I agree. If that was the case it is false advertisement.

sorry i'm just a little bitter! lol.  I just found out today about the price hike.  Last year I was hit with 2 price hikes.    

@bcbsncjlj calm down my guy! lol Just venting a little.  

Roger that.

Though clarified in fine print, I agree that Price for Life is fundamentally different from Discount/Promotion for Life. All about the wording.

At the very beginning (the first week or 2) that they advertised DirecTV Now (end of 2016) they apparently either phrased it badly or omitted the fine print that they then added that made clear (as much as any of these things do) that the discounted price offered early signups could go up, but no more than increases for those without the discounted price - that is, the discount from the then current price would remain the same, but the price itself wouldn't.  So no one who signed up after maybe the first week (and who did due diligence) could argue that they were offered a locked in price for life.  Those who signed up that first week may have a bit more of a case, but I don't remember the exact phrasing, so I'm not sure how much more - in any case it would have been a somewhat unrealistic expectation given the knowledge from other carrier services that content prices always go up.  I'm just glad that they didn't just declare the service dead and wipe the legacy subscribers off their books, as they did with WatchTV.

I understand yearly increases now that the networks have gotten so (Edited per community guidelines) greedy. They don't even stop to realize how much their marketability would decrease if DTV was to just drop them. The problem is that most channels are not ala carte they come in packages. You can't just buy the 2-3 good ones, you have to buy the whole package of 7-10. In that package only 2-3 are worth the bandwith, but it makes the company look bigger and stouter as a whole.

This is not all Directv, as matter of fact most of it is the Broadcasters.

I will just wait to see what my bill is and if it's too much I will go back to YTTV and wait for the next package deal. I only allot a certain amount for TV and a budget is a budget when you are retired. I wish the our Government could understand what is mandatory for us.

You pretty much got it right. Networks require them to be packaged, so TV providers cannot al-a-carte. It is how the industry is setup and doesn't show any signs of changing.

Government views TV as entertainment, not mandatory. Doesn't matter if retired, low-income, or some other status. I wouldn't expect that to change until we reach a technological level to provide connected media to practically all homes. But that is a SciFi future I doubt I will live to see.