A couple of years ago, I ‘cut the cable’ meaning I do not have cable and rely on the Internet, Netflix and Hulu for show watching.
Some shows/Networks are good at this like, for example, Lucifer. I have been keeping up with this show and many others like it.
However, looking through my history I completely forgot about shows like ‘The Walking dead’ and ‘Supernatural’.!
!
I love(d) those shows? Why did I stop watching?
Because I forgot about them. Why? Because, unlike Lucifer, I have to wait until the end of the season and then one whole year to watch them! Why do they do this? I’m sure they have reasons like contracts with local stations or cable companies, or they want to try to get people to pay to watch single episodes or something. However, that something needs to stop, in my opinion. It will kill your show.
Interested in whether people think I am correct or very wrong. You won’t hurt my feelings…I could very well be wrong.
The networks already are planning for the streaming future. Many NBC programs are available through Hulu. CBS has its All Access service. And Disney is starting multiple streaming services; one will have Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar movies as well as new shows. A second streaming service will be for ESPN programs and events. And they’re also putting stuff on Hulu.
I’m less clear on what the Fox network plans for streaming.
It is easy to be snarky about personal anecdotes, but I think the data suggests this is a real challenge for network television.
It is just the first result in a Google search, so I’m hesitant to vouch for it completely, but I think it is good enough for Cafe Society and is in line with what I’ve read elsewhere: The State of Traditional TV: Updated With Q2 2017 Data.
I think that covers both broadcast and cable channels. It suggests that they’re losing young folks fast.
Personally, we cut the cord quite a lot of years ago, although having lots of cable / satellite channels never was a big cultural thing for me. My family was very late to the satellite game back in South Africa, and I only had satellite in the US for a few years before realizing it wasn’t good value for me. So I might be abnormal in terms of how easy it was to transition. I’m also regrettably not in the “young folks” section of the graphs I linked to.
The networks do seem to be trying to start their own streaming services, as Dewey Finn mentions. But I suspect this might not be as lucrative as the cable model and that consumers will resist subscribing to too many services at (e.g.) $15 a pop.
I think a big part of the “forgetting about shows” issue is that there is a huge variety of things to chose from. Even if we watched a lot of TV I think we’d essentially get all of the very good shows we could possible watch just out of our Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu subscriptions. HBO’s streaming service has tempted me in the past because of specific shows I wanted to watch, but I cancelled after a couple months. They actually have a few shows now (“Barry”, for example) that are tempting. But there is a reasonable chance that it’ll end up on one of the streaming services I already subscribe to in a few years, and even if it doesn’t I might add it to my Netflix DVD queue or simply forgo it altogether because there are more quality shows out there that I’d ever be able to watch anyway.
So it seems to be that the fundamental problem from the network’s perspective is a lot more competition. Seems like a good deal for entertainment consumers like me. Whether the current streaming model is sustainable or subsidized by companies willing to take a loss for future market share remains to be seen. I hope it works out. I don’t think TV has ever been better.
Subscriptions. What used to be a place to stream movies or get DVD’s has kind of turned into a stand-alone cable channel where you can stream their original content. In fact, they dump the entire season of most shows at once so you can kind of back-to-back the episodes.
Their hope is to:
Have enough original content to tease you into subscribing
By having original content, they do not have licensing time-limits. If Netflix makes a movie or TV show, they pay for it once and stream it forever
That was kind of my point. Cable companies offer programming not available on streaming channels, so they can sell subscriptions. It is obviously still profitable for networks to sell their programs to cable companies. I still watch a lot of live news and sports which I can’t get on streaming channels, so cable cutting isn’t attractive to me. Yet.
There’s a lot more competition all around. One insider has been tracking this, and according to him, there were 487 scripted shows last year, counting broadcast, cable and streaming options. (This ridiculous number of shows is a big reason so many old shows are being revived or rebooted; at least there’s some familiarity there.) No one’s watching everything, and what’s considered a decent number of viewers is much less than in past decades.
I’m pretty sure Supernatural is available on the CW’s web site/AppleTV app as it airs, but in general, for shows that aren’t available on Hulu/Netflix/HBO Now/Amazon Prime (all via the AppleTV, these days), I just generally buy “season passes” to them from iTunes or Amazon (usually iTunes, since the quality is better).
I used to pay over $120/month for cableTV. Since all of the above the bulk streaming services together add up to less than half that, I figure I’m saving $600+ a year, which will afford quite a few $20-$40 seasons if I really can’t wait a year for something. I think in a normal year we normally have about five of these, or brief subscriptions to one of the other services (like Starz for American Gods).
I can’t remember the last time there was something I wanted to watch and could not obtain at all (legally) without cable. But I don’t care about live sports, which I understand is the big hurdle for most cord-cutters. These days, most of the major sports are available by subscription, but at costs so high you may as well just get cable.
My cord is uncut at present, but a few years ago when I was on limited basic and I wanted to watch the current season of Better Call Saul I just bought the season on Google Play for about $20. Each episode would show up the morning after it aired.
Last year, the NFL signed a deal with Amazon to stream some games through Amazon. I expect eventually NFL Network will be offered as a standalone streaming service.
Around here, the NFL is just about the only thing one can get each week via antenna (over-the-air). Baseball and basketball are both purely cable sports,
Baseball has a very nice streaming service except the HUGE catch that you can’t watch games for the teams in your market. I’m ready to pony up $90 a year, directly to MLB, to watch my Indians, with commercials…but the cable companies have told them “no.”
If that’s the only thing keeping them from cutting the cord, they should get an antenna and test out their signal. Chances are they can get the networks just as good from an antenna as they would through the cable.
Well, Fox airs Baseball every Saturday night from Memorial Day until Labor Day (it used to start earlier in the season - they can’t go into September because of college football).
As for not being able to air a local team’s games, I don’t know if it’s the regional sports networks complaining about it so much as some of the team owners. Pretty much since they moved from New York, the original Giants owners made it quite clear that no regular season home games could air on TV in San Francisco. The one exception I remember was, IIRC, in 1982, when the Giants, Dodgers, and Braves were in a race for the AL West, and the Giants’ last game of the season, at home to the Dodgers, could air locally. Even when they allowed home games to air on an RSN, (a) at first, it required an additional $10/month (which also included the Warriors and, eventually, Sharks games), and (b) if the game was on another station as well - e.g. a Braves-Giants game on WTBS - all of the cable companies in the area had to black it out.
I do know that an RSN broadcasting a game has to be blacked out outside of the RSN’s main area.
Ironically ESPN is one of the reason I don’t have cable since it’s a mandatory part of bundles and costs several dollars per subscriber per month even if no one actually wants it. Cable companies don’t want to charge $70 a month when a good portion of that is going to the content channels. I’d subscribe to cable if it were only $20-something a month and I got to pick the 15-20 channels I’d actually watch (in addition to of course the useless ad and religion channels that pay to be on cable which I don’t think the cable company would let me opt out of.)
If it’s the local team, you actually might. I know when the Falcons are playing on Monday Night Football or Thursday Night Football, a local Atlanta affiliate puts them on OTA.