Had been on DirecTV for a few years as a cheaper alternative to the Comcast pricing at the time. That was before the AT&T acquisition and unending price increases. When the two-year 'commitment' expired last fall, jumped to the Disney bundle (toddler grandkids) and upgraded the Hulu service to their Live tier. Hulu Live is about 40% of what we were paying for satellite with the same channel lineup. We also get a discount on the Disney+.
We already had Netflix and we're Amazon Prime customers, so we have no lack of available content.
I dumped DirecTV last month; AT&T's fiber service is (at least for now) uncapped, and Hulu Live is one-third the cost of what I was giving the Deathstar, gets me the locals, and if *they* get in a pissing match over retrans fees, I'm < 3 mi/5 km from the local broadcast towers and a cheap antenna will get me the locals just fine.
The local Tegna-owned ABC & NBC stations have a banner on their webpage about how mean ol' AT&T won't come to terms with them and they've been off the air on DirecTV and AT&T's streaming TV service since Dec 1. I'm on Hulu Live since Oct though, who's jacking my rate up $10 in January, likely for garbage retrans fees like this. Still under half the cost of what we used to pay DirecTV, I'm still ahead.
At some point the locals and the conglomerates owning them are going to catch a clue; I can flip to the $10 antenna if I want the local content that bad and they get zip.
I'm getting HBO Max as a freebee with my AT&T Fiber internet service, so all these movies are going to come gratis. Beats the crap out of coughing up for a four-pack of tickets to watch on a screen barely bigger than my home TV given the way they carve up rooms at the local multiplex.
The theater owners must have seen this coming for a while; they need to offer something besides a larger screen and overpriced concessions to get bums in seats. Are they expecting the studios and/or government to force the status quo on their behalf?
One of the reasons we had delayed cord-cutting from our "triple-play" FTTH/VoIP/DirecTV bundle with the Deathstar was that having the dish-based TV got us a waiver from their data cap on the fiber 'Net service. As of 3Q they've removed it from their gig-speed service (at least) and thrown in HBO Max as a perk (no doubt to try and raise subscriber numbers since they hadn't cut deals with the bigger streaming platforms).
If an ISP caps your data at X, but traffic from them (or whatever streaming services have chosen to pay the Danegeld) doesn't count against that, then obviously there's an incentive to use those sources rather than incur the overcharges. For the third-party sources, the ISP is engaged in rent-seeking behavior, charging for access to their customer base. For all the current administration bellows about free markets, this is the ISP gatekeepers picking & choosing winners based on the heft of their wallets. For the consumers it's being penalized for daring to choose content suppliers other than the ISP or its allies. Having the same company providing both content and controlling your access to anyone else's content is clearing anything but net-neutral. I hope for a turnover of administration and a clear, legislative solution to this.
Notice how baseball & football have handled their restart: empty stands, a handful of camera crew spaced out around the venue (and I'd agree that could drop with some reasonable automation as is used in the overhead skycams), the "control board" for the game being managed from an offsite location and the announcers in 1+ other locations. With all that network traffic already flying around, how hard would it be to simply provide a livestream off said control board and charge appropriately? You subscribe to your favorite teams' feeds and the league gets a cut. The assorted sports networks like ESPN get to pound sand.
My current bill for DirecTV is $160/month ($110 base, $30 set-top boxes, $10 "sports fee", DVR service, no premium channels), gig fiber $80 (uncapped while bundled), PLUS taxes & "service fees". Hulu Plus @ $63 for the comparable channel bundle, uncapped fiber resold by toast.net for $75. Not quite half-off. If AT&T and Roku ever get past the measuring contest, adding back the HBO Max for $15 still puts me ahead.
Yes, I get uncapped fiber 'Net access from AT&T for bundling their VOIP and satellite TV service. They throw in HBO Max for free as a (minor) perk on top of that.
That contract expires in October, at which point we're likely moving to Hulu Plus for TV and finally dumping the "landline" after 30 years in this house. Keeping the uncapped fiber service will cost another $30/month from the Deathstar, but an available reseller (toast.net) will provide uncapped service on the same fiber strand for $5 less than the bundled price I've been paying to SWBell, er, AT&T :-). I see little downside here, other than the dubious value of the HBO I can't use on my Roku players anyway...
On the one hand, they want everyone with Ring-or-similar to volunteer them to LE to avoid them actually having to do boots-on-the-ground patrolling. On the other hand, it creates an offsite copy of any cases of their overstepping (dang, can't just seize and "lose" someone's cell phone to cover up), which I'm sure any lawyers looking to have QI overturned will find soooo useful.
My city was one of the candidates for Google Fiber before that disintegrated. Big noise from City Hall about how modern this made us etc etc. Strangely enough :-), about four months later, AT&T drops a postcard in my mailbox that they've run fiber through my neighborhood and would I like gig service for what I was paying Comcast for 75/10 internet?
Can't complain about the service TBH, but I frankly would have preferred Google coming in and being able to tell Comcast *AND* the Deathstar to pound sand...
Stephenson came up through SW Bell's hierarchy, apparently with the old monopoly mindset well-entrenched by the time they bought up the rump-AT&T operation and took the name.
He assumed they could slap the Deathstar logo on something and have people rush in for it. At this point they run screaming.
At present I have a 'triple play' bundle with them for DIrecTV, FTTH gig internet and VOIP, which contract runs out in the fall. At that point we may keep the fiber, which is giving us free HBO, but if they can't get their act together with Roku it's off to toast.net, a reseller without data caps. For the rest Hulu Plus and maybe Ooma will drop our media bill by about 2/3.
On AT&T's fiber service, so I'm entitled to HBO Max gratis. That said, neither my LG smart TV or my Roku boxes can get the service, and I'm uninterested in picking up YA streaming box such as Chromecast just for their stuff when everything else I'm interested in is already available. Planning to dump their DirecTV once my contract is up in the fall, so streaming options are important.
That AT&T can launch a service to try and staunch the flood of cord-cutters, then ignore 2/3 of the streaming platform market (Roku & Amazon) astounds me. Old-school monopoly mindset still in play I suppose. At some point they're bound to deal with their cranio-rectal inversion, in the meantime AT&T can suck it.
In the US, the studios were forced to divest their theater operations as an anti-trust move in the late 1940s; the original ruling had come nearly 20 years earlier but was put off by FDR during WW2. The studios unloaded their portfolios to the rising television networks of the time (all the late-night old movies on the independents back in the day...).
the Alamo Drafthouse chain has a hard-and-fast no talking or texting rule in their theaters. They've even gotten some stars to do lead-ins to warn people against it, usually as part of whatever new movie they're in:
>> It'll be interesting to see how the US handles this, because they'll have to choose between government enforcing equal-levy rules on the cables, or a permanently entrenched monopoly.
Problem with re-engineering this is that most of these companies have exclusivity agreements either at the state or local level, so you'd end up getting into a raft of "states' rights" arguments (hello, Interstate commerce rules :-) ).
The simplest solution would be to declare the last-mile infrastructure as open to all comers, such as was done in the Ma Bell breakup, so competitors could get on the wires/fiber/coax. The incumbents would scream, but this should create the "public roads" needed.
In my town, AT&T & Comcast suddenly got much more competitive on pricing once Google FIber announced/threatened to come in. Have AT&T gig FTTH at this point for $80/month. Will be looking HARD at cutting the cord (ditching the dish in my case) once the contract expires in the fall.
Deathstar-Prime would like to get a set of meaningless NN rules in place (see Blackburn's nonsense) before the election and a potential Democratic trifecta of POTUS/Senate/House push through something with actual teeth.
Re: saving money
Had been on DirecTV for a few years as a cheaper alternative to the Comcast pricing at the time. That was before the AT&T acquisition and unending price increases. When the two-year 'commitment' expired last fall, jumped to the Disney bundle (toddler grandkids) and upgraded the Hulu service to their Live tier. Hulu Live is about 40% of what we were paying for satellite with the same channel lineup. We also get a discount on the Disney+.
We already had Netflix and we're Amazon Prime customers, so we have no lack of available content.
Re: Don't forget about AT&T and Tegna
Re: Re: Tegna/Gannett & AT&T
Nice freebees
Re: 'I support the military! ... that I'm trying to defund.'
https://i.imgur.com/fEuVES0.gif
AT&T removed caps for faster tiers
Too obvious
Re: On the matter of sport channels ...
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: this again
Re: this again
Cops don't get it both ways...
On the one hand, they want everyone with Ring-or-similar to volunteer them to LE to avoid them actually having to do boots-on-the-ground patrolling. On the other hand, it creates an offsite copy of any cases of their overstepping (dang, can't just seize and "lose" someone's cell phone to cover up), which I'm sure any lawyers looking to have QI overturned will find soooo useful.
competition ftw
classic monopoly mindset
Stephenson came up through SW Bell's hierarchy, apparently with the old monopoly mindset well-entrenched by the time they bought up the rump-AT&T operation and took the name.
He assumed they could slap the Deathstar logo on something and have people rush in for it. At this point they run screaming.
At present I have a 'triple play' bundle with them for DIrecTV, FTTH gig internet and VOIP, which contract runs out in the fall. At that point we may keep the fiber, which is giving us free HBO, but if they can't get their act together with Roku it's off to toast.net, a reseller without data caps. For the rest Hulu Plus and maybe Ooma will drop our media bill by about 2/3.
Waiting for AT&T to catch a clue
On AT&T's fiber service, so I'm entitled to HBO Max gratis. That said, neither my LG smart TV or my Roku boxes can get the service, and I'm uninterested in picking up YA streaming box such as Chromecast just for their stuff when everything else I'm interested in is already available. Planning to dump their DirecTV once my contract is up in the fall, so streaming options are important.
That AT&T can launch a service to try and staunch the flood of cord-cutters, then ignore 2/3 of the streaming platform market (Roku & Amazon) astounds me. Old-school monopoly mindset still in play I suppose. At some point they're bound to deal with their cranio-rectal inversion, in the meantime AT&T can suck it.
Re: studios owning theaters
In the US, the studios were forced to divest their theater operations as an anti-trust move in the late 1940s; the original ruling had come nearly 20 years earlier but was put off by FDR during WW2. The studios unloaded their portfolios to the rising television networks of the time (all the late-night old movies on the independents back in the day...).
Re: phones out in theaters
the Alamo Drafthouse chain has a hard-and-fast no talking or texting rule in their theaters. They've even gotten some stars to do lead-ins to warn people against it, usually as part of whatever new movie they're in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAVp6i5dlU (Godzilla!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_a8YATU_NM (Mark Hamill)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh9xkaY8TYQ (Amy Schumer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=077i_XUvOBo&list=RDCMUC5hYQ9a_QgTFnOCqHBzlX4g&index =7 (Chadwick Boseman)
Re: Beginning of the next 'Ma Bell'?
Re: There are several ways this can be fixed.
1) already happened some years ago to a Ron Paul staffer: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/06/aclu_sues_tsa_for_airport_sear.html
They backed away quickly once it came out that these were political contributions.
Re: Re:
Thanks, beat me to posting that one specifically.
"wear gloves..."
set rules under business-friendly Congress
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