HN user
We need to eliminate the idea of the diet. The only way to lose weight and to keep it off is to commit to a long term lifestyle change. Similar to how recovering addicts continue to go to meetings years have they've gotten sober, people need to make the same kind of commitment to their weight and general health.
Disclosure: I lost nearly 100lbs 15 years ago. The most I gained back was 20 pounds. Never going back.
One more: Most Dutch don't feel the need to dress in bright colored lycra uniforms and ride $6,000 racing bicycles simply to commute to work. I'm American and an amateur racer, but I wear normal clothing when commuting to work. I'm not sure why so many Americans feel the need to "kit up" for the daily commute. I think it actually turns a lot of would-be commuters off.
Why do you think the big bundle will go away? Sure, subscribing to a small number of one-off streaming services may make sense for some consumers, but not all.
For example: if you collect the top three must-have channels from each member of your average American family, you'll discover that mom, dad and the kids have very different tastes in media. By the time each family member finds and subscribes to the streaming service that provides them the content they want, they'll be paying much more than what they paid for the big cable bundle.
The average American watches 34 hours of TV a week. Keep in mind: the HN audience is not representative of your average American. I don't think the media companies are too worried about a natural dry out.
The 18Mbps OTA signals you mention are MPEG2. Netflix is AVC. Anything above 6Mbps AVC is pointless because the quality differences become indiscernible. You need to start tuning things like frame rate and filters at that point.
That's exactly why the cable guys have been saying that bundling is the most economic option for consumers that want a large content catalog. As content creators stand up their own streaming services they'll begin to pull their content from third party streaming services (see Starz/Netflix). Consumers will eventually have two choices: purchase a very small subset of services directly from providers or go back to the big bundle.
Netflix and Amazon realize this, which is why they're scrambling to become content creators. Without original content, they're doomed to be nothing more than the Internet version of Nick at Nite.