Could watching the newest season of Orange is the New Black on Netflix cost you? Comcast customers may be facing this frightening reality.
In recent statements from the mass media mogul, they’ve admitted to considering making the switch to charging customers for heavy internet usage as the rates of cable cutting grows, an “insurance policy against cord-cutting,” Moffet, a Comcast representative, reported.
According to research from the Liechtman Research Group, cable bills for the average family have risen 39% in the last six years and now averages at about $99.10 monthly per household. This translates to $1,189.20 annually, which makes Netflix and Hulu+ bills of about $96 a year looking pretty sweet.
About 6.5% of households nationwide have made the switch to no cable and getting their entertainment from streaming services and Comcast wants to ensure they get their money’s worth. In many places across the nation, users have been facing growing fees on their Internet bills due to streaming, especially in the cities that are the guinea pigs for the plan. Comcast’s shift to pay-per-stream is intended to essentially discourage users from cutting cables off completely.
Noah Theran, a representative from the Internet Association, which is a Washington group for trades that represents companies like Netflix and YouTube, said “Users hate wireline data caps because they create artificial scarcity that increases the cost of getting online…To make matters worse, limited competition in the high-speed broadband market means users often have nowhere else to turn for a better deal.”