“Hulu’s anticipated live television service, which was rumored in the past few weeks to launch in early May, has quietly appeared on the iOS App Store [Direct Link], although the app doesn’t appear ready yet to begin streaming live content,” Mitchel Broussard reports for MacRumors. “At the time of writing, Hulu with Live TV only supports on-demand content, but the live services could presumably be turned on as early as later today.”
“Officially named ‘Hulu with Live TV,’ the company said that this version of the app comes with Cloud DVR and the ability to stream more than 50 live and on-demand television channels, including sports-related content,” Broussard reports. “The basic service will cost $39.99/month, while the plan which removes commercials from on-demand content will cost an additional $4/month. Both of these options come with all of the previously mentioned channels, the ability to stream on 2 screens at a time, and 50 hours of cloud DVR storage.”
MacDailyNews Take: Unless you live in a select major city, you’ll likely not get all (or any) live networks. They’ll be on-demand only.
You’ll see a lot of this: “Hulu with Live TV” On-Demand Only outside of select areas.
So, it’s not really so “live” at all. On other words: Start shopping for an HD Antenna.
As with all other current “streaming TV” services, including our favorite to date (Sony’s PlayStation Vue), coverage is not even close to being uniform across the country.
Live TV is available for those live local, regional, and national channels available in your area. Select channels may offer only on demand content. Certain channels or content may not be available in all locations or on all devices.
Check live TV and channel availability via your zip code here.
I’ll poo-poo it right now. I don’t want Apple to be my cable company, either (how any of this is ‘innovative’ is beyond me), and though I don’t watch broadcast TV, but if I did, why the hell would I pay 40 bucks for the privilege? I realize most people only see the new and shiny, not what they are actually getting, but I will definitely pass. So much for cord cutting, eh? The past decade seems to have been about undoing all of the progress made in the previous one.
One, MDN pooh poohs this service because they use PlayStation Vue and know what they are talking about. Two, I doubt Apple offers a me-too service as long as these live streaming services are all available on the AppleTV. There are now 4 offerings and counting. Apple only talked about disrupting cable when there were no live streaming unbundled services available. That’s no longer the case.
Ideally you’d have on-demand streaming for all of the stuff you’d want to watch that way (á la Netflix), and live streaming only for the stuff that makes sense (sports & news).
The idea that a “television show” will be live streamed at a particular moment in time on a particular “channel” seems so 20th century.
I’m telling ya, you will miss TV for about a week. Unless TV is what you do 24×7, why pay for 24×7 broadcast noise? If you’re a normal human being, what do you watch religiously? 4 maybe 8 hour a week? Maybe 10 shows? You’re paying to have television while you are sleeping, at work, and all those times when you aren’t there.
DUMP IT!
if you hear of some interesting show you’d like to watch, say “The Expanse” on SYFY. Get it from iTunes or wait for it to move on to NetScape. Even cheaper! Let’s say there are 10 shows that you “must” see throughout the year. If you get them all from iTunes that’s $400.00 for the year. If you get one of these stupid deals it’s going to be that anyway and you might not get all the shows you want to see.
If you’ve got nothing planned for a weekend, turn on hbo go or now or whatever it is me binge the latest season of Game of Thrones and/or Westworld, then turn it off again. There are all kinds of options. Hell get a VPN and torrent if your conscience doesn’t bug you. If you can stand the commercials, most of the networks let you watch their shows for free online.
The problem is news and sports and news is gradually taking care of itself {who needs it anyway, its turning us all into rabid dogs and blaming racism). All the news you need to fuel your delusions is available form all the major sources online. I bet there’s a bunch of you who are already paying for Amazon Prime and don’t take advantage of it. Many good and entertaining shows there. Truth is there’s so much content now you’ll never see all of it.
Sports? I hear that’s getting better also.
Here’s the kicker. It will save you time. You won’t flop down in front of the television because you have nothing else to do. You can, now don’t laugh, read. Buy an iPad with the money you save. You can start working your way through the 100 greatest novels. You can read the works of Locke, Pane, and others. The true inventors of America. You can indulge yourself with your favorite techno thrillers! It’s great.
You can cut the cable on broadcast tv and never look back.
Cut the cord!!!!!
Been without 24×7 tv for many years now, and I still feel I watch too much television.
Read and improve your mind instead of watch television and rot it? — sounds familiar, like my father admonishing me as a child. 🤦🏼♀️ OK, he was right, and so are you. But, it depends on the choice of content, doesn’t it? I started my reading programme by nicking the paperbacks he stashed at the back of his sock drawer.
The iBookstore on my iPad doesn’t promote Locke and Paine, but features Danielle Steel and.. a new thriller by Michael Crichton. I thought he was dead.
If it weren’t for live sports and the need for high speed internet, I would have cut the cable long ago. But in my area, the only option for high speed internet, was also the cable company, and it was actually just as cheap to get a cable bundle as it was to get high speed internet by itself.
But it is amazing how much reading you can do, if you avoid TV. Started a doctorate about 16 months ago and have read around 40 books in that time period.
The problem is getting clearance from affiliate stations- the Dinosaurs in the way of all streaming progress. Getting the big cities is easy as the CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox affiliates in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are owned by the nets. Below that stations are owned by a patchwork of owner groups that are now in transition due to newly relaxed FCC oversight by Ajit Pai. Tribune Broadcasting is likely to be swallowed up by Fox and Blackrock which could start another round of swaps and affiliation switches.
In order to stream live they have to pay tribute to the pirates that own the local rights to the various networks and each has different demands and conditions. This is precisely what is slowing the rollout of YouTube’s new streaming service.
The day is shortly coming when local affiliates will be bypassed entirely and in part because streaming destroys the geographic model that is a holdover from the days of terrestrial TV. Comcast, Disney and CBS would be wise to drop the affiliates in the current model and just go directly to streaming & satellite excepting the very largest markets. There are simply better uses for spectrum and Millions of Watts needed to push signals out to the handful of people actually watching on antenna.
$40 is a lot of money given the very few number of non-broadcast channels.
I like the channels offered but the price must come down significantly before I am interested.
This is supposed to be a cable TV replacement. But look at the numbers. First, let’s assume you have three rooms and TVs on which you want to be able to watch at the same time. Let’s assume you want a DVR where you can skip commercials. Let’s assume you want premium channels. Well, they only have one premium channel, Showtime. If you got their service, the cost is $82.96. This includes an upsell to no commercials on the VOD service ($4), another upsell for no commercials on the DVR ($14.99), and another upsell for streaming to all of your TVs ($14.99). Add the cost of Internet (let’s say $60 per month). Add the cost of three Apple TVs (3@$149). So that’s a monthly cost of $142.96 and a one-time expense of $447. Ouch. This isn’t much better than cable in terms of cost. And the channel lineups are worse since it doesn’t have PBS, CW or most independents, even if you are in a big city.
MDN downplays this service as not uniform, probably limited, etc. All true and valid.
When Apple launches a competing service that is fundamentally identical, I hope to see the same pooh-poohing.
Cable still offers more for the money in most cases. These services are going to have to compete HARD on price to get a toehold.
I’ll poo-poo it right now. I don’t want Apple to be my cable company, either (how any of this is ‘innovative’ is beyond me), and though I don’t watch broadcast TV, but if I did, why the hell would I pay 40 bucks for the privilege? I realize most people only see the new and shiny, not what they are actually getting, but I will definitely pass. So much for cord cutting, eh? The past decade seems to have been about undoing all of the progress made in the previous one.
One, MDN pooh poohs this service because they use PlayStation Vue and know what they are talking about. Two, I doubt Apple offers a me-too service as long as these live streaming services are all available on the AppleTV. There are now 4 offerings and counting. Apple only talked about disrupting cable when there were no live streaming unbundled services available. That’s no longer the case.
This isn’t what I’d want in an ideal TV service.
Ideally you’d have on-demand streaming for all of the stuff you’d want to watch that way (á la Netflix), and live streaming only for the stuff that makes sense (sports & news).
The idea that a “television show” will be live streamed at a particular moment in time on a particular “channel” seems so 20th century.
Tell that to my wife (or anyone else) who just wants to have a live morning show from one of the networks on while she gets ready for work.
Isn’t that why they invented radio?
No thanks. I’ll stick with my $7.99 basic Hulu and my free HD antenna channels.
Looks like for me everything I want except PBS and Discovery is there. Looks like getting PBS is easy but Discovery might be hard.
All the fake news one can eat.
I’m telling ya, you will miss TV for about a week. Unless TV is what you do 24×7, why pay for 24×7 broadcast noise? If you’re a normal human being, what do you watch religiously? 4 maybe 8 hour a week? Maybe 10 shows? You’re paying to have television while you are sleeping, at work, and all those times when you aren’t there.
DUMP IT!
if you hear of some interesting show you’d like to watch, say “The Expanse” on SYFY. Get it from iTunes or wait for it to move on to NetScape. Even cheaper! Let’s say there are 10 shows that you “must” see throughout the year. If you get them all from iTunes that’s $400.00 for the year. If you get one of these stupid deals it’s going to be that anyway and you might not get all the shows you want to see.
If you’ve got nothing planned for a weekend, turn on hbo go or now or whatever it is me binge the latest season of Game of Thrones and/or Westworld, then turn it off again. There are all kinds of options. Hell get a VPN and torrent if your conscience doesn’t bug you. If you can stand the commercials, most of the networks let you watch their shows for free online.
The problem is news and sports and news is gradually taking care of itself {who needs it anyway, its turning us all into rabid dogs and blaming racism). All the news you need to fuel your delusions is available form all the major sources online. I bet there’s a bunch of you who are already paying for Amazon Prime and don’t take advantage of it. Many good and entertaining shows there. Truth is there’s so much content now you’ll never see all of it.
Sports? I hear that’s getting better also.
Here’s the kicker. It will save you time. You won’t flop down in front of the television because you have nothing else to do. You can, now don’t laugh, read. Buy an iPad with the money you save. You can start working your way through the 100 greatest novels. You can read the works of Locke, Pane, and others. The true inventors of America. You can indulge yourself with your favorite techno thrillers! It’s great.
You can cut the cable on broadcast tv and never look back.
Cut the cord!!!!!
Been without 24×7 tv for many years now, and I still feel I watch too much television.
Read and improve your mind instead of watch television and rot it? — sounds familiar, like my father admonishing me as a child. 🤦🏼♀️ OK, he was right, and so are you. But, it depends on the choice of content, doesn’t it? I started my reading programme by nicking the paperbacks he stashed at the back of his sock drawer.
The iBookstore on my iPad doesn’t promote Locke and Paine, but features Danielle Steel and.. a new thriller by Michael Crichton. I thought he was dead.
If it weren’t for live sports and the need for high speed internet, I would have cut the cable long ago. But in my area, the only option for high speed internet, was also the cable company, and it was actually just as cheap to get a cable bundle as it was to get high speed internet by itself.
But it is amazing how much reading you can do, if you avoid TV. Started a doctorate about 16 months ago and have read around 40 books in that time period.
The problem is getting clearance from affiliate stations- the Dinosaurs in the way of all streaming progress. Getting the big cities is easy as the CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox affiliates in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are owned by the nets. Below that stations are owned by a patchwork of owner groups that are now in transition due to newly relaxed FCC oversight by Ajit Pai. Tribune Broadcasting is likely to be swallowed up by Fox and Blackrock which could start another round of swaps and affiliation switches.
In order to stream live they have to pay tribute to the pirates that own the local rights to the various networks and each has different demands and conditions. This is precisely what is slowing the rollout of YouTube’s new streaming service.
The day is shortly coming when local affiliates will be bypassed entirely and in part because streaming destroys the geographic model that is a holdover from the days of terrestrial TV. Comcast, Disney and CBS would be wise to drop the affiliates in the current model and just go directly to streaming & satellite excepting the very largest markets. There are simply better uses for spectrum and Millions of Watts needed to push signals out to the handful of people actually watching on antenna.
$40 is a lot of money given the very few number of non-broadcast channels.
I like the channels offered but the price must come down significantly before I am interested.
This is supposed to be a cable TV replacement. But look at the numbers. First, let’s assume you have three rooms and TVs on which you want to be able to watch at the same time. Let’s assume you want a DVR where you can skip commercials. Let’s assume you want premium channels. Well, they only have one premium channel, Showtime. If you got their service, the cost is $82.96. This includes an upsell to no commercials on the VOD service ($4), another upsell for no commercials on the DVR ($14.99), and another upsell for streaming to all of your TVs ($14.99). Add the cost of Internet (let’s say $60 per month). Add the cost of three Apple TVs (3@$149). So that’s a monthly cost of $142.96 and a one-time expense of $447. Ouch. This isn’t much better than cable in terms of cost. And the channel lineups are worse since it doesn’t have PBS, CW or most independents, even if you are in a big city.