“Streaming TV shows, movies, and other types of video over the internet to all manner of devices, once a fringe habit, is now a squarely mainstream practice,” Walt Mossberg writes for The Verge. “Even people still paying for cable or satellite service often also have Netflix or Hulu accounts. Nearly every traditional TV network, sports league, or video service — even those still primarily grounded in cable or satellite — has a channel or app for playing video on everything from set-top boxes and ‘smart’ TVs to mobile phones.”
“Until recently, however, almost all of these streaming apps and services followed what you might call the Netflix / Hulu model. You paid a fairly modest monthly fee for a large library of shows and movies which you could watch anytime, as many times as you wanted, in whatever order and frequency you wanted,” Mossberg writes. “But that’s changing, and it bothers me. Two big new streaming services, both owned by satellite TV services, have made a splash in the last couple of years, and, when you cut through all the hype about them, they are pretty much just old-style, linear TV services delivered via the net.”
“I’m talking about Sling TV, which is owned by Dish Network and came out last year, and a new competitor, DirecTV Now, which is owned by AT&T, also the owner of the DirecTV satellite service,” Mossberg writes. “I’ve been watching both, on an Apple TV and on a laptop, and I feel like they are a giant step backwards by an industry that’s trying to hold onto customers from an outdated system.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “TV” is broken and, if Apple’s efforts are any indication, it’s not getting fixed anytime soon. At this point, we’ll settle for Apple adding our cable system to Apple TV’s single sign-on.
