| A deep dive on Locast: This week, the New York Times wrote an informative profile of Locast, a free service that streams live, local broadcast channels in seven U.S. cities. Because Locast is a nonprofit, the group believes it can legally retransmit local broadcasts that it pulls in from rooftop antennas around the country. No one’s actually tested that theory in court, but as the Times’ story notes, TV networks may be wary of spotlighting the service through lawsuits.
For now, the bigger concern may be the cost of operating a free, nonprofit service like this. David Goodfriend, Locast’s appropriately-named founder, says he doesn’t take a salary and has sunk about $700,000 into the service through a high-interest loan, yet Locast has only received about $10,000 in donations over the last year. Goodfriend is apparently soliciting corporate sponsorships and talking to Samsung about smart TV integration, but the organization may have to tread carefully to stay within the non-commercial, non-competitive status on which its legal case relies.
Locast is available in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, and Denver. The service is available on the web, iOS, Android, and Roku.
The Super Bowl without cable: I was going to spare myself some effort and just link to an article on this topic, but I couldn’t find any good ones. Real quick:
- The CBS Sports app will stream the game for free. It’s on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and iOS, Android and Android TV, Chromecast, Xbox One and the web.
- An antenna will still give you the best picture quality, assuming you get decent reception. Use AntennaWeb to check your distance from the nearest CBS station or local affiliate. If you want to get fancy, a device like HDHomerun (as mentioned in this week’s column) or an over-the-air DVR will let you stream the video to other devices around the house.
- Live TV streaming services that carry a local CBS feed will offer the game, though you’ll have to pay for those services. To check local coverage, plug your zip code into the websites of PlayStation Vue, DirecTV Now, Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, and FuboTV.
- Locast is also an option if you’re in one of the cities I mentioned above.
Streaming movie services compared: If you want the largest selection of fairly decent movies, Netflix is the service to get, at least according to a recent movie catalog comparison by The Streaming Observer. The site found that Netflix offers 596 movies with a “Certified Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes (meaning positive reviews from at least 75 percent of critics), versus 232 movies on Amazon Prime, 223 movies on Hulu, and 38 movies on HBO. Amazon Prime offers far more films in total, with 17,461 movies versus Netflix’s 3,839, Hulu’s 2,336, and HBO’s 815.
The story reminded me of another comparison last year by streaming search engine Reelgood, which found that Netflix and Amazon Prime were neck-and-neck in “quality” movies (as measured by their iMDb rankings). Hulu, however, came out ahead on quality TV shows.
I’m not exactly sure what to make of these comparisons, beyond appreciating the sheer volume of well-liked movies and shows that you can now watch anytime from a multitude of inexpensive streaming services. Don’t let anyone tell you we were better off with cable.
Ultraviolet, vaporized: Back in 2010, a bunch of movie studios got together and launched Ultraviolet, an online “locker” for all the films you’d purchased digitally. The hope was that you’d buy more movies if you didn’t have to bounce between different websites or keep track of the digital copies that came with Blu-ray or DVR purchases. Some brick-and-mortar retailers even launched disc-to-digital programs for adding previous DVD purchases to Ultraviolet (albeit at a price).
On July 31, Ultraviolet is shutting down. Although the service made sense in paper, it never got buy-in from Disney, which in turn discouraged popular digital stores like Apple iTunes and Amazon Video from getting on board. Disney, meanwhile, spearheaded its own locker called Movies Anywhere, which expanded to outside studios in 2017 and did get the support of Apple and Amazon. That expansion essentially doomed Ultraviolet, even if its backers would rather not admit it.
If you have even a vague recollection of using Ultraviolet, you’ve got six months to sign into the site and link them to additional retailers. You can even link your purchases to retailers that support Movies Anywhere, such as Vudu. |
