In 2018, why the heck is it that I can't click on something to indicate, "I want to watch this," then I get a notification when it airs, and have a list of shows/events now available to watch? If media companies want their advertisements to be worthwhile, why don't they get their act together and do this?
Now you can buy Netflix, Hulu, HBO, CBS All Access, Disney whatever, etc. each for $10 a month. You still end up paying $60 a month, but now you get six channels instead of 100.
And 94% of Comcast channels are trash. I have no problems with people who subscribe to Comcast based on the number of channels they carry, though. Personally, I don't need hardly any of them.
My new ISP relies more heavily on individual channel streaming sites rather than hosting their own central portal for it, but again, the on demand experience is more or less the same I was familiar with from Hulu, CBS All Access, and other online sites I've used.
In fact, if there is any issues with the comparison, it'd be that a real TV service will let you watch things live if you want to, whereas streaming sites often won't carry something until the day after. And if you get a DVR, you can hold live TV almost indefinitely, whereas on demand services tend to expire shows after several weeks.
Funny enough: My friends who never see television ads, I sometimes feel like they miss out on a lot of meme-worthy things. Sometimes I'll reference a commercial (like Grammarly, which is pasted all over YouTube), and people don't know what I'm talking about. It's weird. As annoying as ads are, they've become a significant part of our culture and it's odd when people don't see them.
Imagine if you happened to not know what the Geico gecko was or have heard the commercial from which the pronunciation "diabeetus" came from.
On top of that, they understand when cable goes out it just happens. But if thier internet went out and they couldn't watch TV, they would be really frustrated. Besides they live in a small town with a 150GB cap on thier DSL and a 300GB cap on thier cable internet. My family blew right through that when we stayed with them for the summer.
If you add the corresponding channels to Plex, you can watch them without commercials. Plex channels scrape the content from the official web channels in real time so while the networks may not like it, to the websites it looks just like you are viewing it on the web so it wouldn't be considered "piracy"
For instance. This is the latest episode of The Flash. No login required. It's usually available the next morning
http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-a...
That is, for me, it's not about money so much as control over distractions in my home. People have been clamoring for a la carte cable for years if not decades, and since the cable services either decline or are unable to provide this, technology finds a way.
The $5-10 (or whatever) per subscriber that ESPN gets in kickbacks is commercially offensive to me (and who knows how much they get from home shopping providers), but if there's a way where I can avoid that whole thing, well that's worth the same amount I might otherwise give a cable company that would just as soon shovel a bunch of garbage I don't care about into my programming guide.