Weekly output: Movies Anywhere, pay-TV apps

Posted on October 15, 2017 by robpegoraro

This week involved some tech trouble at home: Tuesday morning, our fridge was near room temperature. After a call to Samsung support, they scheduled a technician to stop by Thursday afternoon, and then I borrowed a friend’s powered cooler to store the surviving food items. (We later tried rescheduling but couldn’t reach a human to change it, but the original time worked out in the end.) The cause was apparently a faulty $8.59 sensor that let ice build up and block a fan that, when partially obstructed, had earlier begun yielding annoying grinding noises that should have been our warning. It cost another $175 or so in labor and other charges to get that replaced and restore the fridge to working order. Still worth it, although I would like for this 2014 purchase to go much longer than three years before its next service incident.

10/13/2017: Movies Anywhere solves the hassle of downloading flicks everywhere, Yahoo Finance

This Disney-run site, which puts copies of movies you’ve bought off Apple, Amazon, Google or Vudu in your accounts on all four services and in its own app, is shockingly good–especially in light of the sheer awfulness of the first Hollywood-run movie-download sites. The site has even improved since I filed the post: While it didn’t initially match my years-ago iTunes purchase of The Insider, by the next day it had. I’ll try to get the post updated tomorrow.

10/15/2017: A new way to beat the cable box: Streaming Internet apps, USA Today

This column was set off by a reader asking if Spectrum’s app could let her retire one of her cable boxes. I realized that I hadn’t written about that, and then further research revealed that some other cable and satellite TV providers had expanded their own app offerings. A reader’s Facebook comment has since revealed an option for Fios TV that Verizon may not know about: If you have a Samsung phone and a Samsung smart TV, the mobile device’s Smart View screen mirroring can cast the Fios app to the big screen.

Weekly output: Emmanuel Macron, Ditch the Box, Tech Night Owl

Posted on June 25, 2017 by robpegoraro

This week wasn’t really this slow: I filed two other stories that have yet to get edited and posted.

6/19/2017: Why America should import France’s plan to become ‘the nation of startups’, Yahoo Finance

I wrote up this recap of French president Emmanuel Macron’s Viva Technology speech on the flight home last Saturday. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve had to use my not-totally-rusty French for a story: Macron spoke mostly in French, and the simultaneous English translation offered at the time fell behind at a few points, so I had to replay the speech to transcribe and translate some key phrases myself.

6/23/2017: Big Cable broke its promise and you’re paying for it, Yahoo Finance

I’ve had this post on my to-do list for a while: One year after major cable operators had put forth a bold, reasonably consumer-friendly plan to offer subscribers free apps to take the place of rented cable boxes, I could point out how almost none of them have done any such thing. The 1,195 comments below the post suggest I may have struck a nerve.

6/24/2017: June 24, 2017 — Kirk McElhearn and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I talked with host Gene Steinberg about my bootlooped Nexus 5X, Apple’s new iMac, why I wish Apple would finally update the Mac mini, and a few other things.

Weekly output: IFA (x2), iPhone 7 and 7 Plus (x2), headphone jacks, pay-TV apps, iPhone 7 purchase options

Posted on September 11, 2016 by robpegoraro

Over the past few years, I’ve often found myself observing September 11 by flying somewhere. This year didn’t have me on a plane, but the day did finally get me to post a Flickr album of photos from my visit two years ago to the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. If you’ve never gone, try to do so sometime–but know that it will be a difficult time.

9/6/2016: Gadgets from Europe’s big tech show you can’t get in the US, Yahoo Finance

I wrote this “we can’t have nice things” post from the press room in Berlin on Saturday, but it didn’t go up until Tuesday. Note that we changed up some of the art after an editorial mixup had a couple of errant images in the post.

9/6/2016: The most bizarre things I saw at Europe’s biggest tech show, Yahoo Finance

My original headline began with “IFA inanities,” but my editor correctly pointed out that many readers have no idea what “IFA” is.

9/7/2016: The forecast for Apple’s new iPhones, WTOP

I spoke to Washington’s news station a little after 8 in the morning about predictions for the new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.

9/7/2016: Apple’s new iPhones, WTOP

I returned to WTOP just after 5 to talk specifics about Apple’s new smartphones and their wireless AirPod headphones, which I may have called “AirBuds” once or twice.

9/7/2016: Apple just demonstrated why people hate the tech industry, Yahoo Finance

I teed off on Apple’s decision to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Nothing I’ve seen since, including BuzzFeed’s long feature, has convinced me that Apple really had no choice–remember, the company did find room to jam in a second speaker. This leaves me once again content not to own an iPhone, even if the cameras on the new models sound amazing.

9/9/2016: FCC tweaks its proposal to free Americans from cable box fees, Yahoo Finance

Federal Communications Commission chair Tom Wheeler rolled out a new proposal to give customers options to the traditional cable (and satellite) box that’s largely built around the cable industry’s own proposal. Big Cable has yet to appreciate this flattery much.

9/11/2016: How to buy an iPhone 7 without getting locked into a carrier, USA Today

I asked my editor if they needed anything iPhone-related this week, she suggested looking into purchase options, and I realized they had changed quite a bit from a year ago–in a customer-friendly direction.

Weekly output: EMV cards, wearable gadgets, cable-TV apps, Apple, upload speeds

Posted on June 26, 2016 by robpegoraro

I’m halfway through an obnoxiously transatlantic fortnight: I spent four days in New York this past week for CE Week, and Tuesday I fly to Paris to moderate a handful of panels at the VivaTechnology conference. But when I step off the plane at Dulles a week from today, I’ll have more than a month before my next work trip.

6/20/2016: What Home Depot’s Chip-and-Pin Lawsuit Means to You, Consumer Reports

If you’re wondering why people get so insistent about having a PIN on their credit cards, this story may clear things up for you. (Spoiler alert: It won’t do much for the biggest source of credit-card fraud.)

6/23/2016: Is that Tech You’re Wearing?, CE Week

I talked about the design, features and use of wearable gadgets with UNICEF Ventures’ Jeanette Duffy, WARE founder Pamela Kiernan, and ŌURA co-founder Kari Kivelä. Afterwards, GearDiary’s Judie Stanford interviewed the four of us, and the organizers posted that clip next week.

6/23/2016: Big cable has a plan to help you dump the cable box you’re renting, Yahoo Finance

While I was in NYC, I stopped by Yahoo’s offices to record an interview with Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer about the prospect of replacing cable boxes with cable apps; it runs atop this story.

6/25/2016: Rob Pegoraro on technology, plus a presentation by MacRecycleClinic, Washington Apple Pi

I drove over to the general meeting of this Apple user group to share my thoughts on the state of Apple–and to donate the 2002-vintage iMac I used for four years before handing it off to my mom, who relied on that computer until replacing it with an iPad Air last year.

6/26/2016: How to compare Internet service providers — by upload speed, USA Today

After a reader of last week’s USAT column commented that I should have addressed upload speeds–and some quick searching revealed that many Internet providers treat them as a bit of a state secret–I realized I had a column topic on my hands.

Updated 9/6 to add a link to Stanford’s interview.

Weekly output: iPhone leases, smartphone-car connectivity, cable-box alternatives

Posted on January 31, 2016 by robpegoraro

I didn’t set out to vanish from Twitter this week, but I became all but invisible anyway. First I decided that free-but-slow T-Mobile roaming in Israel was good enough, then I had a round of meetings and visits in places with little to no cell signal and no free WiFi, then my phone spent a couple of days not getting a signal at all until I gave in and rebooted it. Meanwhile, the seven-hour time gap between Israel and the East Coast left a minimal audience for anything tweeted before mid afternoon, which further discouraged me from jumping into Twitter.

1/25/2016: Sprint and T-Mobile Backtrack on Crazy iPhone Lease Deals — and Why That’s Good for You, Yahoo Tech

This story came out of fact-checking for an imminent revision to my Wirecutter guide to the wireless carriers. My “huh” realization that Sprint and T-Mobile’s lease options no longer saved any significant money compared to buying a phone outright was followed by my surprise at seeing that nobody had covered this shift in the market.

1/28/2016: When It Comes to Car Tech, the Cars Are Having a Hard Time Keeping Up With the Tech, Yahoo Tech

This sequel to last year’s assessment of car-smartphone connectivity doesn’t find me much more optimistic about where the auto industry’s heading. If you’d like to cheer yourself up by looking at a picture of a crash-test dummy or a Toyota Mirai fuel-cell vehicle paying homage to Back to the Future, see my Flickr album from the Washington Auto Show.

1/31/2016: Ways to ditch some — but not all — of your cable boxes, USA Today

A reader’s question about whether she really had to rent a cable box for every TV in her home arrived only hours after Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler pledged action to open up the cable-box market. My answer to this reader: You do have fee-free options for your secondary TVs at home, but they depend on your cable or satellite provider and are often not that good.

Weekly output: iPhone rumors, remote controls, Kindle Fire, the Cricket iPhone, cable boxes, IE 8, Google alternatives

Posted on June 3, 2012 by robpegoraro

All three pieces that were on an editor’s screen a week ago went online this week. See how falsely productive I look now? This week’s list includes a new site, CNNMoney. (I enjoy how my freelance situation gives me enough spare time to try to chase down new business and write for different sites and audiences.)

5/29/2012: The Next-iPhone Season Draws Near, So Read Wisely, Discovery News

As you may have read here a year ago, I think obsessing over next-iPhone rumors can be a colossal waste of time, but that doesn’t mean I can’t provide some advice about which of this year’s crop could be true and which seem transparently ridiculous. Just don’t make me write that post every week!

5/30/2012: Your Next Remote May Already Be In Your Pocket, CEA Digital Dialogue

After seeing some interesting experiments in using smartphone and tablet apps to replace remote controls at the Cable Show–which, in turn, followed some similar demos at CES–I thought it was a good time to assess this overdue experimentation in replacing the remote and warn about how it might go awry.

5/31/2012: Rethinking the Kindle Fire, six months later, CNNMoney

Back in January, I had a great conversation with an editor at CNNMoney about the lack of follow-up in tech reviews: If car magazines and sites can set aside the time to write long-term evaluations of cars, why can’t tech sites do the same for gadgets? This six-months-later look at Amazon’s Kindle Fire is the result of that chat. Please compare it to my initial writeup for Discovery–and let me know what other tech products might deserve their own extended eval.

5/31/2012: The ‘Next iPhone’ We Didn’t See Coming, Discovery News

The week’s surprise was seeing Cricket Wireless, the prepaid carrier I reviewed back in 2009 and hadn’t encountered since getting a demo of its Muve music service last spring, get the iPhone. Even more surprising: Learning that Cricket’s version of the iPhone 4S will be unlocked for international use–and then seeing that highly-relevant fact go unmentioned in other stories.

6/3/2012: Off the Grid, Still In the Box: where’s Cable TV headed?, Boing Boing

My Cable Show coverage wrapped up with my second post at Boing Boing, in which I recap some surprisingly positive developments in user interfaces and energy efficiency–and a less-enthralling lack of progress in opening up this market to outside vendors. Having enjoyed the conversation with BB readers in February, my next move after posting this will be to catch up on the feedback I missed earlier today.

6/3/2012: How long should you hang on to IE8?, USA Today

A reader asked if it was okay to keep using Internet Explorer 8 instead of IE 9; as you might expect, I don’t think that’s a great idea. (To answer the “what if you’re still on XP?” replies I’ve already received: That’s not a great idea either. That OS is well past its sell-by date, and I can’t stand to use it myself anymore.) After I endorse Google’s Chrome as a good IE alternative, I explain how to set Chrome to use non-Google search engines as its default.

Last week, I also learned from my site stats here that ABC News’ tech site syndicates these columns. So if the orange highlight atop USAT’s tech section bothers you, maybe the blue-green header at ABC will be more to your liking.

A cord cutter visits the Cable Show

Posted on May 26, 2012 by robpegoraro

I spent the first half of this week at a place I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome–the Cable Show, the annual convention put on by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. After my wife and I canceled our Dish Network TV service back in October of 2009 and realized we could live without pay TV, I’ve repeatedly suggested that other TV subscribers weigh that option.

Fortunately, no bouncer tossed me out of the convention center in Boston (disclosure: one reason I attended was the chance to stay with my brother and catch up with his family), and I learned a few things about the market I’ve been avoiding since 2009.

(Yes, even though one of my clients is cable giant Discovery Communications. The irony is duly noted.)

One was that there is an enormous amount of stuff to watch on TV if you’re willing to pay for it–as JetBlue reminded on my way to and from Boston. Another was that the cable industry has recognized that the cable box is not exactly everybody’s favorite gadget and is working to streamline its interface and reduce its power consumption. (My wrap-up of that awaits an editor’s attention; my photos of the show are up.)

But I also got a reminder that in some fundamental ways, the cable industry thinks it’s doing fine–NCTA president Michael Powell said in his opening keynote that “this industry has never been content to rest on aging business models”–and doesn’t need a fundamental change of course.

I don’t recall hearing the words “à la carte” spoken at any point, nor did I run into any serious discussions about the lesser step of offering subscribers a wider choice of channel bundles. “AllVid”–a nebulous proposal by the Federal Communications Commission for a unified standard for subscription-TV reception that might open the market for tuning and reception hardware–only came up when I asked an FCC staffer about it after a panel on regulatory issues had failed to mention the topic.

And you can continue to forget about paying for real-time online access to shows without the conventional cable subscription required by such Web-viewing options as HBO Go. The industry sees that and other cable-subscription-first “TV Everywhere” offerings as customer-retention moves, not ways to draw in new viewers.

And as for cord-cutting–a topic that drew me to Boston a year ago, when I led a panel about the topic at Free Press’s media-reform conference–the cable industry doesn’t seem to think it’s a serious issue. Chief executives and lower-ranking staffers all repeated that it’s not losing any viewers it would want to keep. For example, during Tuesday’s opening session, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said a predicted wave of cord cutting “didn’t happen” except for “economically challenged customers… many of who didn’t even have boadband at home.”

I thought about standing up, waving my hand and shouting “dude, I’m right here!” But I did not.

I might have also said then that my brother and his wife cut the cord last summer (while retaining a Comcast Internet connection). After day one of the show, I went home to my brother’s house and watched a few episodes of NBC’s Community on his paid-for Hulu Plus subscription. After day two, we caught an episode of HBO’s Game Of Thrones that he obtained… somehow.

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

Tag Archives: cable box