OTA remains free for another reason and that is the NFL's Broadcast Anti-Trust exemption. This exemption allows the NFL to negotiate broadcast deals and share revenue among all the teams. If the NFL tried to take every game off free OTA television, I suspect Congress would revisit the exemption.
NextGen TV has the same conditional access control mechanisms as DTV and more. The fact that many of these programs will be delivered via broadband is the problem.
I doesn’t matter what you or we want, DirecTV didn’t even negotiate to extend after this season so it’s done- time to stick a fork in it and relish/enjoy the last year of this while you have it with your setup. All good things come to an end.
People stream Sunday ticket now on Sunday’s without issue
YouTube doesn’t have me as a subscriber & never will.
Uh, you're not Christ. DIRECTV isn't going to spend $2+ billion per year to make you happy. And the real Christ has better things to do on Sunday than watch the NFL, IMHO.
I'd consider that style of viewing to be "advanced". A lot of buttons to push and a tuner dedicated to each game. Someone who did that would probably be able to figure out a new interface. Hopefully whomever designs the app supports multiple stream pausing and content searching. Just because it is streaming doesn't mean it has to be a steaming mess.
In the two plus years I've had DirecTV Stream, I can't tell you the last time I had an internet outage. I can tell you that weather outages with DirecTV satellite, while fairly rare, did happen a number of times with storms and heavy rain, even on a well aligned dish.
Never is a very, very long time. If you're young enough, you may well wind up staring at a blank wall and I don't think anyone will care.
Wake up? DIRECTV had an exclusive on NFL ST for years and always lost money. If all 2 million subscribers actually paid the $300 for it that only brings in $600 million dollars. I doubt the commercial carriage brought them close to breaking even at $1.5 billion. Do you think if DIRECTV wakes up they will suddenly magically sell 10 million subscriptions to break even at the rumored $3 billion price tag the NFL wants? But you think they should do it just for you? Good luck staring at that blank wall on Sunday afternoons.
You realize that Netlifx has been LOSING subscribers, which is why they went this route.
www.giantfreakinrobot.com
I remember the days when people swore up and down they'd never watch ads again, and then subscribe to ad-supported tiers of various services and "live" with it. Yes, there are always going to be a few people like that. Is it enough to support the cost of that tier (or lack of profit?) Again, what price would those people pay? What if the price went up to $40 a month, while the ad-supported tier is $10? How many die hards are left? I suspect, that out of the die hard ST users who are complaining about how things are changing, that the vast majority of them will port over to the new system. The games are what matters, not the tech. Again, here, remember, we are the tech savvy bunch, but most users aren't. Don't go by what you read here, we are NOT the vast cross section of users.
If you want to watch the games bad enough, you'll subscribe. If you don't you won't. It's that simple. For me, I never paid for ST, because I don't care about the games. I can watch plenty of football without it. It's nice to have when it didn't cost me anything. What streaming does is open it up to many more subscribers. Obviously current subscribers will have to decide who important potentially losing those features is to them (and we really don't know what features the new system will have. It's only speculation at this point). The games are what matter, you either want them or you don't.
Bet you wouldn't!! If streaming was the only option (and that day is coming, even cable companies are transitioning there), you'd make it work. And the experience has been getting exponentially better for many of us, and will continue to improve for the rest of us too.
And I've had rain fade that knocked my dish out, causing missed recordings, not to mention storms that ruined the alignment of my dish and I had to get someone out to fix (which could take days). I agree, not everyone has broadband that's reliable. That will change as the tech improves and it's built out to more and more folks.
