Slashdot Mirror
Comcast's New 'Xfinity Instant TV' Streaming Service Charges $18 For What Antennas Offer For Free (exstreamist.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Exstreamist: Comcast announced this week that they plan on rolling out their streaming service, "Xfinity Instant TV" as an option for broadband-only customers. At our very first glance, it seemed like a pretty good deal, a live-streaming service for $18 a month, not bad right? But once we actually looked into the offering, we noticed something funny. Almost the entirety of what they're planning on charging $18 a month for could be viewed free with an antenna. According to the Wall Street Journal, the antenna as an option is apparently a long lost TV option for many consumers. Variety is reporting, "Xfinity Instant TV" intro packages, the ones that are $18, will only include a handful of broadcast channels, and a few "freebies" like the Home Shopping Network, and CSPAN So we're not exactly talking about getting access to ESPN, CNN, FX, or other more desirable channels for cord cutters, those will cost you at least $45 more a month, so basically the cost of your current cable television package. The report notes that the service is only available to Comcast internet subscribers and does include access to on-demand services.
Some people live in low-lying areas and can't get a signal, and HOA rules, or the nature of the type of dwelling (apartment, rental house), prevents them from putting up an antenna in a way that gets around those issues.
...as long as you're carrying an antenna and a TV around with you.
Instant TV offers streaming live TV via IP, including native mobile apps. You could certainly replicate this level of mobility with an antenna, but it would be a little cumbersome to cart around :-)
Unlike 1971, in 2017 most people actually live in cities and they get high quality 1080p HDTV over the air signals.
Inside of buildings.
It is specifically because people are waking up to this, and only need high speed Internet, that cable companies are losing customers fast.
If I could get a good CBC HDTV signal, I'd do the same.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As I watch a football game legally on Amazon over Comcast for $100 per year plus free shipping on purchases.
I mean which is the greedier public menace really? The greed, or the greed that enables it?
Now, how do I connect this antenna to my phone?
You can just plug an antenna in any TV! Do people not know this?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It can't go wrong! It can sell free over the air tv to people who are restricted or banned from mounting an antenna to get free over-the-air HD TV content. Booyah Xfinity.. maybe your attempt will stick better than Aereo.
https://www.lifewire.com/aereo-tv-viewing-service-overview-1847833
An HOA does not have the authority to block or prevent the installation of an antenna designed to receive television signals:
https://www.fcc.gov/media/over...
So... it's illegal, but it's no longer illegal if you pay someone for it?
Can't we do that with drugs, too? I mean, I already pay my dealer so that smack is legal, right?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wait.. you are paying for this. Have you found evidence that the payment to Comcast is not transferred to the local broacaster? Have you figured out this is an issue that has been struggled with this.. before today?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/business/media/supreme-court-rules-against-aereo-in-broadcasters-challenge.html
You can just plug an antenna in any TV!
Provided it's actually a TV. Many devices that are shaped like a TV and sold in the TV section, such as the Vizio E70-E3, are actually only monitors. They can display an HDMI signal or receive a Chromecast, and that's about it. The tuner is sold separately.
Installing your own antenna to receive OTA is extraordinarily expensive.
In shithole I live get 21 channels perfect picture counting all sub channels while ignoring religious only stations.
Dual tuner HD Home Run = $60
Two wire ace hardware dipole antenna = $6
$66 dollars buys me the ability to "stream" OTA from anywhere on my network .. HD.. perfect picture ... $0 monthly cost.
But then I couldn't be bothered to run coax to my TV... so streaming from HD home run was VERY expensive...an ODRIOD C2 with gigabit Ethernet, 2GB ram, 4k h265 hardware decoding cost me $50.
Then I wanted to record shows and watch them later. Installed free DVR software on a spare computer with some available disk space.
What about the TV guide subscription? EPG is also broadcast OTA... not as fancy as subscription based Internet sources but good enough for most purposes including of course automatic DVR recording.
Your all better off giving thousands of dollars a year to your local cable monopoly. Don't even think about going OTA. You'll regret it.
It isn't free to them. They have to pay the networks to provide it to you.
It isn't free to them. They have to pay the networks to provide it to you.
And to put the blame for that where it belongs: it could be free to Comcast IF the network affiliates did not invoke their exemption to the must-carry rules and demand payment. You see, there is a law that says that cable operators must carry locally available broadcast signals (with certain limits on size, IIRC) without having to pay the broadcaster anything, UNLESS that broadcaster opts out. If they opt out, they can demand payment for retransmission rights.
Right now in my area Comcast is displaying a CG page for one of the network stations we used to get. That broadcaster has opted out of must-carry and is refusing to grant retransmission rights. Comcast claims they demand too much money; the broadcaster claims Comcast isn't offering enough.
And the irony of this is, it is the broadcasters who originally demanded the must-carry rules. They were afraid that cable would choose to carry a different source of the network material and exclude the local stations, or simply not carry a signal that most people could get OTA (freeing up a channel for some other programming). In the former situation, viewers would get the network programs with national or other-region advertising. In the latter, viewers would be less likely to switch from cable to OTA to get that channel. Both situations cost the broadcaster advertising revenue. For the channel that is currently a stationary graphic, they've lost all viewers and all ad revenues from this area, a lose-lose for them. Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, I think the phrase is.
OTA TV is on its way out anyhow.
Back in the early days when most people had 3-4 OTA channels and few people had cable, more than enough people were watching each network to fund their operations. However now that it's not uncommon for a show on a broadcast network to "go fractional" - that is, get a Nielsen rating below 1.0 - OTA is no longer sustainable. Ad revenue alone isn't enough, and on top of that you have the heavy costs of operating a 1 megawatt broadcasting antenna.
The broadcast networks are slowly transitioning over to cable-style paid networks, and this is the only reason they're surviving thus far. If they weren't receiving subscriber revenue from cable companies, they'd already be dead.
The future is not in free content. It may take broadcast networks another decade or more to get out of the OTA business, but the continuing balkanizaiton of TV viewers over dozens of networks guarantees that OTA will no longer be viable in the long-run.
Nope. Still not tired of winning.
Uh, what? If people broadcast content they expect people to tune in to receive it. It's not a private screening, you literally set the whole system up for people to be able to receive the content you are transmitting without any further effort on your part. You make it sound like nobody anywhere has paid for the rights to broadcast the content in the first place. I live in the UK where television is largely "free-to-air" meaning we can all receive roughly 10-20 channels on "Freeview," provided we pay an annual license fee, without needing extra cable/satellite TV subscriptions. Such content is received through a good old Yagi-Uda antenna.
I understand the USA doesn't have a license fee, so this got me wondering how these proposed channels are funded. The most obvious solution would be a combination of grants from local/federal government and sponsorship (ads). This does indeed appear to be it's funded for both radio (from Wikipedia):
Some of the funding comes from community support to hundreds of public radio and public television stations, each of which is an individual entity licensed to one of several different non-profit organizations, municipal or state governments, or universities. Sources of funding also include on-air and online pledge drives and the sale of underwriting "spots" (typically 15–30 seconds) to sponsors.
...and television:
PBS and American Public Television (formerly Eastern Educational Television Network) distribute television programs to a nationwide system of independently owned and operated television stations (some having the term "PBS" in their branding) supported largely by state and federal governments as well as viewer support (including from pledge drives that many public television outlets carry for two- to three-week periods at least twice per year, at dates that vary depending on the station or regional network), with commercial underwriters donating to specific programs and receiving a short thanks for their contributions. Such underwriting may only issue declarative statements (including slogans) and may not include "calls to action" (i.e., the station cannot give out prices, comparative statements, or anything that would persuade the listener to patronize the sponsor).
So your suggestion that using an antenna to receive broadcast content doesn't support content creators is a bit odd. Satellite TV streams are an example of a different system where anyone can receive the signal (the transmission beam from the antenna in orbit covers a decent chunk of Europe), but lawful demodulation (i.e. viewing content) requires a decryption token available only on subscription to the provider.
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
I think he was just being Poe. Commercial OTA television is free to receive by anyone with an antenna and tuner. There are no fees. It is funded by running ads. So many, many ads. Usually approaching ten minutes out of ever thirty. Blah. Public OTA television is funding partly by government and private grants, but mostly by People Like You :) They have commercials too but only at the beginning or end of a show; very brief, usually.
This is technically true. It's also irrelevant: Cable companies started out as ways to make it easier to obtain TV stations that were difficult to get via an antenna, and it remains the base that the lowest tier on offer from cable companies are, essentially, the broadcast channels and a few self-funded channels like HSN.
If you look at the actual product, what they're offering is a base price of $18 (which only includes antenna channels and self funded), plus packages you can add to that of channels you might actually want. Most people would probably end up paying somewhere between Sling TV (about $45 for a full set of channels) and what they'd pay for a normal cable subscription (quite a bit more than $45.)
So the price structure is the same as regular cable. It's just a little cheaper.
The service includes a virtual DVR. And you can use it with a Roku. You can use two devices simultaneously.
It doesn't seem to be bad or overpriced from what I'm looking at.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Comcast is weird, you need to stay on top of it and jump between promotional plans none of which have contracts. I only want internet, I added this and my bill went down $30. It wasn't mentioned in the article but they also severely limit what you can view if you aren't on your "home WiFi". And by home WiFi they mean home network, a VPN bypasses this limitation.
Overall the application works just fine, and they threw in HBO as well.
For example, I regularly get snail mail from Cox Communications asking me to re-up for Contour service. Sure it's only $15 but I know that it's just going to go up from there. They've done it before, they'll do it again.
I cut the cord years ago, and I've experimented with various computer-as-a-DVR and network DVR devices. (Elgato EyeTV on a Mac, Windows Media Center on Windows 7, Tablo, and now HDHomerun.) They are all very expensive, and they are all a pain to use. HDHomerun's DVR software is extremely stable and easy to use, but it's still rather feature incomplete. I don't think Silicon Dust has enough cashflow to make HDHomerun's DVR a complete device.
For the money I've spent on bad devices, $18 a month is a great deal, especially if the software works and is easy to use. No one in my household could figure out the Tablo. I used the Elgato EyeTV when I was single, and its interface was so awful that it basically required the user to write SQL queries in order to program the DVR.
I will say this, though: 20 hours of recording space is extremely small unless the controls are good. I like to DVR the news and occasionally watch the headlines, but that often requires dedicating 5 hours of space for yesterday's and today's broadcasts.
No, I will not work for your startup
Comcast offered this before for less $ with more stations. About a year ago they did a trial in Illinois for $15 a month. Same station line-up, plus it included HBO. Now it costs $3 more without HBO. We only used it for a couple of months to watch Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones. Once their seasons ended, we dropped it. Still more content available to watch than we have time for on youtube, netflix, amazon. PBS is the only thing we can get with an indoor antenna.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Why is this not modded funny yet? I sense a huge amount of whoosh here.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Is that thanks to Sony vs Betamax, it's legal to record OTA TV with a DVR.
Bet that's not true for the same material transmitted any other way, such as cable.
At our very first glance, it seemed like a pretty good deal
What are they smoking? At first glance, it looked like a terrible deal.
OTA TV is based on RF signals. Traditional cable is based on QAM signal transmission. Newer cable and streaming services use a regular IP network connection. If you're in an area that has poor RF reception, these should provide a significant quality increase since they're using an IP network connection. It would be great if it were free like RF, but someone has to pay the bandwidth and infrastructure bills.
Local Off Air charge as much as $1 a month per channel to the cable operator! Hence why you are seeing the bill. The rise in cable bills comes from the cost of content. As everyone cuts the cord, content providers increase cost to cover lost revenue. Who owns all the content?
General Electric
Time Warner
Walt Disney
News Corporation
CBS
Viacom
Ok...so here's the thing.
Cable companies have been paying retransmission fees for OTA channels since the mid 90s. The difference is they used to roll it in to your service package and hide this from you. They are no longer allowed to do that; and if you look at your bill, you should see a "local channel fee".
Aereo was not paying fees; they were arguing they were effectively acting as just a remote antenna and tuner.
This Xfinity service and Aereo are the same thing in some aspects; except XFinity has paid for the ability to sell the service. Aereo was shut down because it was ruled they were violating these rules.
Also, no one is restricted from being able to put up an antenna to get OTA TV. The FCC has laws protecting these devices and only in specific extreme cases (like you live in an apartment) can they be violated.
Your explanation is wayyyyyyy too generic when you talk about capture. Capture for private use has long been upheld as legal. DVR's technically capture digital signals. VCR's for years captured and recorded off-the-air transmissions. The difference is these have been considered "private use"; and courts upheld the legal right for retransmission or capture for private use. This means it's legal for me to record OTA HDTV; it's also legal for me to install hardware at my house to capture the OTA signal....or in my actual case...anything coming out of my cable STB; and then stream that to myself in another location. During the Aereo hearings, several broadcasters tried to roll Slingbox technology in to the mix.
But the federal judge overseeing that case said there is a big difference between things like Slingbox and things like Aereo. With Slingbox, it relies on you having either an OTA STB or a cable STB. In the case of OTA...this is your tuner, your antenna, and you are streaming it to yourself. With the case of Slingbox, you pay for the TV subscription and are streaming it to yourself. Because the signal originates from your home and moves to you over the internet; it was ruled this type of use was "private retransmission" and violated no laws.
What Aereo was doing was capturing OTA signals...then reselling it. They argued they were only renting space for the antenna, as well as the hardware; but the court didn't look at that way.
Television channels have been collecting retransmission fees for what we get over the air when we get them from cable. Most people haven't realized that. But it's been that way for close to 20 years now.
The only problem is you have basically only explained how "public" broadcasters here operate..which would largely be a PBS or a community station.
However those are such a small number of channels in a given area that they probably barely make up a measurable percentage. Most TV people watch is 100% commercially owned; funded by advertisements.
I know over there BBC is considered a "public" broadcaster; but "public broadcasting" in the US has an entirely different definition. It, for the most part; is largely strictly educational programming. Granted, my local PBS has a digital sub-channel that shows a bunch of UK sitcoms; public broadcasters here are not the "general entertainment" channels working for the public like the BBC. The big networks here are big commercial organizations that work solely for themselves and shareholders. I suppose I could liken it to say Channel 4 or iTV over there...which are commercial broadcasters. But when I had the pleasure of watching UKTV for a few months; the main difference between Channel 4/iTV/commercial broadcasters and your public BBC was the fact BBC had no commercial advertisements. The quality of programming is the same.
Not that our PBS programming isn't done to a high standard; but it is not "general entertainment" where you'll find sitcoms. If anything I'd be willing to say our PBS is closer to BBC2, but a lot more boring and pretty much 100% educational.
You should also take in to account the differences in reliability. Freeview uses OFDM modulation with several multiplexes each coming from a central location...with effort taken to provide coverage to everyone. Granted, the UK is a lot smaller than the US; we do not have many centralized broadcast facilities. Each broadcaster essentially owns it's own tower, it's own spectrum; and as a result...the coverage of each channel can vary wildly. Very little effort is taken to cover a large area...only what their license requirements dictate. Your freeview system is actually about as large as what the average cable TV basic subscription used to be. It's been a while since I looked at the OTA channel list; but I was insanely jealous at all the selection of channels you get. We're at the mercy of whatever the owners of the station want to throw on the subchannels. We have a few good ones; but we also have a lot of garbage.
The whole difference boils down to the fact the US was first with broadcasting...not trying to play the "we're better" game...becuase in the long run we really screwed up. Even in the 20s, the UK saw how our radio stations were pretty much acting to the benefit of it's sponsor. In fact...most early stations were set up and run by companies strictly for advertising purposes. It wasn't uncommon for the shop in town that sold radios to also have a radio station...because what good is selling a radio if you can't listen to it. They saw where radio wasn't serving the public...and you get the system you guys have now. While many in America scoff at the idea of a TV license; they largely don't understand it. Hell, I get a lot of people that think the BBC is a government broadcaster and that all broadcasting is BBC. I know it's not true...eight months of access to a Slingbox hooked up to SkyUK taught me a lot about the TV landscape over there.
You guys got it right. The US just stuck to it's capitalistic roots and made it all about serving the people who paid for broadcasting (advertisers)...and the listeners were an afterthought. Give them something to keep them tuned in so we can shamelessly shove our advertising at them.
I think it might depend on the area. Last time I ran the TV through "setup" it picked up 17 channels OTA. Of course, most are crap, but besides the networks there are a few specialist channels (the oldies channel, horror channel scifi channel (which is not the syfy channel)) which you'd think would be cable channels but are available OTA. We don't have cable at all, haven't for years. If we can't get it OTA, we largely do without. (Caveat: I don't watch much TV, so YMMV. And wife does have Hulu on her Kindle, which is admittedly a cable-style paid network.) We currently only have two connections to the outside world -- a big "farmhouse style" antenna on the roof, and fiber internet to the house (internet only, no TV) and there's a blu-ray player attached to the TV. It works for us. (What works for me in particular is that my cost for TV after initial investment is basically zero. Previously it was something like $160 a month.)
Personally, I don't think those transmitters will go away in the immediate future. They may get repurposed somehow.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I get you're joking.. but I wanted to point out that FCC licenses to use those airwaves actually explicitly require that the broadcasts use FCC-determined standards, specifically so that anyone can capture and decode that content. That's also part of why time-shifting is fair-use; you're recording something broadcast in a finite, public medium. Broadcasters give up their right to exclude by licensing public airwaves.