this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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You're projecting an American perspective, but I suspect you're talking to an Australian.
Cable in Australia has always been considerably more expensive than in the USA, and includes considerably less content. Except for movies, it was also never available adfree. It was changing in the last 5 years when I left the country, but it wasn't even close to competing with the likes of Netflix on price or service and I don't think there was any ad free option (despite the dramatically higher cost to consumer) - there was a whole media oligarch conspiracy to sink the national broadband upgrade because they knew they had the market cornered with their monopoly and streaming would disrupt that.
You might have had that in the US, but in my country there has always been protections against monopolies in the TV industry and therefore we had (still have) several competing networks, some paid, some free with ads, all about the same size, and 99% of content was exclusive to one network. A few shows would be available on two but not many.
It wasn't too bad, because there was enough free/ad supported content that paying to get a little bit more was a luxury which could easily be avoided. And it was closer to $50/month (US) to have everything here
With the new generation more content than ever is locked behind a paywall there are so many services if you wanted everything you'd pay far more than $100. I think I have 20+ streaming services on my TV. Nearly all of them (including Netflix) don't have an active subscription.