Cord Cutter's Diary
Peter Kafka reports that Aereo, the service I use for network TV over the internet, has changed its pricing structure. Huh!
I signed up for Aereo in May but have yet to be charged for it. Still, the company has always maintained that, when they did get around to ending my free trial, Aereo would cost $12 a month, which has seemed steep to me. Now, I have a few more options.
I can still pay $12 a month for unlimited use and 40 hours of DVR space, but I could also pay just $8 a month, if I thought I only needed 20 hours of storage. From experience, that is more than enough; in fact, I’ve barely used the recording function on Aereo at all. Or if I were willing to pay $80 upfront for a year of service, I could reduce my equivalent monthly bill to $6.66 (and keep the larger DVR option). Not bad.
But the really interesting new options are the day passes and free trials. I can watch an hour of live network TV per day without paying a dime and/or pay $1 every time I want 24 hours of continuous access (plus a modicum of DVR storage). That last option, the day pass, sounds ideal to me, based on how I’ve been using Aereo so far. When I want to watch a baseball playoff game on Fox or the Oscars on ABC, I pay $1. And on most days, when I don’t have a need for network TV, I pay nothing.
Roku’s as-yet-unreleased Streaming Stick, which is essentially a smaller version of the Roku XD that I own, will help second-tier television manufacturers compete in the “smart TV” market. Essentially, why do a lot of work turning the TV into a pseudo-computer when a peripheral device can do the work for you? And as Roku puts it, “In a few years, you can replace that Streaming Stick instead of the entire TV.” You could even replace it with a non-Roku device — like, say, the Pocket TV I bought on Kickstarter. That upholds what, to me, is a first principle of cord cutting: modularity.
The Streaming Stick plugs into a mobile high-definition link (MHL) port, which is more common on phones and tablets than TVs right now. So that’s the upshot of today’s announcement: a bunch of TV manufacturers will be making their devices “Roku ready” by supporting MHL.
What I’d really like to see: combine the slimmed-down form factor of the Roku Streaming Stick with the similarly diminutive Boxee Live TV stick, which would add free network television to the mix.
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Finally. It’s here in the App Store. I’ve been using Amazon Instant Video more and more and recently added Amazon Prime. (I paid the $79 for Prime mostly for the free shipping, but it didn’t hurt that I also get a limited library of free media to stream.) I view all of this stuff on my TV through a Roku box, but it will be nice to also have the option of watching on my iPad.
The best feature of the new app is offline viewing, something I wish had for the flights I recently took across the country. (That would be an amazing feature for Netflix to offer, though I assume their content licenses prohibit it.) The app even syncs your viewing across devices like Kindle: start a movie on your big screen and pick it up where you left off on your iPad.
The biggest drawback to Amazon Instant Video for iPad, Peter Kafka notes, is that you can’t purchase new content, just view stuff you’ve already purchased or rented. Blame Apple for that.
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Not a big deal for me, since I don’t use Hulu Plus and can already get it through Roku, but this could start to address a weakness of Apple TV: its paucity of apps compared to other set-top boxes.
Monday night
I caught up on the new episode of Breaking Bad by purchasing it for $2.99 from Amazon and watching it on my television through my Roku box. On my iPad, I kept an eye on the Olympics by streaming NBC live with Aereo, which is still in a free trial but will eventually cost $12 a month. When the swimming was on, I switched it over to my big screen. I followed Twitter on my iPhone, and when someone mentioned that the Yankee game was close in the bottom of the ninth, I flipped on the local radio broadcast on MLB.tv, which cost me $14.99 for the season. The Yankees lost, but it was good night — better than usual, I’ll admit — for getting by without cable.
When I signed up for TV and internet service from Time Warner Cable, back in the day, I paid, like everyone else, a deeply discounted rate for the first 12 months. But after my introductory period expired, the standard rates kicked in, and that’s how I came to pay an intolerable $156 a month before dropping TV. Existing customers can sometimes negotiate discounts, especially by threatening to cancel altogether, but nothing like the offers extended to new customers.
Which is why it was surprising to receive this mailing from TWC, offering me the same internet service I currently receive plus “digital TV” for $85 a month. (I pay $52 now.) Call it the cord cutter’s discount: I can add back cable TV for $33 a month, or about a third of what I was paying for it before I dropped the service. The mailing doesn’t specify what level of TV service I would get and I’m hardly interested, anyway, but it’s interesting to see how TWC adjusts its marketing for people like me.
Google just released some details about its experimental, ultra-fast internet service in Kansas City: $70 a month for one gigabit per second in both directions. That’s 100 times faster than the service I currently get from Time Warner Cable, which is the dominant (and nervous) provider in Kansas City, for $50 a month. To drive home the difference, Google is offering free service “at today’s average speeds” to anyone in who wants it, essentially arguing that what Time Warner Cable can provide is worthless.
For $120 a month, customers of Google Fiber can get gigabit internet and cable TV service, but it looks like the latter is missing channels from Disney and Time Warner. I’m sure there will be plenty of hand-wringing to come over those distribution deals, but it seems beside the point. The real story here is super-fast internet and all the opportunities that follow from there. (See my previous post on this.) Google Fiber is a long way from coming to New York, but it will be fun to follow developments in the Midwest.
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With Apple’s new operating system released yesterday, OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), AirPlay has finally come to the Mac. That’s a killer feature for cord cutters. Now, any media you can pull up on your MacBook or iMac — and there’s plenty of live and on-demand video most easily accessed that way — can be sent over to your big screen with a click. This was already the case for your iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad, but nothing beats the flexibility of a personal computer with a Web browser.
Now, yes, it has always been possible to plug your Mac or any other computer into the side of your television. That’s how I and a lot of people I know do it. But it’s ironic and more than a little cumbersome that cutting the cord actually tends to involve, well, a lot of cords. Apple TV and AirPlay let you skip the hassle of plugging and unplugging your various devices, and the more Apple devices you own, the more convenient this seems. (Yes, of course, that’s the strategy. I am increasingly trapped in Apple’s ecosystem.)
When I was first considering which set-top box to buy, I chose Roku because it’s much more flexible and has many more apps. Apple TV is in the same price range but more limited: it has Netflix and MLB.tv but no Amazon and lots of other apps I find valuable. At the time, I saw the core strength of Apple TV as iTunes, which others may value but I don’t use much. But now it’s abundantly clear that Apple TV’s greatest asset is actually AirPlay, and that’s why I’m finally going to buy one. A friend and fellow cord cutter emailed me last night to say she’s also taking the plunge for the same reasons.
Apple has sold 4 million Apple TVs this year, but the company still calls the device a “hobby.” For that and other reasons, a lot of people speculate about Apple releasing an actual television that will enter the market with the same kind of splash that the iPad did. That may still happen — who knows — but as Peter Kafka wrote last month, “Look a little closer, and you might see the outlines of Apple’s TV plans staring you right in the face.”
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