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Bloomberg

Why Cable Bills Are Going Up Again

Dec 28, 2015  •  Post A Comment

Even as a growing number of consumers are opting out of traditional pay TV in favor of over-the-top services and other streaming alternatives, the price of the average cable bill is once again on the rise.

“Time Warner Cable Inc., Comcast Corp., Dish Network Corp. and AT&T Inc. are all planning to increase their prices early next year — at the risk of turning off more subscribers fed up with the rising cost of television,” BloombergBusiness reports.

The companies are citing rising carriage costs for broadcast and sports networks, the story notes.

“To attract viewers who are migrating to Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., programmers are spending billions of dollars on developing scripted shows and on the rights to air sporting events — one of the last things that people still watch live,” Bloomberg reports. “They are passing on those costs to cable- and satellite-TV providers by charging higher fees to carry their channels. Those providers, in turn, are passing on some of those costs to consumers.”

The report notes that the average price of a cable bill has gone up at an annual rate of 5.9% since 1995, hitting $66.61 last year.

4 Comments

  1. Why are they raising rates? Because they can. Because the bottom line means more than anything else. Because they don’t really care about YOU.

  2. Apparently millions of customers leaving and telling them because the prices are too high is too much math for them to comprehend. I’ve done some evaluating lately and realize I hardly use 90% of the channels they offer. Once my current contract expires, I’m done with them.

  3. Along with the cost of the cable channels, many of the cable companies also require customers to use expensive converter boxes, or cable cards to receive the channels, then charging additional fees and taxes on top of that. Local stations also shouldn’t be charging local cable companies for programming, that viewers can receive for free with an antenna. No wonder people are dropping cable services.

  4. All these worthless channels and they still have commercials. Makes no sense why local channels you could get for free and are paid for by advertising, but we have to pay such a high price for cable with the same thing! Im glad people are leaving by the millions. I’l consider getting cable or satellite again when I see that companies are forced to slash their prices.

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