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Hulu’s Live TV service to cost $39.99/month with ads, sources say
- revmoo 10y agoHulu: "We've seen what the cable companies are doing and it seems to be going poorly for them. So we're going to go ahead and give that a shot"
- alexkavon 10y ago"Don't you see? The only way to decrease piracy is to provide more ad-supported services that cost a premium...otherwise how do we pay the lawyers?"
- madamelic 10y ago"We've seen what we are doing so we are just going to continue doing what we are doing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu (Hulu is owned by cable providers)
- grangerg 10y agoExactly. We canceled Hulu ages ago. Look! I can pay for Hulu, and get the exact same service as people that get it for free---but on something other than a browser! Canceling "cable" was a bit jarring at first, but I don't miss it anymore. It was kind of like trying to stop watching the show "24". The show had its hold until I missed the subsequent episode, then it was gone; I didn't care anymore.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoHulu silently removed free streaming and replaced it with Yahoo TV, I guess. https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/08/hulu-ending-free-streaming/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/08/hulu-ending-free-streami...
- josefresco 10y agoInching closer and closer to Big Cable prices. Considering most streamers have both Netflix and Hulu, the cost of "cutting the cable" is slowly becoming noncompetitive.
- Retric 10y agoNot when a HD DVR is ~20$/month on it's own. However, stopped using Hulu a long time ago. If you look at their paid customer numbers is relativity tiny @12 million for $7.99 per month. By comparison 25% of households in the US have 'cut cable' and many people have cable because it's cheaper as a bundled service.
- sixothree 10y agoTivo is $15/month or less. And remote boxes are free.
- Retric 10y agohttp://www.defefx.com/fios-tv-equipment/ http://www.defefx.com/fios-tv-equipment/ Cable Card is 4$ / month, and there is an extra fee for HD TV but does not provide access to Video on Demand. The downside is that you’ll also need a TiVO subscription which is $12.95 per month 13 + 4 = 17$/month. On top of this there is a fee for HD TV.
- josefresco 10y agoDVR service (in any room) from Comcast costs me $10/month.
- Retric 10y agohttp://cordcuttersnews.com/starting-2017-comcast-will-charge-5-49-every-tv-use/ http://cordcuttersnews.com/starting-2017-comcast-will-charge... Now that fee is jumping from just $3.49 to $5.49 a month, which means that if you have three TVs in your house you will pay an extra $16.47 a month just for this fee. http://cordcuttersnews.com/starting-2017-comcast-will-charge-5-49-every-tv-use http://cordcuttersnews.com/starting-2017-comcast-will-charge... So adding a new TV costs ~10$ + $5.49 a month. That sounds like it's costing 16$/month per HD DVR. Here are some other 'fees' https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161213/09004336262/happy-new-year-comcast-usage-caps-rate-hikes-more-sneaky-fees-2017.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161213/09004336262/happy...
- woogiewonka 10y agoAds you say? No thanks.
- ChristianGeek 10y agoI agree...either charge me money or show me ads.
- jimmaswell 10y agoSomething surprising I learned a while ago is that one of cable tv's selling points used to be no ads.
- narrowrail 10y agoThis is one of those urban myths that refuses to die. I've looked for the supporting evidence and can find none. When we got cable as a kid in the 70s, that was certainly not the selling point. Cable was used by remote communities that were out of range of the broadcast signal. The only channels that existed at the time (i.e. ABC, NBC, CBS) all had adverts.
- brianwawok 10y agoAnd they block your ability to fast-forward. Dumb. I know why they do it, but my life is too short to fastforward. Want me as a customer? Then you need: 1) No ads. I will not tolerate ads in my house. I do not want your clown burgers or your overpriced car. if that means I need to pay 10% more, then charge me the 10% more. 2) Ala-Carte pricing. I do not watch sports. I am not going to pay $20 a month for ESPN and a bunch of sports programs. I will totally pay a few bucks for the history channel, or something that has value. 3) Needs to be fully streaming or TIVOed. i.e. let me watch at 6:23 pm or 7:19 pm. No sitting around until 8:00pm so I can watch a show. Currently do Netflix + HBO and have more TV shows than I can watch. Totally willing to throw in a few more bucks for something of value, but no $200 cable package is going to happen here.
- lithos 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 10y ago"Cloud DVR Bundle - The live TV service will allow for a certain amount of recording...But this recording space will not be a fully functional DVR, as it will not support fast-forwarding" No thanks. Is there a competitor (PS Vue, Sling, others?) that lets you fast forward past commercials? Edit: Apparently the ability to FF is spotty, no matter who the "cloud TV service" is. If they offer it at all, it works on some shows and not others, and is also spotty for "on demand" content vs dvr content.
- xanderstrike 10y agoHonest answer: piracy. If companies won't let you pay to avoid advertising, let them know it's a problem by not paying at all.
- mathgeek 10y ago"If I can't have it exactly the way that I want it, I'm going to acquire it illegally." An interesting and recurring theme in piracy, to be sure.
- tyingq 10y agoCalling something a DVR when it doesn't have FF is also interesting. If it's "ON DEMAND" with easy bookmarking, that's fine, but it's not a DVR.
- Veratyr 10y agoWell it seems to be the only thing that drives improvement in media licensing. Without piracy I suspect iTunes and Spotify would have come decades later, if at all. I suspect the same can be said for Steam. Piracy really is an availability problem.
- xanderstrike 10y agoThat's not what I said. I'm not very picky at all, I have two requirements for streaming services: have the content I want and do not advertise to me. There are several services that satisfy this requirement: Netflix, HBO Go, Google Play Music. I subscribe to all three.
- penpapersw 10y agoWe're going on a half century of still-good television and films that have already been made! That's probably more TV than someone could watch in a whole lifetime! Even if all you do is borrow DVDs from the library (usually for free), you can still get an hour or two of quality video entertainment every night for a few decades (if not the rest of your life!) without ever seeing any new television/film content made after today. So the TV/film industry's "need" to produce (all too often low-quality) content 24/7 is no longer something anyone has to put up with!
- untog 10y agoExcept for consistent audience draws like sports, and (to a lesser extent) news coverage. Those are the lifelines of the cable TV industry, and no-one has solved that problem yet.
- chaostheory 10y agoNot completely solved but getting there. https://www.sling.com/programming/sports https://www.sling.com/programming/sports
- penpapersw 10y agoIt's only consistent because they've lowered people's standards over time, like boiling a frog. The sooner people realize there's better ways to spend their time, and that they can get better and more relevant news and sports coverage much quicker than traditional TV by using the internet properly (on their phones presumably), they'll be that much quicker to jump ship and move to things like Netflix or library DVDs.
- radley 10y agoCouldn't the same thing be said about books, apps, tech... or opinions? The critical difference is relevance to the present age.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoAnd technological improvements making some TV even possible. Game of Thrones being a perfect example, you could have made it in the 1990s, but what is possible today is completely different from what has been possible previously.
- wnevets 10y agoMuch like youtube live, there is no way it's worth the price.
- dawnerd 10y agoI love that these companies want to take advantage of cord cutters yet come in with cable prices and bundles - exactly why people cut cable to begin with. Even sling tv moved deep into bundle territory. Just let me pick the exact channels I want.
- outericky 10y agoWell, their motives are not necessarily aligned with cord cutters as they are owned by cable companies[1]. [1] Hulu LLC, a joint venture with The Walt Disney Company (through Disney–ABC Television Group) (30%),[8] 21st Century Fox (through Fox Entertainment Group) (30%), Comcast (through NBCUniversal) (30%), and as of August 10, 2016, Time Warner (through Turner Broadcasting System) (10%, minority stake)
- WorldMaker 10y agoMost of us don't even want "channels": we want specific shows. If you still want to call a bundle of shows a "channel", that's fine, but you should curate it a lot differently than the cable model of "channel", but the natural term in cord-cutting world for a bundle of shows seems to be more "app" or "site". As a long time cord cutter, I can't tell you how many conversations the answer from me to "What channel is it on?" was legitimately Hulu or Netflix or Amazon.
- gregmac 10y ago> Most of us don't even want "channels": we want specific shows. That, and have different viewing habits. I am watching a very small number of shows (usually somewhere between 1 and 3) at any given time, and watch the entire season (or sometimes multiple seasons) before moving onto something else. For shows where I'm caught up with the most recent season but are released as one episode a week, I wait until they're done the season before starting the first episode. Also, when I want to watch a show, I want to watch a show. I do not schedule my life around TV. I do not care that it's 12 minutes past the hour, or that new episodes come out on Wednesdays, or that I missed watch last week's episode. Old cable TV considers DVR the solution here, and this service looks to have "cloud DVR" but that misses the point. Netflix has no "DVR" because you can just press play and watch any show they have. I assume you have to press "record" in advance in order for it to be in your DVR -- maybe it's really advanced and it'll "record" the show from the start even if it's already started. Realistically, a "Cloud DVR" is basically just a whole bunch of files storing each show, and a database entry that says user x has access to file y. Pressing "record" is what makes that database entry, with arbitrary rules that say you can't do it if the "air date" is in the past, and you can only have just so many database entries that total up to 200 hours of content. It's not much different than Netflix, except that Netflix doesn't have the access control database or arbitrary rules.
- hbosch 10y ago> unlimited DVR with up to 200 hours of programming. Is this not a contradiction? Sounds limited to me (not that I'd likely record 200+ hrs of TV).
- nommm-nommm 10y agoI think it means there's no limit to which programs you can record.