Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I "cut the cord" as it were this year, now with OTA TV and a Netflix and Amazon prime account. OTA reliably gets you local and national news, Netflix and Amazon between them reliably get you movies and recent television shows. And of course with Amazon you can rent/buy stuff.

What you don't get are sports. You find that more and more those sports have become the single reason you might want to buy a cable/satellite subscription.

I welcome their final capitulation to the point where I can subscribe to just my teams and not suffer blackout rules in my home market.

View on HN

Yeah. It's only sports. This year the only things I can remember watching at the time it aired were (in order of appearance): Super Bowl NBA Finals Presidential debates World Series

The only other thing I can expect is election returns.

I really like the world of on demand programming. It's much more convenient, and I'd like on demand sports, but only if it's from the same day. I just can't get into watching yesterday's game. Maybe if I could watch today's game time shifted...

The live streaming packages offered by the various sports organizations are generally pretty good if you're out of market, but are still subject to national blackouts. NHL for example plays a LOT of games on NBCSN, which is only available via cable packages. I'm able to follow all the Philadelphia teams I care about in Chicago without many issues, but having blackouts in 2016 is absurd.

My better half primarily watches E! (Keeping up with the Kardashians), HGTV, Food Network, etc. All have full episodes online, but require the cable subscription login dance. Even if I could get the live sports I wanted, I don't foresee these "middle America" networks and shows embracing cord cutting anytime soon.

The singular feature of Sports is that the content is for the most part exclusive. You can't watch your hometown team anywhere else.

The Food Network shows have stars but the content and the stars are easily replaceble. Just look at Youtube cooking and home improvement shows. They offer the same content at approaching the same quality. I can easily see those types of shows getting replaced by viewers, and I can see it happening soon.

Those specific shows may not embrace cord cutting but they will and indeed are getting replaced by shows that do embrace cord cutting.

Good point. But I suppose there are a handful of other shows which have the same naturally monopolistic property as sports. For example, there is, mercifully, only one Kim Kardashian, so there's no way to directly compete with that show.

I don't know. It's true that there is only one Kim Kardashian. But Kim Kardashian archetype isn't that hard to replace. She's not famous because she's Kim Kardashian. She's famous for a bunch of other reasons that are not that difficult to replace. Even that show isn't really a monopoly that matters.

Sling tv allows you to stream all of these channels (with the possible exception of E!).

I bet your kitchen is fabulous

Reply on news.ycombinator.com