Cordkillers 56 – The Vue Looks Good from Here

Cordkillers / February 3rd, 2015

Playstation Vue is from Mars and Sling TV is from Venus. Plus how much is 1 billion Chromecast Sessions really?

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CordKillers: Ep. 56 – The Vue Looks Good from Here
Recorded: February 2. 2015
Guest: Roberto Villegas

Intro Video 

Breaking News

Primary Target

  • A sneak peek at Sony’s PlayStation Vue internet TV service
    – WAY more channels, CBS, Turner, Scripps, NBC, Fox, Discovery, Viacom
    – Looks like they’re missing ABC/Disney
    – Gallery view as seen at CES but also Guide view on side (like new TiVO default)
    – 3-day catchup, record to cloud DVR for 28 days
    – Add any show to ‘my shows’
    – No price yet!
  • CHANNELS: “Spike, CBS, NBC, Fox, My9, Telemundo, American Heroes, Animal Planet, BET, BET Gospel, Big Ten network, Bravo, CBS Plus, Centric, Chiller, Cloo, CMT Pure Country, CNBC, CNBC World, Comedy Central, Cooking Channel, Cozi TV, Destination America, Discovery Channel, Discovery Family, Discovery Life, DIY, E!, Esquire, Exits, Food Network, Fox College Sports (3), Fox Sports 1,2,3, FX, FXM, FXX, Golf Channel, HGTV, Investigation Discovery, LOGO, Movies TV, MSNBC, MTV (Hits, Jam, 2, U), Nat Geo, all the Nickelodeons, OWN, Oxygen, Palladia, Science, Sprout, SYFY, Teen Nick, Travel, TV Land, Universal, USA, Velocity, VH1, Vh1 Classic, Soul, YES Network.

Signal Intelligence

Gear Up

  • Google’s Chromecast has been used for more than one billion casts 
    – Google’s Chief Business officer Omid Kordestani updated investors on one metric during the company’s Q4 call Thursday
    – One billion cast sessions on Chromecast
    – In October said 650 Million
    – In July 400 million
    – Google defines a “cast session” as a user pressing the cast button within an Android, iOS or web app. In other words: Streaming multiple YouTube videos to your TV one after another counts as just one session.

Front Lines

  • Netflix Prices $1.5 Billion in Debt to Fund Content, Other Initiatives
    –Netflix will raise $1 billion in debt for content acquisition and other purposes. Mostly they’re doing it because the interest rates are so low so they want to have low interest debt to cover the next few years of cash needs. However the company says they expect to launch 320 hours of original content in 2015 three times the amount of 2014.
  • NBC’s Super Bowl Live Stream Was Hugely Popular. It Was Also Terrible.
    –NBC live streamed 11 hours of Super Bowl and Super Bowl-related content online yesterday in the US. Apparently it reached a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. Maybe that explains the lag. Also different commercials in the live stream which means the usual online repetition. Verizon mobile didn’t have as many complaints about its stream.
  • Sling TV strikes deal with Univision for its online TV service
    –SlingTV struck an agreement to carry Univision networks on the SlkingTV service. That includes Univision, UniMás, Univision Deportes, Galavisión, El Rey Network, Bandamax, De Película, De Película Clásico, Telehit, Tlnovelas and FOROtv. My guess? Spanish Language package available soon!
  • Adam Sandler’s first Netflix-exclusive movie has its cast
    –Ridiculous 6 will be one of Adam Sandler’s Netflix productions. Sandler will star as a man who was adopted as an orphan by a Native American tribe. Twilight’s Taylor Lautner, Rob Schneider and Terry Crews will play his adoptive siblings, while Nick Nolte has been cast as Sandler’s father. Rounding out the ensemble is Whitney Cummings, Jon Lovitz, Danny Trejo and Chris Parnell.
  • ESPN Takes Another Step Outside the Bundle, Starts Selling Streaming Cricket World Cup Subscriptions
    –ESPN will sell live and on-demand access to the 6-week Cricket World Cup for $100. The play starts Feb. 13. U.S. cricket fans can sign up Feb. 3 for a subscription at ESPNcricket2015.com, and then access streams on the Web; ESPN says it will have iOS and Android apps available by Feb. 11. Dish and Time Warner will also sell the package as PPV. 
  • Singtel, Sony And Warner’s New Video Streaming Service Beats Netflix To Asia
    –Asian Telecom company Singtel is partnering with Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers to launch a streaming video service in Asia. HOOQ will have Hollywood movies and US TV shows along with content from India, China, Thailand, The Phillipines, Indonesia, Korea and Japan. It will go online by end of March in Indonesia, Philippines, India and Thailand And then expand from there. 

Under Surveillance

2014 Winter Movie Draft
draft.diamondclub.tv

  1. Brett: $656,368,044
  2. Scott: $448,300,000
  3. Brian: $447,548,781
  4. Tom: $373,548,333
  5. Justin: $299,216,240
  6. John: $248,624,089

Dispatches from the Front

Hi Tom & Brian,

From this fans perspective I would say split the feed.

Thanks keep up the good work

Sean

 

 

I’m firmly in the doesn’t matter to me camp so long as you let us know about it. I use BeyondPod for my podcatcher and have a smart playlist that I can control what order things play in so I always get them in aired order.

Amber

 

 

I vote to split the spoilerin’ time episodes to their own podcast. In addition to the reasons Brian mentioned on the show, the main podcast is much more time sensitive, so need to keep those in my stream. I can always go back and listen to spoilerin’ time when I finally watch the shows you are spoiling.

Love the show, cutting the cord as soon as my Sling TV invite arrives!

Matt, Atlanta, GA (aka future site of Google Fiber! )

P.s. finally became your boss today, just signed up on Patreon

 

 

Hey guys as always thanks for the great weekly entertainment, was just listening to this weeks episode and Brian was doing his thing ranting about lack of bandwidth when in the sky and wondering why he can’t do any form of streaming video.

I am kind of an authority on this as I worked for Northwest Airlines subsequently Delta Airlines for 8 years and one of my job functions was to work with the aircraft engineers to install/maintain the In Flight Entertainment systems. I now work for a Major retailer and help consult on GoGo installs for the fleet of aircraft they operate.

The TV service is in fact satellite tv provided by Dish Network. That is how you are getting live tv.

The inflight wifi on the other change is provided by Aircell (Parent company to GoGo). Aircell was originally developed to provide in flight phone calls, remember the phones on the back of the head rests that you swiped a credit card to make in flight phone calls? Yea that is Aircell. When that didn’t take off (pun intended) they re-branded and changed their name and services to GoGo inflight wifi.

GoGo is an Air to Ground connection. GoGo has their own CDMA 3G towers that covers coast to coast of the lower 48 and parts of southern Canada. These towers and antennas are pointed to the sky which provides the wireless data connectivity to the aircrafts.

Each tower has very limited bandwidth, most of them are fed by a single T1, some maybe 3 T1’s. Then on top of that the actual bandwidth provided to each aircraft is also limited, at most 3mbps to a single aircraft.

3mbps that is then shared between all the users on the plane, so say you have 50 users all on a plane trying to use the inflight wifi, and sharing that single 3mpbs pipe so then you’ll start to understand why they proxy the connection and prevent steaming services.

Right now GoGo is in the process of upgrading their infrastructure to support CDMA EVDO Rev B and provide dual modems as a retrofit to aircraft, this could then provide up to 9mbps to an aircraft however you are still limited by the limited/shared backbone infrastructure that GoGo has to each tower.

So what I’m trying to say to Brian is that yes you’d think we’d be able to have 100mbps or even a gigabit connection while in the sky (wishful thinking) GoGo isn’t artificially keeping it slow and preventing users from doing youtube and Netflix while using the inflight wifi. How would you feel if you paid to use the service and one user was hogging all the available bandwidth because he was streaming a movie and you couldn’t even get a web page to load?

Anyways thought I could share some inside details about how inflight wifi works.

Josh S

 

 

Hey team!

Freakin’ love this show, and I’m proud to be a Patron! Thanks for all your hard work.

Thought I’d throw out a hiccup I’ve discovered with my FireTV Stick. When I plug in into my television, I lose all of my OTA signal. When I unplug the stick from the TV, the signal comes back. My antenna is mounted outside the house and connected using the home’s existing cable.

Could be wi-fi interference. Could be the age of my TV (2008). Just curious if anyone else had this issue, or just posting as a possible solution for other cordkillers.

My AppleTV (2nd gen) hasn’t given me any issues.

Mitch
 

 

Hello Tom & Brian.
On the previous episode you guys talking a bit about Plex. Listen, Plex is fantastic, not just great but excellent. Tom brought a good point and it was that his DRM purchased content wouldn’t play.
The reason Plex is so popular is in part yes because you can have all your ripped own content (home videos, DVD/BR ripped movies/tvshows, etc,). The other reason Plex is so popular is because it provides an easy and convenient way to stream and access all your *pirated* content.
I know you guys do not support piracy, but let’s not close our eyes to it. Obviously the reason Plex is so widely loved is because a large portion of its users pirate content and use Plex as their media server. I’m not saying that’s all they do, they probably have home movies, ripped content, etc., but let’s also not pretend that the reason Plex has become so popular is any other than the massive love of its piracy-loving users.

Keep up the great show.

Franklin.

 

Links

patreon.com/cordkillers
Dog House Systems Cordkiller box