Cable and Phone in the US and Canada has always been anti-competetive. Still is, especially in Canada. For Satellite, both countries feature only two national providers. In the US you've got DirecTV and Dish Network and in Canada you've got Bell ExpressVu and StarChoice. Satellite TV in Canada stinks compared to what's available in the US (channel selection is poor and the equipment is always a generation or two behind). But paying for DirecTV and Dish aren't cheap either. "Competition" in the US between these two players and their CableCo counterparts hasn't dropped the price of TV very much.

I'm paying CAD$87 or so per month right now for Basic+something cable (Discovery Channel and a few other extras) and 6Mbit internet. From the single player that can provide it to me. There is no other choice. If I wanted to switch to a slower DSL connection I could go to Bell and also use their Satellite TV.

Rogers, my cable company, has seen fit to lower/alter service (dropped News feeds completely, dropped their own Mail in favor of shifting everyone to Yahoo and a few other things, put caps on downloading, implemented real-time packet inspection/filtering to combat p2p clients and bittorrent) AND increased their prices twice. All this depsite a signed contract for 2 years of a specific service. Of course I don't let service contracts tie me up anyway, I always just drop them when I want to move elsewhere, but I don't suddenlly just decide I want to start paying them a different amount every month.

All said and done, it's still cheaper to pay for Cable than to try and buy shows one at a time or even in series packs online.