| With cable TV, the people who watch sports have always benefitted from those who don’t.
Even if you don’t care about local baseball or Monday Night Football, you still pay for that coverage as part of a big TV bundle. That in turn subsidizes the cost for the actual fans, who might otherwise to pay a lot more if sports channels were sold separately.
That delicate balance is becoming untenable. As the cost of live sports continues to increase, more cord-cutters are abandoning pay TV bundles in favor of services such as Netflix and Disney+, which offer better non-sports programming for less. That’s led to even more price hikes for pay TV, and higher bills for diehard sports fans. In many markets, watching local baseball or hockey teams without cable now costs at least $85 per month, and prices can be even higher with cable or satellite TV.
All of this might explain why TV providers—including Fubo TV and Dish network—have become so eager to get into the gambling business. By letting people bet on the games they’re watching, these providers may have found a new audience to help pay for live sports. That could be good news if you’re hoping for cheaper ways to watch sports without cable—unless you’re a gambler yourself. Read the full column on TechHive. |
| Paramount+ arrives: As expected, CBS All Access rebranded itself as Paramount+ on Thursday, aiming to shake its network TV associations and draw more attention to its broader catalog of movies and shows. ViacomCBS has been steadily adding content from the back catalogs of Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, and other cable channels in recent months, and now says it has more than 30,000 episodes to watch.
But perhaps because of that steady build-up, the actual launch doesn’t seem to have changed much. The price is still the same at $6 per month with ads and $10 per month without, and the most noticeable difference in Paramount+’s apps is the new logo. If you subscribed to CBS All Access via Apple TV Channels or Amazon Prime Channels, you now have a Paramount+ subscription instead with access to all the same content. (One change that is notable: CBS has also launched a standalone app for its own network content, where you can sign in with a pay TV provider or watch a selection of recent episodes for free.)
As I wrote last week, bigger changes are coming in June, when the base tier will drop to $5 per month and lose local CBS channels (with the exception of NFL coverage). For now, though, ViacomCBS’s so-called “mountain of entertainment” is more of an evolution than an eruption.
Sling slashes more regional sports: Just in time for baseball season, both Sling TV and corporate parent Dish Network are dropping NBC’s regional sports networks from their lineups on April 1. Neither provider offered NBC’s regionals in all markets to begin with, so this only affects subscribers who had access to NBC Sports California, Bay Area, and Washington.
The rationale is presumably the same as it was when Dish and Sling dropped regional Fox Sports networks in mid-2019: Those channels are expensive, not many subscribers watch them, and continuing to carry them would mean bigger price hikes for everyone. While I wish there were more ways to watch regional sports without cable, I also appreciate providers drawing a line in the sand.
For now, at least, the channels that Sling dropped remain available on Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, and FuboTV—all of which start at $65 per month—along with AT&T TV’s $85 per month package.
More Plex in more places: This week, Plex added channels from AMC Networks to its free live streaming service. There’s a channel that cycles through AMC hits like The Walking Dead, channels for WE TV reality and wedding shows, a channel for horror films, and two IFC channels (one for oddball comedies like Portlandia, one for movies). The additions are notable because none of Plex’s free streaming competitors offer anything similar from AMC.
Plex is also making some of that content easier to find. Its live channels are now available through the “Live” section on Amazon’s Fire TV devices, and Plex’s on-demand catalog now integrates with the “TV” app on Apple TV boxes. (Plex Media Server users are out of luck though; I’m told that integrating personal media collections with those unified streaming guides is a major technical challenge.)
Channels DVR profile: Speaking of personal media collections, I profiled the creators of Channels DVR in a story over at Fast Company this week. With Channels, you can record all kinds of video sources—over-the-air antennas, streaming cable channels, and even live streaming services—and view them all through one app. It’s a neat solution for those who are on the tech-savvy side and want more control over their content.
While I’ve written plenty about Channels in my TechHive columns (most notably here), I enjoyed talking to the developers about how they got started and where things are going, and how their service fits into the overall state of cord cutting. Check it out. |
