Cordkillers 82 – S-M-R-T SMART!

Cordkillers / August 3rd, 2015

HBO gets smart about Game of Thrones, Comcast com-blocks Sling TV, and why the Xbox won’t be your cable box.

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CordKillers: Ep. 82 – S-M-R-T SMART!
Recorded: August 3, 2015
Guest: Iyaz Akhtar

 

Intro Video 

Primary Target

  • HBO is selling ‘Game of Thrones’ S5 downloads earlier than usual
    -Season 5 of GoT available for download before DVD/Blu-ray, August 31 (preorder AMZN, Vudu, Itunes, Google Play for $39)
    – Includes extras
    – Discs don’t come until March 15
    – Been on sale in Australia since it finished airing
     
  • HBO says ‘Game of Thrones’ will be at least EIGHT seasons
    – HBO programming president Michael Lombardo told Television Critics Association “Seven-seasons-and-out has never been the [internal] conversation. The question is: How much beyond seven are we going to do? Obviously we’re shooting six now, hopefully discussing seven. They [Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are] feel like there’s two more years after six. I would always love for them to change their minds, but that’s what we’re looking at right now.”

Signal Intelligence

  • Comcast’s NBC refuses to air commercials for Sling TV
    – Sling bought ads on all major network sin 8 cities.
    – Comcast-owned NBC affiliates rejected the ads (including in New York and LA)
    – Sling CEO Roger Lynch wrote: “Comcast has a demonstrated history of shutting down ideas it doesn’t like or understand, predictably to its benefit and at the expense of consumers.”
    – POTENTIAL POINTS
    – Is seeing ads for Sling really a consumer benefit?
    – Should Comcast be required to run the ads? Would it be different if it was DirecTV?
    – What’s the real reason? Don’t forget Comcast licenses some of its networks to Sling TV

Gear Up

  • Xbox chief doesn’t see ‘as much value’ in TV cable box features
    – Phil Spencer speaking with the Verge about Xbox
    -“We’ve been thinking a lot about over-the-top and over-the-air conent and the aggregation of all your content in this un-bundled world”
    – On cable box: “I’m not sure we have as much value to add there…”
    – “I think there are natural features that you could see where an Xbox could do a good job helping, especially in a world where you have video sources from all over the place.”
    – “We see what people do on the box and we know making advances in the entertainment space is important. You’ll hear more from us soon actually about that.”
    – Microsoft has a Gamescom announcement at 10 AM Eastern Tuesday. 

Front Lines

Under Surveillance

Dispatches from the Fronts
Hey Tom and Brian,

I was just having a quick look on eBay to see if anyone was selling an Amazon Fire Stick for cheap, but found a load of sellers listing a modified Fire Stick loaded with Kodi and plugins like iVue that enable people to stream premium channels for free. They’re selling them at around £25 profit.. some have sold over 500 units (a tidy £12,500 profit!).

Isn’t this illegal – i.e. selling it like that, not using it when you’ve bought one?

I’m all for killing the cord, and don’t mind if people want to side load this stuff themselves, but blatantly selling them like this for that price & in such quantities feels wrong to me.

What do you guys think?

–Matt 

Hey crew I just setup my Xbox One to do remote play from outside my home network using https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3a1rwv/instructions_for_streaming_xbox_one_from_anywhere/

This got me to thinking this just made Xbox one a great sling box replacement if you run your TV through Xbox one like you Tom. Only thing a bit annoying is having an Xbox controller around to navigate the Xbox one interface remotely.

– Jack

Hello Tom and Brian

I just wanted to add my two cents into the discussion you had about JT question -“Is there room for the movie collector in the cordcutting world?”

Not all movies are available digitally yet

Two, Not all services have a full catalog.

Three, access to quality. Not everything is available in true HD (Stefano from Italy wrote in with the same concern about image abnd audio quality)

Four, there is a sense of control. The sense that you have easy access to your media when the internet is down or that pay streaming service that may or may not be there for the next 5 to 10 years. The sense of security that you don’t have your credit card number on services that got hacked.

– David form Riverside, CA

Hey guys, I love the show. I just want to let you know about a really good documentary that I found on Netflix called “Lost Soul: the Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau”. The documentary explores how the director had been fired and replaced in the middle of production, the script was rewritten on the set and it’s two leads didn’t get along with each other. Did you know that Brando didn’t even bother reading the script at all? His lines were fed to him through an earpiece. Val Kilmer didn’t get along with anybody on the set. There were even long periods where the extras and staff were coked up and having sex with each other because there was nothing else to do, seeing as how both leads refused to leave their trailers.

I was gobsmacked when I watched this, thinking that these were all professional people being well paid to make a movie, where the two lead actors and the director apparently didn’t give a damn.

Best regards,
– Isaac in Madison

I did it I cut the cord with Dish Network, they at first offered me $30 off a month, then in a last ditch my current services (which are pretty low) for $33 a month for a year. But I could not be swayed I think Cable and Sat are aging technologies, I use Hulu and Netflix and Plex for everything else and am perfectly happy. Thanks guys for keeping up the good work

– Dave

 

Links
patreon.com/cordkillers
2015 Winter Movie Draft

 

It’s Spoilerin’ Time 81

Cordkillers / July 29th, 2015

Movie Draft Update, BoJack Horseman S1, Mr. Robot (103-104), True Detective (206), Rick & Morty (201), The Shield (608)

00:53 – Movie Draft Update
04:19 – Feedback 
12:34 – BoJack Horseman S1
16:59 – Mr. Robot (103-104)
20:35 – True Detective (206)
28:50 – Rick & Morty (201)
34:50 – The Shield (608)

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Cordkillers 80 – Sit or Get Off the Pot, Hulu

Cordkillers / July 20th, 2015

Hulu may contemplate an ad-free tier, Judge gives Internet TV hope, Slingbox giveth and taketh away.

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CordKillers: Ep. 80 – Sit or Get Off the Pot, Hulu
Recorded: July 20, 2015
Guest: Andrew Mayne , Eklund

Intro Video 

Primary Target

  • U.S. judge says Internet streaming service should be treated like cable
    – US District Judge George Wu in LA ruled FilmOn X entitled to compulsory license for streaming broadcast TV network
    – (Compulsory license allows small cost carriage of must carry sytations. Stations who opt for retrans consent no longer    must be carried but have to negotiate in “good faith” for retrans costs)
    – An immediate appeal to 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals was allowed
    – Injunction against FilmON left standing
    – Feb. 22, 2011 – District Judge Naomi Buchwald granted an injunction, shutting down most of the broadcast stations carried by Ivi
    – Same right Aereo was denied in Manhattan Federal Court October 2014
    – FCC launched comment period Dec. 18, 2014 on reclassifying OITT as MPVD
  • Password Sharing: Are Netflix, HBO Missing $500 Million by Not Cracking Down?
    – A report from research firm Parks Associates estimates services like HBO Go will lose up to $500 million worldwide to people who share login information. 6% of US broadband households use a service paid for by someone outside the house. Services like HBO and Netflix responded to the survey with a collective “yeah we know.”

Signal Intelligence

Gear Up

Front Lines

Under Surveillance

Dispatches from the Front

Hey Tom and Brian. I am still a few weeks behind so I don’t know if you have mentioned this or not yet.

The people of sideclick have re launched their product. They are only $13,000 away form their $80,000 goal, and they have 27 days left at the time of writing this.

Thanks,

– Savo in silly Schenectady NY. 

 

 

Guys,
Please understand that live TV is essential to a sports fan! I know you two are not. With, basketball, hockey, soccer, golf and football, the major broadcasters like NBC, ABC, CBS & ESPN, make billions, not to mention billions more for teams and players. Then add in endorsements,etc. You are happily ignoring a huge segment of your own potential market.

Please get someone on your podcast who is tech savvy and is a sports lover.
 

– Don

 

 

Hey guys, it’s your boss here. Last week you asked for an “anti-Plex opinion” … I am not that “anti-Plex opinion”, but I’m going to share my insights, anyway. 🙂

In my opinion, Plex is really good at one thing: managing libraries of locally-stored, non-DRM’d content. …

What Plex does not do is Live TV or PVR functionality, or any streaming service or web site. Yes, there are “Plex Channels” that will give you content from the web, but in my experience they are very glitchy and rarely work, probably because they’re almost all scraping web content, making them very prone to breaking. When they do work, figuring out what content is actually available on the channel is worse than figuring out what’s available on Free Hulu, and the experience will make Brian’s Grandmother a very sad panda!

TL;DR – If you have a large library of local media, Plex is awesome. For everything else, Plex is pain.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for making my favorite podcast every week! Keep up the good work!

– Stealth Dave

 

Links

patreon.com/cordkillers
2015 Winter Movie Draft

Cordkillers 79 – Comcast Stream: You Can’t Take it With You

Cordkillers / July 13th, 2015

Comcast offers a cord-cutting fig leaf, ESPN loses subscribers, Chromecast gets an ethernet port.

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CordKillers: Ep. 79 – Comcast Stream: You Can’t Take it With You
Recorded: July 13, 2015
Guest: Lamarr Wilson

Intro Video

Primary Target

Signal Intelligence

Gear Up

Front Lines

Under Surveillance

Dispatches from the Front

Hey guys, just wanted to write in about my experience with the Amazon Fire TV stick and using it in hotel rooms away from home. After hearing about the update which allowed you to sign in through a hotels wifi access portal, I used it a few days later at a Hotel Indigo, an upscale Holiday Inn family hotel. It worked great! Fast, stable, great picture on Netflix, no problems. I loved it.

However, it is I’m afraid to report very bandwidth dependent. I tried it this past week at both a Hilton Garden Inn and a Hampton Inn, and the results were very poor. The login process was painless, but neither hotels had the bandwidth to properly use the stick. I tried the Pluto.TV, Twitch.TV, and the WWE network app and none would work or play any video. Netflix only worked at the Hampton Inn, and even then the video would buffer very often and not be the best quality.

In short, the Amazon FireTV stick is a great piece of hardware, and should be with everyone who travels or stays in hotels a lot for business, but premium internet access is necessity.

Hope this was helpful,
– Ken

 

 

 

Tom — you mentioned you enjoyed watching news from pluto tv because of the variety of sources and sit back experience… for that, I use haystack. Which I thought i heard about through you, but in case not, you should check it out.

A bit early in their dev — but you can see they are working on favoriting and a recommendation engine to keep your feed relevant to what you’re interested in and what’s trending, all while coming from multiple sources.

avid listener,
– Joe

 

 

Hi guys,

I just had one comment about the hulu/pluto channels. This is the syndicated version I’ve been waiting for. I keep hoping for something I can tailor myself. Hulu used to have play lists and queuing but now it’s only queuing. Just recently I wanted a Playlist option when I realized I could only stand 3 shows of someone else’s binge watching. Well I’m close with Pluto but not close enough.

Really hoping maybe Pluto help me get my own channel selection some day.

– Nicky

 

 

Season 2 of “The Strain” premiers this coming Sunday evening on FX.

A good scary series that gave me chicken skin during the first season. I’m looking forward to being scared again. Deserves a look at a couple episodes of season one. I think you’ll like it. 

– Bad Billy

 

Links

patreon.com/cordkillers
2015 Winter Movie Draft

Cordkillers 78 – Binge and Purge Viewing

Cordkillers / July 7th, 2015

TiVo finds TiVo viewers binge, gives Aereo users a free Tivo, Hulu available as a linear channel.

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CordKillers: Ep. 78 – Binge and Purge Viewing
Recorded: July 6, 2015
Guest: Jennie Josephson

Intro Video 

Primary Target

Signal Intelligence

  • Hulu to Deliver Free TV Shows, Movies via Pluto TV Service (Exclusive)
    – Hulu has channels on PlutoTV now.
    – Pluto can restream anything from the free tiere of Hulu on the desktop
    – Late Night Catch-Up; ’90s TV Shows; ’80s TV Shows; ’70s TV Shows; Joss Whedon Shows
    – In addition, Pluto has channels with select episodes of “SNL,” “South Park,” “Star Trek,” “Seinfeld,” “I Love Lucy” and “The Twilight Zone.”
    – Pluto TV has recently struck deals with a half-dozen other content partners to distribute their programming: Shout! Factory, Jukin Media, Devin SuperTramp, Multicom, Around the World in 4K and Amazing Places on Our Planet.
  • Hulu’s Living Room Viewing On The Rise As PC Viewing Declines
    – But desktop is a declining platform for Hulu
    – Living room viewing now 58% up from 44% a year ago
    – Mobile now 17% up from 15% yoy, and PC 24% down from 41% yoy
    – OTT streams have an average of 1.4 viewers

Gear Up

Front Lines

  • Vivendi Buys Dailymotion for $242 Million
    – Vivendi has purchased an 80% stake in Dailymotion. Vivendi owns Canal+ Group and Universal Music Group and said Daily motion will allow for the “joint development of “original and distinctive content and formats”
  • Comedy Central channel starts streaming on Roku
    – The Comedy Central app is now available to add to your Roku. And while you need a cable subscription to watch everything, the latest episodes of some shows — like The Daily Show, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and a few select others. 
  • Someone made a teaser trailer for Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events adaptation
    – An excellent teaser trailer appeared on YouTube for Netflix’s upcoming series based on the books “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Trouble is Netflix doesn’t know where it came from. The teaser is the only video on an account under the user name Eleanora Poe.
  • TVPlayer app streams 25 UK pay-TV channels for a fiver a month
    – TVPlayer which offers free streaming of over the air channels now has a £5 a month plus package that includes 25 pay-TV channels like National Geographic, History and Discovery Channel, some of which will even include catch-up service. 

Under Surveillance

Dispatches from the Front

I’m a time traveler and this email is in response to the discussion you haven’t had yet about the city of Chicago imposing a ‘cloud tax’ on streaming services like Netflix.

I agree with Brian that this is despicable. Chicago’s argument is that they’re trying to recoup tax revenue lost to brick-and-mortar stores that have been replaced with streaming services, but this argument doesn’t fly for two reasons. One, because there are presumably new businesses where the old stores used to be that are paying tax and offering taxable products and services, and two because streaming services don’t use local resources like a brick-and-mortar store. But most importantly, even if they have lost tax revenue, that’s just too damn bad. They have no right to replace it with a tax on a product that isn’t originating and may not be consumed in their city. What if I live in Chicago but watch Netflix exclusively when I travel?

– Shiftlock

 

 

Gentlemen, I was wondering if either of you had checked out the Netflix original “Grace and Frankie“. It is a 14 part comedy series with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. My wife and I really enjoyed it, though we are much older than you guys. First couple of episodes seemed a little forced but after that I though it improved substantially and was fun 

– Steve

 

 

Hi guys! I had to stop and rewind when you said that SHOWTIME was coming to HULU! SHOWTIME is a CBS network, and CBS has been all but openly HOSTILE to Hulu in the past. Has CBS blinked, or is this just another nail in Hulu’s financial coffin?

– Jon

 

 

Links

patreon.com/cordkillers
2015 Winter Movie Draft