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If you're among the shrinking number of people who pay for cable or satellite TV service, your bills are probably going to keep going up for a product that's getting worse. A merger announced Monday to create the country's largest TV company could make it crummier still.
Or if you're hooked on streaming TV services like Netflix, your bills are also probably going to keep going up for a product that's getting worse. Welcome to the glorious, occasional terrible and definitely weird moment when old TV is slowly dying and new "TV" is not exactly thriving, either. No matter what and how you watch, this situation isn't awesome for your viewing pleasure or your wallet.
• You're worse off as cable slowly dies
As recently as about 15 years ago, about 85 to 90 percent of households in the United States paid for TV channels from a cable company or a satellite TV provider like DirecTV. That's about as close as it gets to "everyone" in America doing something.
Now, barely half of American homes pay for TV service from a cable, satellite TV or internet-like cable company such as YouTube TV, according to cable industry analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research.
This mass divorce from the monthly cable bill happened relatively fast.
Cellphones were available for decades before the percentage of Americans who owned a landline telephone dipped below 50 percent around 2016. (Now about one quarter of American adults have a landline; about 90 percent of us have a smartphone.)
In a vicious cycle, cable and satellite TV just got worse for the holdouts as more people cut the cord.
Cable bills went up, because companies' costs kept climbing and they had fewer customers to share the burden. Cable companies dropped channels to save money. They proclaimed, mostly credibly, that they'd make money selling you internet service and didn't care if you bought cable. The companies' disinterest made cable worse.
On Monday, the satellite TV providers DirecTV and Dish said they would merge into what would become the country's largest TV company with about 18 million combined customers. This would never have happened if cable weren't shrinking into the new landline. (Regulators could stop the merger from happening.)
DirecTV and Dish said they would be soon be big enough to push back against climbing monthly bills and offer more compelling combinations of channels. But it might be tough to break the cycle that has made cable and satellite TV increasingly expensive for a less appealing service.
• Streaming fans aren't golden, either
Even if you don't have cable, its problems still affect you.
For decades, the oodles of money from cable helped make entertainment and sports very rich and (arguably) better and more accessible to many millions of Americans. As cable dies, it is draining money from much of the entertainment offerings and the sports leagues that you love to watch.
And streaming is now adopting some of the worst habits of cable. Streaming prices have increased and they'll keep going up. Ads are becoming inescapable, and many companies are cutting back on programming to save money.
Streaming companies are encouraging "bundles," or cable TV-like combinations of programming, to discourage you from easily quitting. Disney Plus just became the latest streaming service to crack down on people who share a password with four neighbors and the mail carrier.
Streaming still gives you more flexibility about when to watch or cancel. It's (again, arguably) still much cheaper, as long as you don't like to watch a lot of sports like the NFL and don't count the cost of internet service that you need to stream.
But what hooked us on streaming - the relatively inexpensive and limitless buffets of entertainment with no commercials - was a blip.
The pain of sticking with cable or going with streaming shows that it's hard to anticipate the ripple effects when technology upends our behavior and the finances of entire industries. (Remember this when you read overly confident predictions about how artificial intelligence will kill jobs or save the planet.)
It was hard to predict both how quickly we ditched cable and how fast streaming started to become more like it.
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