One of my readers, who, for some reason wanted to be referred to as Labron James (It wasn’t Lebron James to be clear) asked me about streaming services Vs. Traditional cable packages. He was trying to grapple with whether or not to continue to pay for conventional cable as well as pay for some streaming services, or cut out cable entirely and rely entirely on streaming. It just so happened that I have been pondering this myself. In my house, 90% of the TV/Movie watching we do is through our Apple TV. I’ve talked before about streaming services (because I do use quite a few of them) however I do still have traditional cable. Why? Well in my house we use it for watching sports, and occasionally the news. So the question remains; Is it less expensive to have a cable package AND some streaming services or to go entirely to streaming services? There are a few things to consider;
1) Price of cable – Traditional cable is not that expensive. Depending on what package you get (certainly in Canada) you could pay as little as 24 dollars a month. For both Rogers and Bell their standard packages start at around$50/month, but they both have discounted packages if that’s more than your willing to spend on cable. The trick comes from the addons. What I have found is that there will be channel packages where you will want the Golf channel; (as an example), but to get it, you need to buy an add on with that and several other channels that you don’t want to get it. Do this enough times, and the bill could get expensive. There are some cases where they will let you add to your cable packages by the channel, but they usually try to get you to get the add on packages.
2) Bundling discounts – I’m not sure how it works in other countries but certainly in Canada (and definitely with the major corporations) if you get additional services (Cell phone, Internet etc.) on the same account as your cable package they will give you a “bundled discount” where they take off a percentage of your bill every month. If you buy internet and ditch the cable, this bundling will not be available to you.
3) Price of program-specific apps per year – This is where it gets a bit tricky. There is a variety for different apps, which have a wide range of prices. There is Netflix for $14.99 per month, CNNgo which is roughly $50.00 a year, and HBO which is also 14.99/month. While I’m sure that all of these apps come with their unique features (things like mobile viewing and other features) the trick is that some of these apps will allow you free access to use them if you can use your login information provided by your Cable provider. This would mitigate some of the cost if you were to subscribe to the apps on their own.
So getting back to the original question posed to me by “Mr James,” is it worth it to give up cable in favour of going with all streaming apps? In short, I don’t think that it’s worth it right now to completely give up on traditional cable. The Streaming app space is changing every single month. With networks and movie houses all declaring their intention to come out with streaming services and the prices changing all the time, it’s not a stable enough space (at the moment) to give up Cable which has much more reasonable prices and has access to most of the channels putting out apps anyway. On several occasions, I have suggested getting rid of our cable, and each time my wife reminds me that the reason we still have cable is for HBO. We have HBO for Game of Thrones, and under no circumstances is she willing to risk spoilers by waiting an extra day for the show. If I even think about persisting, by reminding my wife that we no longer have to wait months and months for Crave TV to update it’s HBO content, my wife starts referring to herself in the third person as, ‘A Girl,’ and I’m subtly reminded that a replica of Arya Stark’s sword, Needle, hangs above my fireplace.
At the moment, with networks releasing their streaming apps, and changing their deals with streaming services, it can be prohibitively expensive to subscribe to all of them. With delays uploading content to different streaming services presenting opportunities for the dreaded spoiler, traditional cable is the most effective way to get the most up to date programming. So I will be sitting here, watching Season 8 of Game of Thrones, on cable with my wife, and checking Crave to see how long it takes them to upload the newest episodes. Hopefully, I can convince my wife, that we can drop cable for good in time for the Game of Thrones Prequel to come out, without her reaching for Needle. If it takes too long to have new shows uploaded in Canada…let’s just say “The North Remembers.”
Do you still rely on Cable?
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