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ABC Kills Next-Day Streaming For Non-Subscribers
jfruh writes "ABC shows are available for free to anybody with antenna on the day and time they're first broadcast. But if you want them at any other time, it's getting harder to see them unless you pay someone. The network had previously made free ad-supported streamed versions of its shows available on its website the day after they aired, but now they're shifting that back to a week. Next-day streaming is still available if you have a cable or Hulu Plus subscription, showing the extent to which "broadcast" networks are dependent on subscriber fees."
I, personally, watch very little on the 'big four' networks, however this trend is a disturbing one -- especially for those of us in markets that aren't served by all the networks. My market has no NBC, so the only way for us to get their content is to wait for it on their web page, or to pay someone. We have no other legal choices...
bork bork bork!
showing the extent to which "broadcast" networks are greedy bastards.
FTFY
The biggest commonality of cable cutters (including me) I know is that they don't watch or care about "live" TV. The difference between a day and a week is nothing to them. DVRs changed a lot of peoples watching habits and these people aren't paying the premium anymore.
Look at Redbox, does a 90 day DVD release delay help sales? Not likely, you just shift what I watch 90 days in the future.
If you're getting something for free, then you're not the customer.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, ever.
I remember one time Adult Swim use to have video on their site available BEFORE the broadcast. That eventually changed, but that was nice.
Speaking of ABC, it's probably fine what they're doing. I assume that the one-day-after streaming was somehow cutting into revenue they get from their sponsors. Maybe not enough were watching on TV, and it was devaluing the commercial's worth. Even if they show ads online, it is probably considered separate for when they sell ad spots.
There's not a single show on ABC I'd ever watch; perhaps that's why they need to increase revenues...
... will ensure they don't buy anything. Similarly, making it hard for people to watch will ensure they don't. If they do want to watch, more will look for torrents (amongst other things) than go back to the stone age days (before PVR's, etc). People nowadays will not bother being inconvenienced unless you have awesome stuff - although it's not my cup of tea, Apple is an example of where people will stand in line for hours and be inconvenienced.
I wouldn't say ABC shows are worth putting off tennis practice (or whatever hobby you have) for. This will not end well.
This is move is going to lose me as a viewer, not push me to subscribe to cable.
I have netflix. I get TV over the air. This sort of access was the only way for me to watch current shows other than at their prescribe transmission time. Other networks have made it "enter your cable bill number" to access this content as well.
I guess they don't want me, and those like me, to watch their shows at all.
I am certainly not going to subscribe to overpriced pile of crap that is basic cable. I grant you can get some good stuff by going specialty cable, but that is even more $$ on top of basic. I am almost never home at the right time to watch it "live" over the air. So count me and countless others like me off the viewship list. This is move is going to lose me as a viewer, not push me to subscribe to cable.
Bu-bye.
Waiting a week / month / year is fine. I accept the business model at play here... Milk the wallets of those who can't resist instant gratification, and find some nominal revenues from everyone else. It's just... I hate the ad interruptions. I'd gladly pay for Hulu Plus... if there were no ads!
This is not new. Fox has been doing this for a while to try to push everyone to get a Hulu Plus membership.
Many of my friends are between 6 months and 2 *years* behind current broadcast schedules.
I watch very little network television (POI & Elementary).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Really, not joking here.. So you lose the ability to time-shfit for free, not the content. Just more of the 'me me me' crowd whining.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As an added bonus all the ads will be stripped off. Sorry ABC, you blew your opportunity to make money off my eyeballs.
If only there were a way to get my favourite TV shows soon after being broadcast, preferably in high-definition and without commercials, so I could watch from the comfort of my couch at my leisure.
Trolling is a art,
What you're looking for is the difference between the words "consumer" and "customer".
If you watch TV/FB/tweeter, you're the consumer.
If you pay to put ads, or (more recently) to watch, you're the customer.
We only have cable here. There is no broadcast that we can receive with an antenna. How exactly would I watch it when it is aired? Oh yeah, wait until it has been aired and stream it off the web (non-abc sites).
Answering myself here. ./ ?
Were they getting too much traffic on
I'm looking for a reason to have made the comment section so much more painful to filter and use.
Content creators and providers want to get paid. If their fees seem too high or their contract terms too onerous don't view the content. I'm sick of people whining about it. As wonderful the concept is you don't have a free right to the creative effort of others.
Time shifting is no longer the "killer feature," time shifting IS television. This is the equivalent of a TV station in the 1950s saying "we will no longer be offering moving pictures with our radio programs."
I have not watched TV on a network schedule for a decade, and my children don't even have the concept of a "TV Schedule".
Fighting consumer demand is difficult, fighting consumer default expectations is suicide; especially in Entertainment media, where the whole world can turn on a dime, except you.
Don't act surprised. It's business. Who said creativity is dead? People keep coming up with new ways to charge for something that had been free'ish traditionally.
Seriously. $75 to $100 a month for cable? Haven't done that for years. $8.95 a month for Netflix, plus a bit of Pirate Bay to top up the offerings. You tell me what makes more sense.
Although honestly I'd be happy to pay say $25-30 a month for some hybrid of the two - at least for news channels.
Of course the downside of not watching cable or network TV is that you really appreciate how horrible advertising is. Easily the most painful part of going out to a movie.
Three Squirrels
I get most of my TV over the air, meaning that I mainly watch the networks. But occasionally life takes priority over TV watching and I end up watching a show that I missed on-line. But almost all (or maybe all) of the shows that I watch have running story lines spanning the episodes. I've missed an episode in the past and when I found that I couldn't watch an episode on-line before the next episode aired (or even couldn't watch it at all), I've just decides "screw it" and quit watching the show. What does ABC think they are accomplishing by only letting viewers who pay someone else see the episodes in order in a timely manner? Why in the world would they do something that can only drive more viewers away from broadcast TV?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
But I posted this a week ago. http://slashdot.org/submission/3219009/abc-streaming-to-require-catv-provider-subscription
Silence is a state of mime.
We need a VCR equivalent. Been looking for one for a while.
For all you young people, a VCR - Video Cassette Recorder - let us record live TV - unencrypted - onto tapes. I'm only half kidding about the education here.
We need a simple box that records OTA in 1080P onto a hard drive or USB stick. There are several out there, of various flavors. The key for searching for such is "converter box" with recording capabilities.
A PC with media software is not sufficient. We need a simple solution.
This might be a contender very soon:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1500872/channel-master-cm-7500-2-tuner-ota-dvr-with-guide
Clicking an addon on XBMC, joining a public swarm 15 minutes after airtime or googling it to find which file locker to stream or download it? How stupid for them to cut another revenue stream.
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I don't even think I have watched a show on ABC since "V." And that one wasn't available the next day anyway, and since I missed them on-air, I never saw the last 2 episodes. And I'm sure I haven't been back to their site since I found out they didn't have the previous day's episodes. I think this devastating occurrence is what convinced me to buy my HDTV capture card.
For some strange reason, all their sports programming got moved to ESPN, so why should anyone watch ABC anyway?
If ABC wants me to watch their junk they'll have to pay ME. My eyeballs are not free.
It sounds like your torrent experiences are all from 1995, except that doesn't make sense since it was before torrents.
For the last many(!) years: 1) torrents have been automatable. You use a tool like flexget or something, to basically "subscribe" to some RSS feed just like you'd set up a PVR. You select the desired quality at that time. 2) unknown amount of time: irrelevant. Your habit is that you watch things asynchronously. You watch things when they're in your list of newly-available shows. And it happens to be pretty fast, anyway. 3) Gigs: irrelevant. Go look at hard disk prices. 4TB drives are below $200 now. Enormous fault-tolerant arrays are affordable and easy to set up. Take the amount of money someone typically sends to Comcast in a year, and send it to Newegg instead, and you will have more Terabytes of storage than you'll know what to do with. And definitely more than you can fill in a year. 4) watch it on your laptop: that amounts to "mount /mnt/videos && mplayer something.mkv" And playing it on your tablet is easier easier, since it'll probably just talk DLNA/UPNP to your plex or mediatomb or whatever server, automatically by default, without you ever dealing with mounts, thinking about what devices can speak NFS vs Samba, etc. 5) futzing to get it to TV: no 'futzing" ever happens. Your TV's main HDMI input is permanently hooked up to your HTPC's HDMI-out, it's already sitting there all the time, and how you watch everything you ever watch, anyway. If a file comes in via bittorrent rather than other means, that's not a special case. It's always easy, no matter where the file came from. 5a) Or you have gone the relatively lame (but cheaper and possibly more grandma-friendly) model where you have some kind of embedded computer (e.g. WD TV Live) which also easily plays your files, but maybe it's quite as interoperative as mplayer. Either way, this is simply just never a problem unless your embedded computer is from Apple or Microsoft or Roku or someone like that.
6) episode suckage. That happens with all delivery techs. It's not a torrent thing. If you don't like s01e01 of something, tell your RSS reader to unsubscribe to that show. What's the problem? After a few weeks, you're mostly just watching stuff that you like, the exceptions being when you try something new, "in case it's good."
So torrents it is for anyone not living in the US. Hulu isn't available for anyone outside of the US and streaming on the ABC website as well. Even if I want to give them my money, they won't take it. So why should I stop myself from finding other ways of watching the shows I want.
It says they went from next-day streaming to next-week streaming. One day wait to seven day wait. This is a non-thing.
Good! More and more people will break the habit of thinking that moronic TV is worthwhile; as the greedy TV-crats cut off more and more, more people will realize that it is all crap, and interest themselves in other things! Good! Good! Good!
ABC corporate screwed over our local affiliate years ago. There were a few personality conflicts with popular local personalities that they needed to win. They did. Talented and well liked people moved on and the station's ratings went into the toilet and stayed there.
Have gnu, will travel.
Curious if I'm the only one who has noticed this. The shows I record OTA often have flaky reception as I don't have a direct line of sight to the towers.
Funny thing is, the commercials never skip or drop out but the shows themselves do. I'm thinking, that doesn't make sense as the video would all come out with the same signal strength regardless of the source.
It's probably just my imagination but... these days is there anything they WON'T do to screw customers? I refuse to pay Comcast a monthly fee to unscramble the OTA signal they've scrambled.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
They are fucking crazy to think that I'm going to pay for the pleasure of watching their streaming ads. If I'm going to pay for it, it has to have some added value.
Time Warner has not owned Time Warner Cable for several years. Other than whatever royalty deal Time Warner has with Time Warner Cable to allow them to continue using the "Time Warner" name and the "Road Runner" IP, they have nothing to do with each other - except that Time Warner Cable is one of the independent TV distribution systems that Time Warner want to get paid by for having it distribute the various cable tv networks of Time Warner's Turner and other cable TV divisions - channels like HBO, Cartoon Network, CNN, Turner Classic Movies, etc.
Your "owns a lot of cable stations" is inaccurate and ambiguous? Do you mean, "owns a lot of cable systems"? If so, you're wrong, as I've explained. Time Warner does not own cable systems at all anymore, the entity called Time Warner Cable is an unrelated company.
Do you mean, "owns a lot of cable networks"? In which case, yes, HBO's owner owns quite a few other cable networks.
Your argument either works or is totally invalid, depending on what you mean. There is no such thing as a "cable station". CNN is a "cable network" owned by Time Warner, "Time Warner Cable of North Carolina" is a cable system owned by Time Warner Cable. The interests of Time Warner vs Time Warner Cable are not aligned.
HBO Go becoming independent, in terms of subscription availability, from having to also have HBO-the-cable-network subscription, might be a net positive for Time Warner the owner of HBO. It might be a negative to Time Warner Cable, because it would remove an "upsell package" opportunity of bundled or special deal premium network sales at huge markups. It would just be more bits, like Netflix or Amazon or Hulu.
But it might be a net positive for Time Warner Cable, and for Charter Cable, Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse, CenturyLink DSL, as providers of high-speed broadband internet (ok, allegedly high-speed allegedly broadband allegedly internet, really minimal speed barely-broadband walled-garden). It might encourage more people to get high speed internet and to upgrade the speed and or monthly total data transfer allowances, because now Game of Thrones without TV.
I believe it would be the latter. But I believe that the cable system executives believe it would be the former, at least the ones that are originally/primarily cable-tv systems that then added data. I have no idea what the cable network and broadcast network executives feel about it.
Personally, I'd like every entertainment series available unbundled, released on the "broadcasting network" servers on a specific schedule, but available continuously after that "street date"/"air date". I'd like to be able to get Sleepy Hollow without having to get American Idol. I'd like to be able to get that Fox Network series without having to get a Chthulu Plus subscription. But if I found I liked enough series that were on Hulu, as one of their options, and that a Hulu Plus subscription was the most economical way to get them, then I'd like that option. If I instead only wanted to buy one series, I'd like the price to be very low, and I'd like it available simultaneous with "home network" air date and time. If it's on ABC broadcast network Tuesday at 8pm EST, I want to be able to start streaming it at 8pm EST that same Tuesday. Even if I'm in the Pacific Time Zone. Or in the Uruguayan Time Zone and IP block. (which I am).
Oh, and a pony.
But note I never said I wanted it to be totally free-as-in-beer. Well maybe the pony.
...on This American Life. The new shows are up for a week until another weekly episode airs. They then charge 99cents for the "archive" podcasts.
Is this a "disturbing" trend as well? It's been their business model for at least 3 years as far as I know. It's just entertainment folks. Not the polio vaccine.
"We didn't want to own it, we just wanted to watch it once, and if we had (and assuming we'd enjoyed it) we would've become regular viewers of the current season."
This is why iTunes should rent tv episodes. I'd pay 10 - 20 cents per episode to catch up on a past season of a current show.
never heard of ABC using Netflix before.
I'm in Canada. I've not had cable television since 2005, about the time some series I was watching ended. Didn't think the vast wasteland was worth the expense for a tiny number of good shows.
Being in Canada, I've become endured to many Internet videos that are television clips being blocked here on American websites, due to someone else holding the rights to broadcast that content in Canada. For some, I tracked down the Canada rights holder to watch (eg. The Comedy Network for a lot of comedy stuff) but most often I just didn't bother with it.
A few months ago, I started watching television on the Internet, including things like "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." and "The Crazy Ones". Sure, I had to find out who had the rights in Canada and where on their website, but once I had the link I bookmarked it. I was watching more television than I had in 8 years.
Then from mid-October to mid-December I had a serious health issue occupy my time, but that resolved well. So about December 19, late at night, I decided to get caught up, as best as I could. Found out I'd missed 3 new episodes of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Went to watch that.
"Sign in with your television provider." And everything else, with that and other programs, had some variant of that.
I've not had Netflicks. I've never gotten shows from a torrent site. And I wasn't about to at O-dark-stupid in the morning. But it got me to thinking.
I figured this was the signs of a sea-change in the television/cable business and like many little people I got side-swiped. Sure I was getting it for free. But all those big corporations had set it up to give it to me for free. And now, without any warning, it was gone.
But I'm not getting cable television, 'cause it's still an overpriced wasteland. I'll find another way. They can take their "television provider" and stick it where the Sun don't shine. >:(
realize you have to have something worth paying for.
The more you try to control it, more I'll just pirate it. you make anything difficult to watch and the black market demand goes up.
You can figure out the reason for doing this if you read between the lines:
...you'll no longer be able to stream ...unless you subscribe to a participating cable service, or are a Hulu Plus subscriber....Worse, the list of participating cable services isn't comprehensive. Right now it includes AT&T U-verse, Cablevision Optimum, Charter, Comcast XFINITY, Cox Communications, Google Fiber, Midcontinent, and Verizon FiOS. At the least, those of us stuck on Time Warner Cable are out of luck. DirectTV and Dish subscribers are also left out in the cold. Maybe your provider isn't included either, and if you live in a city and get your TV OTA you're definitely not covered.
They probably have a contract with all the cable & streaming providers saying that they won't compete with them by offering their shows directly. They might even have agreements with advertisers that forbid the advertisers from showing their ads on competing networks. Could there even be a cartel behind this? Perhaps some of the cable TV companies have banded together and agreed to prevent streaming services from coming online to protect their business model. I'd love to see the DOJ look into this.
Ssshhh.
The day will come when cable-cutters will be left with fewer options. The channels and networks make more off re-transmission fees than they do from advertisers. They love you if you have cable; because you're basically paying for something already "free" (if it's not rolled in to your monthly rates; you're paying a seperate "retransmission fee" on your bill, look at it). Quite frankly; the networks don't really care if you're watching them or not; because they're already getting paid. They've threatened to leave the air and switch to cable-only distribution; a move the FCC won't allow them to do. That one service that was streaming networks for $8/month (whose name I cannot remember) is a prime example. All they were doing was wiring you in to an antenna with an OTA tuner and place-shifting device; something that doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of public retransmission. Yet, they still sued and got the company shut down because "it was threatening our business model". Getting eyes on the programming/channel obviously *IS NOT* what the business model of TV networks are; it's to extort money through retransmission agreements.
But they're not the only ones to blame; you can point a stiff finger at the writers. Remember the writers strike? It was all about lack of payment for online streaming of shows. Brodcast it on TV; it's one rate; stream it online and it's another rate entirely. The writers wanted more money because more eyes were on the programming; this takes more money out of the networks pocket...so it's their way of saying "We paid for this once; now it's up to you."
It's capitalism at it's finest. You can blame whoever you want...not one single party is responsible.