Same issue for me (I didn't get it for free last year, just some discounts after a phone call) - I went to look at my account last week and noticed it wasn't listed, which I thought was strange, so I did a chat with a rep and she said that she was adding it back in and that someone would reach out about any discounts. So far, nothing has changed and I haven't gotten an email yet (which I wasn't really expecting anyway), so I will be reaching out again this week.
Bye Bye NFL Sunday Ticket on Directv.
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...or, he just made it up.
Ok all you streamers out there. For years I have subscribed to DirecTV ST. On Sundays, I record two of the morning games, two of the afternoon games and the evening game on my DVR. Start watching my preferred morning game. If I like it, I'll watch the whole game then switch to the second morning game. Same drill for the afternoon games. Then later, watch the evening game. After skipping commercials, I can watch five complete games without commercials or nonsense announcer BS. It's a fun way to enjoy a Sunday of NFL.
How do I replicate this with streaming?
How do I replicate this with streaming?
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That's a very good question and it will likely depend on who wins the bid.
My uninformed guess is that they'll keep the games around for a while (perhaps even the whole season) and you'll stream them as you would stream anything else.
I suspect the biggest issue that needs to be worked out is "game hopping" (something that I'm not at all convinced is unique to those who participate in sports betting) that has the potential to be a real pain compared to a local multi-tuner DVR.
Impossible to answer since no one knows how it is going to be presented. Ask again in about a year.
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Eight HD feeds weighs in at around 50Mbps. How many bars (or other hospitality venues) do you think you have sharing your network node?
Unless your talking the main drag (WWI Veterans Memorial Highway US395) in Wagontire, Oregon (population ~3), most main streets have sufficiently speedy broadband service to handle dozens (if not hundreds) of those kinds of loads.
Yeah my husband was shocked he now needed Peacock to see the Sunday which is another fee. He decided against it.
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Kids programming costs pennies compared to sports. The Disney channel is moderately expensive (but more like TNT or TBS nothing like ESPN) you're talking well under $5 for every kid related channel.
There isn't any kids programming that's only available on linear TV, cutting the cord is easy for a parent. That's not true for sports fans and probably won't be for years until there are so few non sports fans left subsidizing sports on cable/satellite that they're forced to throw in the towel and make everything available via streaming.
ESPN just hopes they can raise the price of ESPN+ enough by then to keep up. They just announced an increase from $6.99 to $9.99. Problem is, to make up for the lost subsidization they need charge sports fans in the range of $30 to $40 a month if they made all their sports available live on ESPN+. So expect a LOT more price increases for ESPN+ in the coming years.
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In the late 1990s and early 2000s with the dawn of the DVR, to me, TV became perfect. No longer are you forced to watch ads, you can skip them. You can watch on your own schedule and you can save shows until you can actually watch them. But you knew eventually they'd figure out a way to force us to watch ads again. Advertisers weren't going to pay if we were to just skip their ads. It took about 10 years until they figured out that they could prevent you from skipping ads on OnDemad. That was so frustrating and only used as a last resort for me. But streaming is a new frontier. Once they figured out how to make ads work, they also figured out that they can prevent you from skipping them. And they offer much cheaper packages couched in the "ad supported" moniker. And you know what? People are subscribing, and that's why Netflix is going to that model too. As I said, eventually they are going to "realized" (perhaps make this up), that they can just sunset the "premium packages" and force you to pay for ads on every tier. If the content is good enough, people won't care. So now they have their sweet spot, people PAYING for the privileged of watching ads. The whole point of "free" OTA TV was that you get to watch for free, and we show you ads to make money. Somehow that dynamic changed with cable, where you PAY to watch our content AND our ads (and even MORE ads that OTA, there's a reason why Friends is 35 minutes on Nick at Night). And now with streaming....we can make you pay for OD content AND watch ads, which you can't even skip. And while now there are maybe a couple of minutes of ads, eventually that will become just like cable, where you'll have 4 minutes of ads per break as well. Congratulations folks, we've gone full circle, we are back to TV as we knew it in the 1970s.
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And yet, I watched an ENTIRE Yankees game Friday night (as I have every Friday night this season) on Amazon Prime without any glitches and in fact a much better picture than DirecTV. The one thing I miss having it on streaming is the ability to switch channels during commercials (but if I watch on my Roku instead of my Firestick, it seems to keep the stream going if I switch inputs). Not everyone has good enough internet, just like not everyone will have the ability to have a dish.
That is why I keep my phone next to the TV remote. Something to read while the ads are playing.
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Since this is an NFL thread…
Football is one of the ad friendly sports out there. Lots of breaks in the action where 2-5 minutes of ads could be shown.
A few years back, I went to a college football game, and at changes of possession and other breaks in play, they went to commercial for it seemed like forever. At each break, they blasted AC/DC over the stadium PA. It was very detrimental to the in-person experience. I hated the guy in the red vest telling them when they were at commercial.
As a side note, this was when I came to the realization that AD/DC has only one song. It’s long and spread out over many albums, but could be seamlessly stitched together into a single song.
Baseball now has a pitch clock and limits the time between innings, limiting the impact of ads on the in-person experience. Baseball is also more pastoral, making Neil Diamond a more appropriate musical interlude.
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This is all speculation, but it could be similar to MLB.TV. On the progress line, you can jump to a specific inning if you are watching a game that you delayed the start. You would have to jump around from game to game if you do that and it might be more painful than using a DVR.
The other feature that the potentially new ST could borrow from other sites is the ability to watch archived games.
This will be my first full football season without Sunday Ticket. I have 3 TVs set up in my media room with three 3 different streaming boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire Cube, and nVidia). I'll be fine for college football, but NFL Sundays will be a lot different this year.
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Wow, this is wrong on SOOO many levels. First of all, I assume you aren't a huge AC/DC song, but they have WAY more than one song. Sorry it annoys you, but I like AC/DC, and I assume that you think all their songs sounds the same. They have a sound, but their songs do sound different. I do agree, that the stadium PAs blare their music WAY too loud.
Second, I also assume you don't watch baseball either. MLB has NO pitch clock, none. (Minor League baseball has been experimenting with it). There was a pitcher on the Red Sox this weekend who took 35-40 seconds between pitch. Plus baseball has, inbetween innings, pitching changes and other in between innings changes that can be transitioned to commercials. And I've heard the whole spectrum of music at baseball games, AC/DC included.
I'm honestly not sure of the point you are trying to make.
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The real problem is that sports programming isn't carrying its weight. Whether it is league licensing fees or insane production costs or both, something's got to give.
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Agreed. Football and TV were made for one another. College football tends to last longer than a typical NFL game because of the longer halftime (20 minutes vs. 12 minutes except for the Super Bowl) and the stopping of the clock on first downs. The in-person experience is fun, but it can drag.
I have season tickets to the minor league team here. Games typically last anywhere between 2 hours to 2 1/2 hours. Basically the pitcher has 16 seconds to throw a pitch. Those rules will probably be adapted into MLB soon. It is a zippier experience, but that probably won't be the case on nationally televised games.
Ad-free tiers of service are not going away. They exist because people are willing to pay for ad-free programming. If there isn't an ad-free tier, you can't charge extra for ad-free programming. Those ad-supported tiers are designed for people who won't pay the full price. Remember, Hulu originally had ONLY ad-supported programming. They added the ad-free tier when they realized there were a lot of people like me who will pay extra for ad-free programming. It would be foolish to pass up that extra revenue.
As to ad-skipping, you can easily bypass those unskippable ads on streaming services if you want to. If there is a show I want to watch on an ad-supported service (e.g., CW's next-day streaming of their shows or Amazon's Freevee service), I will record it to one of the drives on my Plex server and then skip the commercials when I watch it. I still pay extra for ad-free streaming from Hulu and other services I subscribe to, because it saves me the aggravation of having to skip past the commercials.
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Last time I was at a MLB game (pre-pandemic), there was a between inning and pitcher change clock. I mistook it for a pitch clock. The have 2-3 minutes between innings or for pitcher changes, depending on if it’s a local, national or post season game.
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