Speaking generally (not to this specifically): Cable company offers customer package that has X. Then gets into dispute with provider or distributor of X -- a pricing fight -- and X goes away. Customer keeps paying for the package they were sold.

Again, speaking generally, if cable company had to, hour one, cut customer's bill by the portion that X represents. If, in other cases where provider/distributor of X is still getting paid essentially out of customer's pocket for X, that too has to stop.

Maybe these sudden blackouts would go away.

In this case, as I understand it, ATT bought HBO. ? -- I can't even keep up with all the mergers, anymore; that kind of rings a bell.

Suddenly, a couple of months later, pricing/contract dispute makes HBO go away for these customers. They should get a discount on their packages, and I'd love to see ATT eat it for not honoring the relationship HBO had with these downstream providers and providing some continuity.

At least in this case, if they have decent high speed internet (Sling at least implies this, for part of them), they can get HBO through another avenue. Does HBO stream directly, now? I know you can subscribe to their... "channel"?, addon?, through Amazon Prime video and presumably (without requiring eating the $120/year cost for Prime) through Amazon video.

In other cases, customers may not have such a ready, easy option for alternative access. No high speed internet (Dish customers, maybe). Or content that doesn't stream (some sports). And this lack of options all the more so, in past but still recent and relevant years.

In many cases, due to lack of options, or to one-time cost and time barriers (getting another physical distribution channel set up, if one's even available), customer subscription choices are significantly "sticky".

Every time these big media companies "fight it out", with blackouts and such, they are imposing costs on those customers. Costs they can externalize, because customers are "stuck" with them in a marketplace that is severely lacking in effective competition.

Finally, that lack may be lessening -- IF those customers have access to adequate, affordable, and neutral data delivery. Something that remains untrue or under threat, for many customers.

Anyway, I hope I made some sense, here.

As for me, I spent 16 years with only one high-speed Internet option, because the one competitor in this area chose not to repair or replace the ancient and degraded copper line along my back lot line. And that was after they received approximately 750 million in tax breaks and other... "gifts", I have to call them, from the state, in return for a commitment to deploy "universal" high speed Internet access to the entire state (with a little wiggle room for hard to reach areas) -- years prior. A commitment they promply reneged on and spent money lobbying to get out of.

That was what is now called ATT, by the way.

So here, I see another instance of their shafting customers, because they can.

Make them pay. Nothing else works -- well, there's been no effective political will to throw their executives in prison, yet. (Were there, I'm not entirely dubious that criminal activity could be found in some of their behavior.)