As a long time cord cutter, I can't tell you how many conversations the answer from me to "What channel is it on?" was legitimately Hulu or Netflix or Amazon.

That, and have different viewing habits.

I am watching a very small number of shows (usually somewhere between 1 and 3) at any given time, and watch the entire season (or sometimes multiple seasons) before moving onto something else. For shows where I'm caught up with the most recent season but are released as one episode a week, I wait until they're done the season before starting the first episode.

Also, when I want to watch a show, I want to watch a show. I do not schedule my life around TV. I do not care that it's 12 minutes past the hour, or that new episodes come out on Wednesdays, or that I missed watch last week's episode.

Old cable TV considers DVR the solution here, and this service looks to have "cloud DVR" but that misses the point. Netflix has no "DVR" because you can just press play and watch any show they have. I assume you have to press "record" in advance in order for it to be in your DVR -- maybe it's really advanced and it'll "record" the show from the start even if it's already started.

Realistically, a "Cloud DVR" is basically just a whole bunch of files storing each show, and a database entry that says user x has access to file y. Pressing "record" is what makes that database entry, with arbitrary rules that say you can't do it if the "air date" is in the past, and you can only have just so many database entries that total up to 200 hours of content.

It's not much different than Netflix, except that Netflix doesn't have the access control database or arbitrary rules.

Beyond maybe being a legal workaround and maybe being a way to not confuse old people used to decades of cable subscription: Continuing to apply "Cloud DVR" as a terminology for and its "modern VCR" skeumorphism to services like PlayStation Vue continues the tradition of treating "live TV" as "the real thing" and on-demand/Cloud DVR as the exception and the lesser experience. It's hard not to see that as a willful ignorance from the existing players that they might still have hope to put the genie back into the bottle and return to the halcyon days where people lived to TV schedules and captive eyeballs were guaranteed delivered to very happy advertisers.

[1] Hulu LLC, a joint venture with The Walt Disney Company (through Disney–ABC Television Group) (30%),[8] 21st Century Fox (through Fox Entertainment Group) (30%), Comcast (through NBCUniversal) (30%), and as of August 10, 2016, Time Warner (through Turner Broadcasting System) (10%, minority stake)

Game of Thrones being a perfect example, you could have made it in the 1990s, but what is possible today is completely different from what has been possible previously.

https://www.sling.com/programming/sports

Live soaps and reality TV shows, though, I agree are kind of pointless.

That's not a true statement. Netflix has almost an order of magnitude more subscribers.

Now that fee is jumping from just $3.49 to $5.49 a month, which means that if you have three TVs in your house you will pay an extra $16.47 a month just for this fee. http://cordcuttersnews.com/starting-2017-comcast-will-charge...

So adding a new TV costs ~10$ + $5.49 a month. That sounds like it's costing 16$/month per HD DVR.

Here are some other 'fees' https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161213/09004336262/happy...

Cable Card is 4$ / month, and there is an extra fee for HD TV but does not provide access to Video on Demand. The downside is that you’ll also need a TiVO subscription which is $12.95 per month 13 + 4 = 17$/month.

On top of this there is a fee for HD TV.

As always when these topics come up, I think video content licensing needs to be revamped, so that anyone can create a streaming service as long as they pay a fixed rate to the license owner. It would spur so much innovation!

$50 - 5 extra set top boxes $10 - "HD Technology Fee" $5 - "Broadcast Access Fee" $5 - "Regional Sports Fee"

That's $70/month in fees.

I pay:

$10 - Netflix - I would have this anyway.

$19 - Sling ($30 normally. I get a $5 discount through TMobile and a $5 discount for being on the Orange Beta)

$11.99 - Netflix no commercials

$6 - CBS all access

I also have Amazon Prime. I probably would have that anyway but I do have Amazon Prime Video. Let's say it's worth $5.00 a month.

I pay less for all of the subscriptions services than I would just in fees for Comcast. On top of that, they are a lot less of a hassle to cancel.

No thanks. Is there a competitor (PS Vue, Sling, others?) that lets you fast forward past commercials?

Edit: Apparently the ability to FF is spotty, no matter who the "cloud TV service" is. If they offer it at all, it works on some shows and not others, and is also spotty for "on demand" content vs dvr content.

An interesting and recurring theme in piracy, to be sure.

>Thankfully, Hulu’s cloud DVR will give users the ability to fast-forward through the commercials in their recorded content – just like a cable TV DVR would.

>However, though both Vue and Sling’s DVR technically support fast-forwarding, the option is not always available due to rights deals. It will be interesting to see if Hulu’s live TV service faces those same issues when it arrives.

Dumb. I know why they do it, but my life is too short to fastforward.

Want me as a customer? Then you need:

1) No ads. I will not tolerate ads in my house. I do not want your clown burgers or your overpriced car. if that means I need to pay 10% more, then charge me the 10% more.

2) Ala-Carte pricing. I do not watch sports. I am not going to pay $20 a month for ESPN and a bunch of sports programs. I will totally pay a few bucks for the history channel, or something that has value.

3) Needs to be fully streaming or TIVOed. i.e. let me watch at 6:23 pm or 7:19 pm. No sitting around until 8:00pm so I can watch a show.

Currently do Netflix + HBO and have more TV shows than I can watch. Totally willing to throw in a few more bucks for something of value, but no $200 cable package is going to happen here.

Is this not a contradiction? Sounds limited to me (not that I'd likely record 200+ hrs of TV).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulu

(Hulu is owned by cable providers)

Canceling "cable" was a bit jarring at first, but I don't miss it anymore. It was kind of like trying to stop watching the show "24". The show had its hold until I missed the subsequent episode, then it was gone; I didn't care anymore.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/08/hulu-ending-free-streami...