@mrmhead Said
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Lol, yes. I had more to say, but was afraid I wouldn’t be able to edit in time, as something came up.
I wasn’t clear on the line you were drawing from net neutrality to cable broadcasts, as one deals with internet content and the other deals with content directly delivered via cable lines. While I am sure one can make a connection of sorts, I’ll leave that up to you.
Regardless, my take on the merger and the future of content delivery:
Traditional live TV cable packages are slowly and inevitably going to a death. Millions are already cutting their live TV packages in favor of internet on-demand content services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and HBO Now (with more to come, namely Apple and Disney). People are less and less interested in being forced to view something live rather than view it on demand at their own convenient time, less and less interested in waiting a whole week to see episode 2 rather than viewing the next episode immediately after the end of the first one, and especially less and less interested in paying $50 per month for one or two shows or channels and hundreds of shows and channels they won’t watch rather than paying only $10-$15 a month on a more targeted list of certain favorite shows. And all this becomes more the case as younger viewers take over older viewers more used to live broadcasting.
That being said, with viewership shifting to the internet as a result (where Netflix, etc exists), net neutrality becomes more relevant. Cable companies have a stake in the internet as a service provider, so they can recoup the losses of cable cutting by raising internet broadband prices and capping data. However, with the advent of 5G just around the corner, we will soon see broadband as a thing of the past as well, since everything will eventually be able to be delivered wirelessly with equal speed. Enter competition, which will keep prices at bay.
So yes, deals could be struck between the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and wireless carriers like ATT and Verizon, but I suspect the price difference won’t be as debilitating. Huge price differences would stifle viewership for those guys, so, while HBO may offer a discount of a few dollars for customers of ATT over Verizon, I would guess it we won’t see something like $30 for Verizon customers and $10 for ATT customers unless HBO wants to see huge losses, which I am sure they don’t. And, besides, it would still beat paying $50 a month for tons of live content you have zero interest in viewing at all.