Clearly the content owners are winning and will win. The handwriting has been on the wall for the last several years as the content owners have drawn people away from traditional over the top cable and satellite services by offering streaming of their content at artificially low prices. You can see major reorganization even by the streaming companies and a lot of content owners pulling from services to start their own streaming outlet. Once they put cable and satellite out of business or make them a bit player they can then raise the price of their content to what the streaming market will bear. Satellite at least is hitting the breaking point. Over the last 15 years we have seen our monthly bill go from about $45 a month to $150 a month for the same level of programming. This is a combination of package increases and equipment lease cost increases, but increase is still the same. That's with no HBO or premiums, and no sports package add-ons. We do get the HD Movie pack or whatever they're calling it these days, but I will be letting that go soon. I have already reduced my equipment from 5 outlets to 3. For the first time I am looking into reducing my main programming package to pare my bill down. But it will only go down until the next package price increase, which now seem to come much more frequently than they used to. I think DISH is just trying to hold on for dear life in this market where everyone is trying to get huge increases from them for their content. Oh well its only TV, entertainment, and the more I think of it, it's not so entertaining anymore.
What I did was to cut everything with Dish over the years. I bought my own equipment, installed it myself, which was easy after installing a big dish back in 1985. I have one vip211k receiver with the OTA tuner, added the outboard HDD, paid the $40 activation fee for the HDD that is for life of the account. I pay no other fees period. Just for programming, AT250/Super Stations/Movie Pack. I have been fortunate enough to get a long term customer discount, also being near 71 years old. My programming runs about $100 a month. Streaming an add-on for me. At this point, streaming will not give what Dish has. Also with the Dish Anywhere app on the Fire TV, I get the Demand portion at no extra cost. Even though $100 a month is a bit tough on the budget, I checked over 6 months and could not come up with any alternative that was even close. Dish has a lot of programming not available to me elsewhere. The Super Stations for example, as I am Grandfathered in, then the sub channels like Grit, Laff, etc, are not received here OTA. I agreed to a 2 year deal that knocks the bill down. I believed in Dish when I bought my own receiver in 1999,and I still believe it them now. If anything, the programmers are to blame for the high pricing, especially sports. Comcast, Spectrum, etc all have nasty disputes. The programmers are charging a fortune. One thing I can say for streaming that free services like Pluto, Xumo, STIRR, and The Roku Channel all make plenty of money from the ads and they all say, they are staying free. With streaming there are so many choices. If you do like a service, drop it and pick up someone else. You want a cheap package, they are out there. Philo for $20 a month offers 58 channels. No sports, little news, but that is how they keep the prices down. So there is something for everyone. With many people, they just want TV on Demand, so if the regular programmers charge too much, people will watch OTA for free and sub to a service like Netflix, Prime, Hulu, etc. So let the programmers price themselves out of the market. There will have to be a day of reckoning for programmers, just like it is happening to cable. Cable especially has lost a lot of subs to cord cutting.