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AT&T Inc. on Sunday agreed to buy satellite TV provider DirecTV for $48.5 billion, or $95 per share, a move that gives the telecommunications company a larger base of video subscribers and increases its ability to compete against rivals.

AT&T currently offers a high-speed Internet plan in a bundle with DirecTV television service. The acquisition would help it further reap the benefits of that alliance. AT&T could also use the deal to improve its Internet service by pushing its existing U-verse TV subscribers into DirecTV's video-over-satellite service, freeing up bandwidth on its telecommunications network.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/at-t-to-buy ... TREcd0eead

ATT buys direcTV, Direct TV buys Times Warner, then they sit down for lunch to figure out how to seriously put the squeeze on the rest of us. Data caps, PPV for stuff like Football. Can't wait.

I have been fortunate with regards to a data cap on my internet, so far they haven't been enforcing it for the last 2 and a half years.. lol 250GB doesn't cut it for a family of 4 that uses netflix on 3 TVs..

It's going to get to the point that everyone will say, " screw it" and just stop watching network TV. I can wait for a series to be released on blu ray. I like watching football but I don't have to watch it. Especially if it's now goin to cost a premium price to do so.

If it wasn't for my wife, I would cancel all that shit. I want A-LA-CARTE to pay for the channels that my wife and I want. I have over 200 channels, but watch less than 15 of them.

Executioner wrote:If it wasn't for my wife, I would cancel all that shit. I want A-LA-CARTE to pay for the channels that my wife and I want. I have over 200 channels, but watch less than 15 of them.

If that was offered, they'd make the pricing structure so you'd almost have to take the full package.

Err wrote:If that was offered, they'd make the pricing structure so you'd almost have to take the full package.

there doing that now -and the channels you want are always in the plus package.

Me and friends have been saying it for year about the whole a-la-carte system.

I really only watch fox on sundays, whatever channel has F1 and Adult Swim. That's about all I watch. I can get the races from torrents as well as the Adult Swim stuff. So really I could due with out the cable.

I think the good approach is something like Netflix and Hulu. You pay for a service and when the new episodes or movies come out, you can watch it on-demand when you want rather than having to follow a time table.

People these days are just too busy to deal with programs at set times, at the same times, requiring you to have a DVR. They can host the content on their local servers reducing network overhead and do something similar to Hulu making commercials part of the business model.

Having Cable TV providers makes no sense in this day and age, it should be just get internet and take your choices from there.

The problem with just having internet is many folks (like me) have lousy internet. I have end of the run rural faux DSL . What that translates to is that if the sun is shining and the schools are in session I can get the advertised 2.8 down/.75 up. When it rains, there is significant loss. When I had Verizon dsl here it stayed pretty constant. When Frontier took over, the fiddled it to get more people on (read something about it in Broadband Reports), the bottom line is that many weekends and evenings we can't even stream youtube without endless buffering. I cut the cord on satellite this year b/c I rarely watched anything other than sports, and and it seems they've got everything on tape delay now so they can squeeze more ads in. Nielsen released a study this week that said basically that no matter how many channels are available, people historically watch about 17 channels.