Remember when the cord cutting krishnas talked about how easy, simple and cheap everything would be once we got rid of cable/satellite?
If consumers are dumb enough to spend their money foolishly, corporations are more than happy to take their money.
The only way for the situation is to change is for people to vote with their dollars, but we see they keep buying bundles instead of holding out for more reasonable ala-carte plans.
It's the classic enshittification thing: start services that are subsidized by venture capital dollars and represent a good value to the consumer, then boil the frog by gradually raising prices higher and higher while reducing the quality, start injecting higher paid tiers to make people pay for what they used to get for free, investors laugh all the way to the bank.
I'm amazed more people don't see that they are getting taken by this same old strategy time and time again, but as Connecticut's PT Barnum said a century or so ago, another fool is born every minute.
For me, NFL is now mostly looking at NFL's excellent 20 min game summary films they post for each game to youtube.
Someone cuts the 3 hours of nonsense down to the 20 minutes of interesting bits, sign me up.
I value my time enough to not sit through countless ads, both commercial breaks and the now ridiculous amounts of in-game ad reads.
I already pay for youtube premium for other content, so for me this is all ad-free.
If I want to see the whole game in real time, I have an over-the-air antenna and a TiVo DVR and am in the Boston media market.
Cost me maybe $500 around a decade ago, paid for itself several times over by not paying for CATV or YouTubeTV/Hulu/etc.
F1 auto racing is also going down the enshittification path.
I used to be able to buy just F1TV, now they expect me to buy Apple TV.
I don't give a **** about Ted Lasso, they can stick it up their ass.
So, same thing, watch the 20 minute highlights instead of getting up in the middle of the night to watch the 2 hour race.
Overall, a much better use of time and money, IMO.
And I fully expect this to some day get ruined via some other enshittification path, but so what, I'll read a ****ing book.
