| AT&T is holding a red wedding for DirecTV Now this week, axing dozens of channels from its lineup for new subscribers and raising prices for everyone.
Gone are the old DirecTV Now plans that ranged from $40 to $75 per month. In their place are a $50-per-month “DirecTV Now Plus” plan without regional sports, and a $70-per-month “DirecTV Now Max” plan with regional sports. Both include HBO, but are missing many popular channels that came with the old plans, including HGTV, Nickelodeon, and AMC.
Existing customers will get to keep their current lineups, but will pay an extra $10 per month from April 12 on. The add-on price for HBO will also jump from $5 per month to $15 per month.
All of which means that if you’d been factoring DirecTV Now into your cord-cutting plans, you’ll need to recalculate. Read the full TechHive column for a breakdown of everything that’s changing and what you can do about it. |
| Apple’s next event: Apple has sent out invites for a press event on March 25, where the company will likely to announce a streaming video service among other things. Rumor has it that Apple will start selling subscriptions to premium TV channels such as HBO, Showtime, and Starz directly through its TV app on Apple TV and iOS. That way, you won’t have to jump through multiple apps and billing systems for those channels. (Amazon and Roku already offer similar marketplaces on their respective streaming devices.) Apple is producing original movies and TV shows as well, and while they might not be available until later this year, perhaps we’ll hear more about pricing and availability.
On a related note, MacRumors reports that Apple and Roku are close to a deal on AirPlay 2 support. This will allow users to stream video from an iOS device or Mac to Roku’s streaming players and smart TVs. Samsung, LG, Sony, and Vizio all announced AirPlay 2 support for some of their newer TVs a couple months ago. By expanding AirPlay support beyond its own hardware, Apple is acknowledging that its streaming service won’t go far if people can’t watch on their televisions, and that most people won’t spend $150 or more on an Apple TV.
Comcast’s TV squeeze: As I wrote last month, the new trend among cable and satellite TV providers is to give up on competing with live TV streaming services in earnest, and instead extract maximum value from current TV subscribers as the ship sinks. At an industry event, Comcast Cable boss Dave Watson appeared to confirm this plan, saying the company is “simply not going to chase unprofitable video relationships.”
Comcast, like other cable providers, continues to profit handsomely from its internet business, which is still growing and has better margins than TV anyway. Instead of trying to take on the likes of YouTube TV and Hulu with Live TV, Comcast will lean on NBCUniversal to launch a direct-to-consumer streaming service next year. It’s similar to the strategy that AT&T is pursuing with its upcoming HBO-powered streaming service, but with the added security of a healthy cable internet business in a famously anti-competitive market. Can’t say I blame ’em.
Fire TV Recast’s hard drive support: Amazon’s Fire TV Recast DVR now works with external USB storage drives, so you can expand beyond the 500 GB or 1 TB drives built into the Recast itself. Amazon says it’s tested this with a few particular drives (WD’s Elements Portable, Toshiba’s Canvio Desktop, and Seagate’s Fast SSD), but any external hard drive or solid state drive should work.
There’s a catch, though: Amazon automatically decides where any given recording should go. As Elias Saba at AFTVNews notes, that’s probably a good thing for the average user, but it does mean you can’t easily direct recordings to the external drive for the purpose of transferring them onto another device. The only workaround would be to fill up the internal drive first, mark all recordings as protected, then plug in the external drive. |
| If you’ve never tried Spotify’s $10 per month Premium streaming music service, you can now bundle it with Hulu’s ad-supported video plan (normally $6 per month) at no extra charge. The discount appears to be permanent for as long as you keep the Spotify subscription active, though you have to sign up by June 10 or “while supplies last.”
Some other caveats: The discount doesn’t apply to other Hulu plans such as the ad-free version of the live TV service, nor does it work with Spotify family plans. Existing Hulu subscribers can get the discount by switching their billing to Spotify after signing up for Premium, but existing Spotify subscribers are out of luck unless they’re in the middle of a free trial. Assuming you’ve passed all those roadblocks, this is a pretty good deal. |
