What Adaptation? Cable TV Prices Jumped $15 A Month In 2025
from the learning-nothing-from-history-or-experience dept
As streaming video chipped away at traditional cable TV subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded by raising prices and being difficult. When confronted with growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting the TV cord but keeping broadband and streaming TV) was a growing trend, most of these same executives spent years first denying cord cutting was happening, then trying to claim the only people doing so were lame man-children living in their moms’ basements.
Stodgy old cable giants have shown some adaptation. Comcast offers its own streaming service, Peacock. Charter tries to offer users a cheaper streaming-only plan. Both companies have started bundling streaming services with traditional cable offerings.
That said, they simultaneously seem absolutely dedicated to raising prices on traditional cable TV bundles in a bid to price gouge any customers looking to stick around. Cable providers on average raised rates as high as $15 last year, with several imposing two price hikes in the same year:
“These widespread increases have drawn sharp criticism from consumer advocacy groups, who argue that the companies are exploiting their customer base, especially during a time of economic uncertainty. Many argue that the price hikes are disproportionate to the actual increase in programming costs, and that companies are simply padding their profits at the expense of their loyal subscribers.”
As a result, the cable industry lost 4 million subscribers in just the first six months of 2024 alone, as users increasingly shifted to streaming, over the air broadcasts, piracy, or free video services like YouTube and TikTok. Fortunately for giants like Comcast and Charter, they still enjoy a monopoly over broadband access (faster than 100 Mbps) across much of the domestic U.S, ensuring they get their pound of flesh.
That said, we’ve noted repeatedly how streaming TV executives (many of whom came from cable having learned nothing from experience) are now dedicated to bringing all of cable’s bad ideas and consumer -facing hostility to streaming (price hikes, annoying restrictions). So ultimately you’d have to suspect that piracy will be seeing a real resurgence in the years to come as the economy tightens under Trump 2.0.
Filed Under: cable, competition, cord cutting, price hikes, tv, video
Comments on “What Adaptation? Cable TV Prices Jumped $15 A Month In 2025”
So they are blaming swaths of congress, musk and the president elect?
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Except they no longer live in their moms’ basements, since theses basements have been transformed into luxury spa and swimming pools. It may be the main reason for theses price hikes since the cable TV content has no been improved for the last decade.
While this will surely be the case, I am (possibly unreasonably) optimistic that other forms of entertainment will see somewhat of a growth as well.
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Are you referring to leopards dining on faces?
Why bother with that crap, and they expect to be paid too?
No thanks.
A good portion of that $15/month has to be going to the actual network owners like Disney, NBC, Discovery, etc.
I wouldn’t be surprised if 2/3 or more of that goes toward the content providers.
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…who’ve set things up such that people cannot subscribe only to the shows or channels they want. Also, replace “NBC” with “NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast”.
Of course, the oft-proposed concept of a-la-carte channel selection would now be little more than re-arranging deck chairs on the Titantic: “channels” are dead as dead. Which brings us to…
Nobody’s really “looking to stick around” with cable. It would be more accurate to say they’re “stuck”. Probably they don’t understand how to use torrents or streaming; my grandmother doesn’t even have a DVR (remember commercial breaks?).
Cable and Streaming can be canceled
Some people may still be on cable because of inertia. My in-laws are in their 80s and use an Apple TV box to sign up for a service, watch what they want and cancel. The squeeze is on as cable companies have to pay the networks for the same content, spread over fewer subscribers. I think the smart move for smaller providers is to drop TV and focus on being a good ISP.
Err, no, I don’t. All I remember from back then is the 24/7 commercials, with an occasional break to display a show of some kind, giving us the impression that it was thrown in just for the lolz.
Oh yeah…. I also remember when cable first came in to our homes. They promised “no ads, ever”, because the price of the subscription would be enough to cover all of their costs. That lasted less than three years, and Wall St. took over.
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Citation needed.
People keep mentioning things like this, but cable television began as “Community Access TeleVision” (CATV): a bunch of people sharing a large antenna because the broadcast signal couldn’t get over the mountains or whatever. So, of course, it had exactly as many commercials as the broadcast stations it was re-transmitting.
Cable-only channels came later, and maybe some of them made such promises and reneged on them. But for cable in general, I don’t see how it would make sense to make such promises—they’d have to have avoided re-transmitting the major networks, meaning they wouldn’t have been able to get most of the popular shows till they went into syndication years later. Who’d subscribe to such a thing?
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Most people havenever heard of, let alone experienced, cable as you have described. Even if true, it is pedantry wihout a (and beside the) point.
More people probably know about pre-“cable” pay tv than that setup.
And yes, for years there were no commercials on cable channels. The business model was that they were paid directly. Then more people stuck their fingers in, and Wall Street demanded what it always demands, and everyone added commercial advertisements because everyone else was doing itand what are you going to do about it.
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I don’t think it is. I never experienced that, having grown up (with cable) in the 1980s, but I don’t recall anyone ever talking about a lack of advertising as a benefit of cable. The only time the cable companies might have mentioned that was for the “free preview weekends” for “pay TV” channels, which most people never otherwise had. We had cable to get clearer pictures, to not have to install anything on the roof (or apartment balcony) or fuck around with antenna-rotators.
In the 1980s, we had a few cable-only channels, but they were mostly a bonus. Broadcast channels were what people were watching, and what they were subscribing for. In the late 1990s, we did start to get and watch “pay” channels like Discovery, when we noticed they weren’t filtered from our cable-modem’s separate co-ax connection; the parents then started paying when those moved to digital channels. Still, lack of commercials had little to do with that; their shows weren’t available elsewhere, and the well-known shows weren’t available commercial-free anywhere.
So, where’s this mythical cable-company advertising in which they tout themselves as commercial-free? I’ll believe companies such as HBO were saying it, but who ever had HBO? It wasn’t till after 2000 that I heard much chatter about cable-only shows, and by then TiVo existed and cable’s death spiral had begun (but the cable companies, being delusional, considered it a “golden age”).
Partners in crime
Landline phone costs are going up by leaps and bounds each month, crushing those without solid cell phone reception. Around $100 a month for a basic line with caller ID.
Imagine if you want both a phone and basic cable TV.
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…and who can’t get internet service sufficient for Voice over IP, which these days is probably more common than landlines for those who can’t get or don’t want cellular service. The connection doesn’t have to be fast; just reliable.
The telcos are in the stages, like cable TV, of milking a mostly-captive market. They’ll keep doing it till governments let them remove the copper entirely, which has already happened in some parts of the world.