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> 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
by 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.
- tfandango 10y agoI feel like the "Cloud DVR" is kind of a legal workaround, probably because of the contracts they have with media providers. PlayStation Vue has one and it sometimes offers you "recorded" content and sometimes "on-demand", which is subtly different and mostly doesn't matter. Creators and providers are dragged into the future kicking and screaming, while Netflix and the like are eating their lunch.
- WorldMaker 10y agoI feel like "Cloud DVR" is as much of an intentional missing-the-point on the part of traditional players in the market. It still feels a lot like "based on how popular the Tivo originally was, people really want a DVR" and missing the point that regardless of the technology actually used: people just wanted to watch shows on their schedule, not some overpaid executive's schedule based on astrology readings and Nielsen surveys (which may as well be astrology readings themselves). Beyond maybe being a legal workaround and maybe being a way to not confuse old people used to decades of cable subscription: Continuing to apply "Cloud DVR" as a terminology for and its "modern VCR" skeumorphism to services like PlayStation Vue continues the tradition of treating "live TV" as "the real thing" and on-demand/Cloud DVR as the exception and the lesser experience. It's hard not to see that as a willful ignorance from the existing players that they might still have hope to put the genie back into the bottle and return to the halcyon days where people lived to TV schedules and captive eyeballs were guaranteed delivered to very happy advertisers.