower tier subscriptions

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      1 day ago

      The big promise of streaming was that you were supposed to only need to subscribe to individual channels of content. It turns out the major streamers are still providing some bundling.

  • kenjen@feddit.online
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    1 day ago

    Dumb headline:

    • premium ad free didnae exist in cable
    • Greedy bastards in Hollywood got greedier: The method of delivery is not the reason, just the excuse.
    • The fact that some of us let all these media companies create their own service and demand the streaming infra pricetags is part of the problem. If Americans refused to jump ship for Friends and Marvel and whatever else, we might actually just have Hulu and Netflix and the infra costs would be be lower. Instead people flocked to greedy Dickney et al and got screwed in the process. This is not an attempt to claim Netflix or Hulu wouldnae have triez to raise rates, just to point  out that their argument to do so would have been harder.
  • Ptsf@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s still so much better than it was. At least with most services I can pay to opt out of ads, that didn’t exist for cable.

    • Schal330@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      We also have control of what we want to watch and when, and can cancel and move between services.

      My parents used to spend £35 a month for 300 channels of which they would only watch one or two of, and they had no control of when they could watch what they wanted unless they paid extra for the ability to record shows.

      I moved them over to a broadband only deal and they hop between streaming service subs now. It saves them a good amount of money each month and they can watch what they want when they want.

      Streaming services are far from perfect, but they are ad free (if you pay for it) and give you greater control.