361–370 of 466 posts
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I assume they want cancellations so they can shutter it with less friction.
You might be on to something there. In the email they sent out to subscribers, they are actually provided directions for if you wanted to cancel...I thought that was quite odd
It’s a shame because it really is a great service. The infinite DVR basically lets you build up your own on demand library of any show.
In the end I was only in it for the live sports. Those aren’t even on anymore and when they come back they’ll be cheaper on Hulu.
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OTA channel surfing is slow because before you can see a picture, first you have to tune the digital signal, then you have to wait for an I frame, plus whatever decoder delay and output image processing. In order to make it better, you really need to three tuners, so you can process the streams of the up and down channels. Random access would still be slow, but oh well. I imagine cable is pretty similar, but I suspec…
Every cablebox I've ever dealt with is a pile of shit than struggles to display simple text-based menus.
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You might be on to something there. In the email they sent out to subscribers, they are actually provided directions for if you wanted to cancel...I thought that was quite odd
That shouldn't be odd. All it would take is a tiny little bit of ethics in their heads.
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I'm not sure about other people but I don't "think" I want a la carte, I absolutely know I do. So much so that I don't pay for anything because nobody offers what I'm willing to pay for.
No you don't. It's like saying that you'd be willing to pay for a $2/month Spotify subscription for only the genres of music you want. That's not how the economics work . Going a la carte would mean paying as much as a bundle, for less content. The problem here is that people's mental models are fundamentally self-centered. They imagine paying half or less for just the channels they want. But in total, that would mea…
Of course, broadcast technology doesn’t support that and we have decades of industry built around a different model, giving all of the incumbents a strong incentive to resist any sort of change.
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This was the first time I've watched live broadcast US TV since leaving the country ten years ago. Are there any shows on, or is every channel besides PBS just advertisements all day?
Even PBS has ads nowadays. At the beginning of a show, "sesame street was brought to you today by support from viewers like you, and..." (ad for abcmouse, some minivan, etc plays)
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> I pay for YouTube Red because I can skip through ads. It's worth it. Hard to see how this could possibly be worth it, since you can also skip the ads for free.
This isn't necessarily true. I don't have any behind the scenes knowledge, but I suspect that enough money or reputation can buy you unskippable ads. I've had several ads I have been unable to skip, running to as long as 15 seconds for the TV+ Tom Hanks movie from Apple. Almost every ad for a Google product has also been unskippable. Could just be an extension of Google's anti-Apple UX design, but I would be rather s…
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Try listening to a music radio station sometime. I turned one on for the first time a 10 years a couple weeks ago and in a 45 minute drive heard approximately 2 songs. The entire rest was station identifiers and commercials.
That's why I pay ~$5/mo for satellite radio. I don't even drive that much but it's worth it to not listen to ads the whole time.
I've liked listening to a handful of channels on Sirius XM when it's already been enabled in rental cars but it's not worth the price.
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Thanks. That's horrific.
A European will have a big problem to understand how you can pay that much money to submit yourself to this torture...
I have recently returned to watching golf by subscription to sky sports golf. They often mirror the NBC/CBS advertising schedule instead of using the clean feed. Totally ruins the golf tournament. I have to pause 45 mins before I watch and use an app I've written to quickly jump the two minute ad breaks.
I've spent much time in American hotel rooms. Watching TV there is like entering an ADHD simulation.
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An interesting aspect of Aereo's model is that they attempted to circumvent these regulations by leasing each customer an individual antenna which they could access remotely. They maintained "antenna farms" full of tiny antennas.
It was a brilliant $100m bet that backfired for no good reason.