Cable Pricing Wars

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Probably raise Internet only prices. They know you still need them for that.

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they've been gaming customers ever since the "double the speed for free!" promotion last year. essentially what they did was get rid of the 25mbps tier, made it 50, kept the price the same for awhile, but now it's jumping up.
now cox no longer offers anything between the 5mbps (bare minimum for streaming) and the 50mbps (way more than most people need) internet plans. 25mbps or even a little less would be ideal for most streamers.

You think Cox has been placing caps on Data Plans and not enforcing them just because they want you to know how much data you are using?


Expect to get hit for internet fees plus overage fees in the future.

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Personally, the sports channels dictate my satellite package. If I could get all of the sports channels and a handful of others, I would spend a lot less per month.

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You would probably end up spending more. Think about this:

ESPN charges cable companies about $6 per month per subscriber. The next highest channel is TNT at about $1.50 per month, and the rest fade off quickly after that. ESPN2 is in the top 10 most expensive, the NFL Network is like #4, and Fox Sports 1 is in the top 10. So the bulk of your expanded cable fee goes to the sports channels already. If they move to a truly a la carte option, the first thing a lot of people are going to do is drop all the sports channels (there are a lot more non-sports fans than you realize) to save money, forcing ESPN to increase their already sky-high fees to maintain their revenue since their subscriber base will fall off hard.

The bundling of channels shifts costs around so that all of the non-sports fans currently subsidize your sports channels. That's why any package that includes all the sports channels also includes TNT, TBS, USA, FX, A&E, etc... Who's going to pay $30 for a handful of sports channels when you can pay $35 for 100+ channels? So we have 10 million people paying $350million a month split between all the channels (and about $300million of that is for the sports channels and $50million for the rest in total). Let's go a la carte and say 5 million people decide to drop all their sports channels. Those sports channels still need their $300million, except now it's only split 5 million ways. The sports fans' bills shoot up from $35 to $65. That's a bit high, so they in turn decide to drop all those channels they don't watch, and their bills drop from $65 down to $60. So now all those entertainment channels have lost half their subscribers, and they need to double their rates. Now that $50million gets split only 5 million ways, too, so those people are paying $10/month. The average bill is still $35, except the sports fans who used to beg for a la carte pricing because they don't watch all those 100 bullshite channels are now paying nearly double for only a handful of channels.