chronically_crazy

Well, tbf, creepy stuff does happen in nowhere.

Depending on whether it's college or NFL, and how local your team is, you could try an over the air television antenna.

I get every NFL game I need with mine.

Lemmy has been growing alot lately, so there's certainly reason to have optimism. It's really just a numbers game to get more niche communities here.

The biggest problem people run into is a lack of thier niche communities here, and that's mostly due to a lack of overall numbers. Reddit, while a festering hellhole, still has that. I'd be thrilled to see that change one day, but it's definitely gonna be a while.

This honestly is dependent on alot of different factors, including the type of your ISP, thier national footprint, and what other lines of business they have.

Let's first start with what type of ISP you have. The main 2 today are cable and fiber. If you have DSL/Satellite/Fixed wireless, they don't really carry cable tv as part of thier infrastructure. Anyways, Fiber has a serious edge over traditional coax cable in bandwidth. Light has a much higher bandwidth limitation, whereas copper wire is very limited in comparison. So far, cable has been able to keep up with Fiber's download speeds, and with DOCSYS 4 rolling out, hopefully they'll get closer to symmetrical uploads speeds. This will allow them more bandwidth to keep up with the fiber companies, though I suspect one day, the limits of copper coax wiring will catch up to them. Consider too, some companies like Comcast are putting in fiber to the premises in select areas, though it seems pretty limited at this point.

Another thing to consider is thier national footprint. Larger ISPs are probably going to be the last ones to get rid of traditional cable, simply because they'll have enough customers to keep it viable longer. We're already seeing smaller ISPs drop them and bundle a streaming service instead (more on that later).

The other factor to consider here is what other lines of business they own. One I'm thinking of in particular is Comcast. They own NBC/Universal. They've been pushing Peacock hard, though it's not really profitable yet. I suspect the day they get rid of cable is the day they require you to pay for Peacock instead, and Peacock will probably cost more so it isn't hemorrhaging money. Other ISPs are also partnering with streaming services, and it wouldn't surprise me if they start buying up streaming services too to complete with Comcast. We already saw AT&T try to buy Time Warner back in 2016.

So, it's really anyone's guess, but the death of cable is really just going to be replaced by forced subscriptions to streaming services. When they drop the actual cable tv is largely dependent on how fast they get outpaced by Fiber internet providers.