Do You Need Cable Anymore?

Posted by Andy Boyer in Big Businesses, Media

So, like everyone lese in the blogosphere, I wanted to make sure I passed along the news that Joost had finally come out of hiding and was in a public beta.  If you don’t know, Joost is the new venture from the guys who built Kazaa and Skype.  It’s a real attempt at "TV on the Internet."   But, I wanted a different angle, so I’ve been waiting a few days as I figured it out.

Well, after scratching my brain a while, I believe Joost may be the straw that allows me to ask this question. "Do you need cable TV anymore?" 

Let’s think about what I would watch on my Cable TV:

1) News: Realistically, I can read online everything I need to know.  And every story that matters generally has a local or national feed I can watch.

2) Live Sports: I may not be typical, but I rarely watch sports by myself.  If I care enough about it, it’s generally a social event.  So, it sucks that I can’t host a party for the Seahawks game, but I certainly can find a place to watch it.

3) SportsCenter:  So far, this is not replicable online.  Score one for Cable TV.

4) Movies: $4 for a DVD.

5) Prime Time Shows: Many are now available online the week they air (or the week after). Since my TV Drama and SitCom watching has already shifted from "Live" to "Tivo," waiting a week isn’t a big deal.  

So now let’s do a dollar for dollar comparison.  For my $70 per month to Comcast, I would probably let the news run about 40 hours in the background, catch 2 or 3 movies, watch about 4-8 hours of Tivo’d material and catch a few episodes of Sportscenter.   Without Cable, I lose out on the background news, am forced to the Video store for movies, have to go to a bar to watch the MLB playoffs, and have my selection of sitcoms and dramas cut down by some percentage, unless I want to buy them from iTunes.  It really probably comes out a wash.

So is Cable dead? No, of course not.  It’s a wash, not a landslide.  And I’m probably atypical.  But the fact that it’s a wash should be somewhat scary to Cable companies.  Which is why this whole Net Neutrality thing becomes an important issue for us to keep an eye on.  The Cable guys aren’t dumb, and they aren’t going to just let $70/month from 100 million households walk out the door.  But that’s a different topic.