When contemplating home entertainment options, you might be weighing the differences between cable television service and Netflix. Both require paying monthly fees, both offer the ability to watch television programs and movies at home and on a wide variety of other devices, like your smart phone, tablet, or laptop.
The origin of cable in the United States dates back to the late 1940s; originally known as "CATV", which stood for "community access television", the technology of having one large antenna and programming being redistributed to many homes was developed for very rural or mountainous communities, that could not receive conventional 'over the air' television programming.
Today, cable television is available to nearly every household, and is delivered to a set-top decoder box via coaxial cable. The cable is runs between your home and the cable office, and as many as 500 channels can be delivered over modern coax. There is a basic monthly subscription fee for cable television, for which one receives a minimum number of channels, including local over the air broadcast television; 'tiered' packages at different monthly fee levels allow a household to increase their channel choices, subscribe to premium movie channels, and receive "on demand' programming from an extensive library managed by the cable television operator.
Because you have the cable already into your house, most cable operators are able to offer you additional services for additional fees; some services available include internet service, home telephone, and sophisticated home monitoring and security services. The latter can include home management service, whereby you are able to control services in your house like lighting, heating and air conditioning at remote locations from your smart devices.
Netflix started in the United States in 1997, and has since spread to other countries. In the beginning, it was envisioned as a convenient home delivery of DVD service; you paid a flat monthly fee and movies and television shows on DVD were delivered to your home via the postal service. The DVD came packaged in an envelope that could be turned inside out, and dropped back into the mailbox for return. With different tiers of prices, Netflix had services that allowed you to have one DVD or multiple DVDs available at the same time. The service was designed to compete with the major brick and mortar video rental chains.
The service has evolved whereby its customers have a choice of receiving the DVDs in the mail, or accessing the service via the internet, where your program choices are streamed and watched in real time. What that means is, you cannot download (store) a program, you have to watch it within a certain allocated time period.
The difference between cable and Netflix can be summed up in one word: "current." Netflix does not have the resources or in-house materials to (as yet) deliver live, immediate video. For the foreseeable future, cable has a distinct advantage in that arena; a cable subscriber is able to view his local channels for news, and the 24 hour news and sports channels as one sees fit.
This is one of the key ingredients to the success of any service that wants to deliver paid content. Cable companies have had established relationships with movie studios for a very long time, and thus have a pipeline of new or nearly newly produced movies and television shows. The "rights" to broadcast programs in this manner is effected by program providers bidding for the right to broadcast a show or movie for a certain period of time. Cable companies have been consolidating and purchasing program sources as of late, thus assuring their position as "content kings."
While Netflix has the ability to delivery programming of this nature to homes, or even live programming like sports, it would require a gamble on behalf of the company. They would have to add another tier of subscriber fees in order for households to access this content; these fees would be used to acquire programming. It's a chicken and egg discussion. Netflix can go our and risk millions and millions of dollars on programming without having a single end user signed up.
For the time being, for depth of libraries, and variety of content, the advantage sits with cable. If you’d like a recommendation on where to start, we suggest checking out these affordable cable tv deals.
The origin of cable in the United States dates back to the late 1940s; originally known as "CATV", which stood for "community access television", the technology of having one large antenna and programming being redistributed to many homes was developed for very rural or mountainous communities, that could not receive conventional 'over the air' television programming.
Because you have the cable already into your house, most cable operators are able to offer you additional services for additional fees; some services available include internet service, home telephone, and sophisticated home monitoring and security services. The latter can include home management service, whereby you are able to control services in your house like lighting, heating and air conditioning at remote locations from your smart devices.
Netflix started in the United States in 1997, and has since spread to other countries. In the beginning, it was envisioned as a convenient home delivery of DVD service; you paid a flat monthly fee and movies and television shows on DVD were delivered to your home via the postal service. The DVD came packaged in an envelope that could be turned inside out, and dropped back into the mailbox for return. With different tiers of prices, Netflix had services that allowed you to have one DVD or multiple DVDs available at the same time. The service was designed to compete with the major brick and mortar video rental chains.
The service has evolved whereby its customers have a choice of receiving the DVDs in the mail, or accessing the service via the internet, where your program choices are streamed and watched in real time. What that means is, you cannot download (store) a program, you have to watch it within a certain allocated time period.
The difference between cable and Netflix can be summed up in one word: "current." Netflix does not have the resources or in-house materials to (as yet) deliver live, immediate video. For the foreseeable future, cable has a distinct advantage in that arena; a cable subscriber is able to view his local channels for news, and the 24 hour news and sports channels as one sees fit.
This is one of the key ingredients to the success of any service that wants to deliver paid content. Cable companies have had established relationships with movie studios for a very long time, and thus have a pipeline of new or nearly newly produced movies and television shows. The "rights" to broadcast programs in this manner is effected by program providers bidding for the right to broadcast a show or movie for a certain period of time. Cable companies have been consolidating and purchasing program sources as of late, thus assuring their position as "content kings."
While Netflix has the ability to delivery programming of this nature to homes, or even live programming like sports, it would require a gamble on behalf of the company. They would have to add another tier of subscriber fees in order for households to access this content; these fees would be used to acquire programming. It's a chicken and egg discussion. Netflix can go our and risk millions and millions of dollars on programming without having a single end user signed up.
For the time being, for depth of libraries, and variety of content, the advantage sits with cable. If you’d like a recommendation on where to start, we suggest checking out these affordable cable tv deals.
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