Dish Network Announces Web-Based Pay TV Offering | Hacker News Reader

Dish Network Announces Web-Based Pay TV Offering

nytimes.com

75 pointscjdulberger35 comments

> Dish executives said the new service would not cannibalize the company’s current business because its current offerings do not appeal to Sling TV’s target audience of 18- to 35-year-olds.

> “We are not hitting the 18- to 35-year-old market today; we just aren’t,” Mr. Clayton said, adding that he knows from experience with five children between the ages of 18 and 28.

This is so refreshing to hear -- I feel that, too often, decision-makers at big media companies resist the realization he's had.

I hope this new product is not tied to an archaic time-based schedule as well, but rather allows viewers to watch shows on their schedule. The DVR is a stop-gap technology between time-based broadcasting and on demand viewing of all published content. Why should it matter if I wasn't home at 8pm on Sunday -- let me watch the program shown on the channel I paid for!

Very true, for content that it doesn't matter if you watch live, there should always be a streaming option. The next step is making that a de facto part of the show production. Design it to be pulled off a shelf on-demand, because that's how most people will be watching it.

But not quite "all published content." For live content we'll still always have realtime broadcasts. I was just reading about LTE Broadcast which is pretty cool. I wonder from a spectral efficiency standpoint, how does it compare versus existing OTA broadcast technology?

Just a clarification; I'm not sure that when they (Dish) say "streaming" they mean on-demand streaming. So, everything will be streamed "live" and you will still have to wait until 7:30 to watch Jeopardy or record it if you will be out of the house. :(

I've been expecting somebody to come up with this for years. I guess the HBO streaming announcement finally opened the floodgates.

They still are bundling a package of channels, I guess wanted a-la-carte but broadcasters would have none of that. It's probably the smallest package they were able to negotiate.

This is basically a TV cable provider using the internet as last-mile infrastructure. There will be lawsuits from big cable, they will lobby regulators to impose cable service fees into them.

This service actually has pre-dated the HBO annoucement in the industry.

There will be lawsuits from big cable, they will lobby regulators to impose cable service fees into them.

Actually I'm not sure this will be the case. Right now Comcast knows they're treading very close to the anti-trust line. They're actually being very careful on the net-neutrality issue particularly with their acquisition of Time Warner still under scrutiny while letting DISH provide service over their wires may be a bitter pill it might be a necessary evil for them to deal with. Its actually very good timing on Dish's part to get this out there now when new regulations may be forced down Comcast's throat as part of their expanding empire.

The Intel/Verizon OnCue project has been working on this for a few years and Aereo is planning to offer a similar service. There was some ambiguity about whether such services should be legally treated the same as cable/satellite companies, but a recent FCC rule change explicitly legalized the concept. http://www.fcc.gov/blog/tech-transitions-video-and-future

Didn't Aereo go out of business? This is what I see on www.aereo.com right now http://i.imgur.com/d6UBCPQ.png

(SIDENOTE: Must be kinda annoying being forced out of business only to watch the law be changed to allow said business soon after)

This wasn't Aereo's business (and yeah, they're dead).

Dish has carriage agreements and pays retransmission fee's to the networks they carry via this service. This is directly contrary to Aereo's model. Aereo retransmitted over-the-air broadcast tv with individual subscriber antenna's and tried to skirt retransmission fees so they paid nothing to the content provider (I honestly thought they should have won their case).

At some point Aereo claimed that they wanted to relaunch as an online cable company if they have anything left after bankruptcy.

A crucial aspect in Aereo's case is that their original business model (which was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court) paid nothing to TV stations, but under the new FCC MVPD rules they would probably have to pay retransmission fees to local TV stations, which would cut into their margins.

Sony announced their offering a year ago at CES. It was simply a matter of time.

It's an interesting first step, though I'd wager a huge percentage of that $20/mo fee is just the ESPN/ESPN2 fee. ESPN commands over $5/mo per cable subscriber even if they never watch it and you can't choose not to get ESPN on cable (without going with an absurd super-basic package which includes no other channels). So, you're forced to spend over $60 a year for nothing.

Given that most non-sports content is already available by the episode, maybe people will subscribe to Sling TV specifically to get ESPN.

I wonder how much buy-in came from companies like ESPN who I feel are supporting existing cable providers who pay ~$5 per subscriber? If I can triple it to $60/mo and get many (all?) other sports channels, I will not hesitate to purchase.

I also feel this will be a big boon for the satellite company whose products were not previously available to apartment dwellers without a southern-sky view.

This is a huge first step to modern tv watching. I have DirecTV and Verizon FiOS internet, which is something like $200 per month. I am offered no bundled deals, so this is immensely appealing.

If they include local channels I would seriously consider giving this a try. I also hope it comes to Fire TV.

The other questions would be what about when you miss a show? Could you watch old episodes from the current season for free?

UPDATE: Looks like a DVR like functionality is not available yet and you can only watch from one device at a time. http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/05/sling-tv/

As someone who is in the process of cutting the cord (just ordered some gear, very excited!), I am hoping that the KODI(XBMC)/MythTV/etc community will work on something that integrates with this service as I can only imagine it will be a hot commodity when it comes out. It looks like they have already been working on a Xbox One app.

I will be trying this out day-one.

Local channels should be easy to get with an OTA antenna. If you live far away, you might have to put one on your roof. If you live within city limits, a simple wall-mounted, newer, "rabbit ears" style antenna should be plenty.

I'm thinking of building a hardware (USB TV tuner + Raspberry Pi) and software (Roku channel) solution that allows you to hook up an OTA antenna and stream it to any TV on your local network.

Right now we use our Roku box pretty heavily but have to switch to OTA to watch local stuff. Its a pain in the butt to have to switch TV inputs all the time and requires an extra remote control. An OTA Roku channel solves the problem of switching inputs and too many remotes. :)

Unless you really want to build your own, the HDHomeRun OTA box [1] will already do the above, and you simply have to plug it in to your local network.

[1] http://www.hdhomerun.com/

I love how history repeats. When I was a kid we had a big 50-foot antenna tower outside of my house so we could pull in stations from 90 miles away.

And now we're back to talking about outdoor antennas again. :)

In this context, AT&T's purchase of DirecTV makes a lot more sense: A fairly large subscriber base, some high demand exclusives (NFL Sunday Ticket). The whole satellite thing is just an implementation detail.

If the network is neutral enough that AT&T can make more money selling you out-of-market NFL games over your commoditized Comcast internet, they'll do that. If not, there's still the dishes, U-Verse, and eventually enough cellular bandwidth.

A great move, but I feel that the cable companies have anticipated this: TV + Internet is basically the same price as Internet. Who is this aimed at?

This was true for me with Comcast when I lived in the Bay Area (in fact, TV+Internet was about 50 cents cheaper than just Internet access.) However, it is not true for me now.

I live in Austin and have Time Warner currently. To upgrade to a TV package that includes ESPN, Time Warner wants $39.99/mo for 12 months. They have a "Starter TV" package at the $19.99 price point, but it doesn't include ESPN or Food Network.

Time Warner's pricing is pretty similar to Google Fiber and AT&T's GigaPower here in Austin. Both want $70/mo for just Internet access and $120/mo if you want Internet + TV.

If this can come out within a year, and offer cheap options for multiple TV sets/computers, it'll be a huge hit. Very smart on Dish's part.

Thanks for the datapoints. I wonder whether Austin is atypical: i.e. has the availability of Google Fiber has forced the incumbents to offer more rational pricing?

I would hope that the future is Google Fiber + Dish TVoIP, and this is just the first step. I'm personally not unhappy with comcast, but more competition would be great.

When Google Fiber came in, all the providers started offering higher-speed Internet access at no additional charge (I'm on 100/10 right now with Time Warner after their latest free upgrade, for $57/month.) I haven't seen cable packages really change, though, and there isn't much incentive given that Google is charging $50/month for TV, as well.

AT&T Gigapower is currently available in my neighborhood, but I am holding on to Time Warner until Google Fiber becomes available (I may rethink this if it doesn't happen this year.)

In the deep south, AT&T wants $40 to add TV to my phone+internet plan ($90). And that doesn't even include local broadcast TV in HD, which is ridiculous as I already pull them in over antenna anyway.

And I'm sure without the HD package it's the same distorted crap they push (presumably in order to entice the HD package upsell--at least based on what I see at my in laws and at the wall of screens at the gym). I was an early adopter of OTA HD in one of the early HD markets and have never, ever had a problem sorting aspect ratios. From my perspective cable seems hell bent on destroying the OTA signal rebroadcast in order to upsell their HD packages (probably because once they moved to digital they couldn't figure out how to differentiate HD from standard def). I will not pay them to burden me with having to manually toggle aspect ratios on my display. I cannot fathom why people tolerate this bullshit.

Here's a link for Sling TV to signup for alerts. http://www.sling.com/

fingers crossed for linux support. This would be a great addition to my HTPC.

Hell, I'd take Roku or AppleTV support! Anything to get off this Verizon/TimeWarner insanity.

Roku support was part of their press release. Apple TV was explicitly not mentioned.

there's some hope here -- if they use Widevine for their DRM platform, and you're okay with using Google Chrome to view. if they go with Adobe Primetime/Flash Access (or any other DRM platform), we're basically screwed

It does use Widevine. Sling is basically the Move Networks technology EchoStar (DISH) bought three or four years ago, combined with some amendments for digital to EchoStars existing distribution deals.

Heck, if you check DNS they are even still using the old Move CDN configs:

   ~> host www.sling.com
   www.sling.com is an alias for cdn.prod.movetv.com.c.footprint.net.

Oh, I thought that something like this already existed for the US, because we've got Foxtel Play here in Australia, and we're usually far behind everywhere else for this sort of stuff.

I currently pay $25AUD for a small set of channels, and watch them over the internet on my iPhone, laptop and Xbox 360. It's quite neat actually.

When my financial situation was not as good I had internet for $50 a month with no cable. I would have gladly paid $20 for ESPN. Now that I have Tivo I would rather pay the $110 a month for all the cable channels instead of $70 with fewer channels and no DVR. If this had been available I may have stuck with just internet.

The current model of bundling channels actually works really well and all the people going on about cutting the cord in the future will soon realize how much its going to cost to pay for individual channels.

Regular people will find that paying for cable is the better deal and will continue to do that.

I think regular people may find that paying for a bundle (even if it's delivered across the internet) is cheaper. That may or may not be cable. That may have been your point, but I found it ambiguous enough that it was hard to tell.

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