Greg's Horrible Waste of Internet Bandwidth

Seems to be the new rage to "cut the cord" and move to streaming of only the channels you want to watch. The complaint is that there's a lot of chaff in our desired wheat. To get your preferred channel you have to scroll through a lot of stuff you don't want.  Underlying premise is that if you cut out those channels and only pay for what you want then the overall service will be less. I don't see it. Problem is, that chaff kinda covers the cost of the wheat. If/when we start streaming only the channels we want then I predict we'll start to see overall aggregate costs increase. We're seeing it now with Amazon Prime and NetFlix, and more and more companies are spinning off their channels to streaming. If each one of those costs $9.99 each, how many $9.99 channels will we buy before we're above the monthly cost of, say, Comcast or DirecTV that (used to) have it all? And the production companies are loving it: they are getting more fees per household than

“You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” - John, Viscount Morley "Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't." - Richard Bach “Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.” - Thomas Sowell "Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy." - Matt Taibbi, Statement to Congress, 3/9/23 "[i]n our constant club-racer quest to make our cars faster, safer and "more reliable" we ha[ve] pushed for rule changes that simply accelerated the rate of entropy. Every class of production racing does this, of course, until it finally brings on its own demise." - Peter Egan "Man is slowly but steadily bringing i