There are only a few certainties in life, like death, taxes and your cable bill going up. But there is one big difference between the three, cable is certain to raise its rates multiple times a year and it comes every month. Just ask California residents, who last October were slammed by Comcast with a 1.5 percent rate increase only to be blindsided the next August with a whopping 3.8 percent increase. And what do they claim as the reason for the raise in rates? To pay for more programming choices, new features, faster Internet speeds and improvements to customer service.
Well that’s understandable, as they do need some upgrading. But didn’t they post huge profits with fewer cable subscribers last year? Hmmm interesting, I also suppose the rate increases will go to help their new customer service initiative. It must be hard to service those California residents who are paying a measly $60.76 to $63.25 a month.
Or maybe the cable companies just see the writing on the wall. As their prices increase, more people are making the switch to over-the-air TV. Last week we saw a statistic that according to Nielsen, only .5-percent of U.S. households lacked TVs capable of tuning into digital broadcasts, down from an already small 2.5 percent in June. And as compliment to over-the-air TV, 161 million Internet users in the U.S. viewed Internet based content during August, with the average viewer spending 10 hours online.
While cable prices are rising at an ever increasing rate, over-the-air TV will continue to be $0.00 every month. And you can count on that. Maybe there are four certain things in life, death, taxes, your cable bill going up and over-the-air TV continuing to be free.