Weekly rewind
Playstation Vue’s shrinking local lineup: On Tuesday, PlayStation Vue abruptly lost two dozen live, local channels across 23 markets, all owned by broadcasting giant Sinclair. For those channels, customers can no longer watch live TV (including sports and local news) or access their recorded programs. For now, they’ll only receive primetime shows on demand, though Sony told Polygon that it will soon offer a live feed from Fox in areas wher local broadcasts are unavailable.
Sinclair says it removed the channels over a “failure to comply with certain contractual provisions,” while Sony says it was “unable to come to an agreement on terms” for carriage. In any case, Sinclair owns or runs 192 stations across 89 markets, so the fallout could hurt Sony’s efforts to provide live, local coverage in the future. Consistent coverage has also been an issue for PlayStation Vue in the past, with several realignments of its coverage map causing customers to lose their local stations.
Last year, Sony eliminated its $10 per month “Slim” discount for customers who don’t receive most local channels in their area, anticipating that local coverage would become much more commonplace. Instead, some customers are getting the price hike without the benefits.
Hulu’s latest moves: As part of its annual appeal to advertisers, Hulu revealed it has 20 million subscribers, and is promising more content and new features to come. Most notably, the service will support offline video viewing sometime over the next years, and Hulu says it can embed advertisements within those downloads. That’s obviously not ideal for users, but it’s better than nothing if it means more networks will permit downloads in the first place.
Hulu is also adding a “Stop Suggesting” feature for when it’s algorithmic recommendations come up short. The company demonstrated this feature to me in January, along with several other improvements such as a grid guide for Hulu’s live TV service. It’s unclear when the rest of those changes will arrive, but the plan was to launch them in the spring.
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