Of course those who aren’t brainwashed into thinking they are there to help save us money will just ditch our TV services all together.

All I know is I can’t wait to see Comcast squirm a little.

I agree partially with what you are saying. People already are canceling and downgrading their cable as iTunes, Hulu and even many of the networks themselves stream their shows over the internet and more people have computers that easily hook up to their HDTVs. That’s going to happen regardless of Netflix. Netflix is currently (and, I believe, will only ever be) cutting into the cable companies’ profits by taking away revenue from pay-per-view movies. Netflix is a much smaller threat than Hulu and the networks themselves. I realize Netflix is using the cable companies’ ‘pipes’ and that will have an effect on how they structure their usage tiers, which are simply a matter of time, but that’s not because of Netflix.

But there currently isn’t any consistent threat of competition to the cable companies when it comes to broadband and I guarantee, the majority of the population will not go back to DSL for long, if at all. I speak from experience, because where I live, the usage tiers have already been put into place by the cable company, a few people switched to DSL or other (weak) options and now are going back to cable because they’d rather pay the prices than deal with the terrible speeds. And these aren’t gamer, techie types that I’m talking about- just average users. Not even users streaming media.

So, as streaming media starts to hit the mainstream even more, there had better be some new competition rise up, or we’ll all complain, but most of us will pay the jackhole cable companies for our bandwidth anyway.