Disney on Sunday pulled its ABC stations, ESPN and other cable networks from DirecTV’s lineup as the two companies failed to reach a new distribution deal, leaving millions of sports fans in the dark as the college football and NFL seasons get underway.
It’s so annoying really, DirecTV has honestly done a good job to try and keep all these conflicts away from their customers. Linear is dying, they are trying to keep it functional while they can.
All these channels (broadcast especially) try to ask for a bigger cut, which leads to customer bill increases. Broadcast shouldn’t even be allowed to, because they get access to public-owned radio spectrum to provide a public service and make some money when that public service isn’t needed.
DirecTV retransmitting those channels specifically does nothing but help the broadcast station reach an audience that otherwise wouldn’t. (Especially in locations like the Intermountain West.) They should be thankful for it, not charge for it, nor be allowed to. The retransmit literally costs them nothing and reaps them free ad dollars.
Linear will likely be replaced with the clusterfuck that streaming TV now is, DirecTV will eventually have to pivot or die.
Not trying to sound like an apologist nor a fanboi, but as far as companies go, DTV has been more flexible than most streamers (their stream arm anyway.) However, they’re just going to continue to have these battles until companies like Disney can pull their channels and get people to pay for all their silly apps directly.
It is a bummer on some level, the end of Linear is kinda nice. Unlimited cloud DVR, fast forward through commercials, all your content in one place.
Can’t wait to see the “underground” Android VM with all the TV apps baked in to present a unified UI like Linear, hah. Like Pidgin for TV.
There was this company Aereo that offered the ability to rent individual antennas in your local market and stream that over the Internet and the supreme court killed that too.
And they ruled Aereo was a cable company on the one hand so it was violating the law by not paying carriage fees…And then later when Aereo sought a compulsory license because it was a “cable company” according to the supreme court - they ruled against Aereo because it’s not a cable company.
It’s pretty obvious the public service part of OTA comes in second behind profit.
DirecTV is actually refusing to air one of the two local stations here due to some dispute. I can’t believe that’s allowable. I thought they were required to offer all local channels. They used to be.