Tag Archives: PlayStation Vue

TV-shopping bookmarks for cord-cutters

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I had yet another story about how to watch baseball games online this week, which meant I had yet another round of checking the sites of streaming-TV services to see which regional sports networks they carry in various places.

That should be easy, but some of these “over the top” video providers don’t let you do this right on their home page. They may not even link to the relevant channel-finder page from anyplace obvious, and in one case a channel-finder feature lurks on a tech-support page.

So I had to open last year’s version of this cord-cutting story to find all the links I’d gathered then. To save me from having to do that again, and to spare you from some extra clicking around, here are those local-channel-lookup links:

DirecTV Now

FuboTV

Hulu with Live TV

PlayStation Vue

Sling TV

YouTube TV

You’re welcome. As a bonus, two more links:

• The Streamable put together a chart showing which services carry the regional sports networks of which baseball teams, which would have saved me a ton of time in researching my own post if only I’d known about it at the time.

•  CNet’s David Katzmaier put together an enormous Google spreadsheet showing which services carry which TV networks (the big four of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC plus MyTV and the CW, with PBS stations remaining absent) in more than 200 TV markets. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated since August of 2018… but I can’t blame the authors for not diving back into what must have been an exhausting effort.

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Weekly output: Michael Chertoff on privacy, TV-streaming rate hikes

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I only had four workdays this week, thanks to Monday being spent in the air on my way back from London to D.C. That said, my productivity was not as bad as this scant list would suggest, since I filed three other posts in those four days… and now I can find out how much more work edits on those posts will entail.

7/12/2018: Ex-Homeland Security chief Chertoff wants EU-style data privacy laws, Yahoo Finance

I spent about half an hour on the phone with Michael Chertoff Wednesday afternoon about his views on various privacy and security issues and came away with far more material than I could fit in this post, as well as a renewed appreciation of the time it takes to transcribe quotes from a recording of an interview.

7/15/2018: As cord-cutting prices rise, here’s what you can do to keep costs down, USA Today

No, rate hikes at such live-TV streaming services as DirecTV Now and Sling TV don’t mean that returning to the embrace of cable or satellite TV–both subject to the same inflationary pressures, both also fond of sticking you with monthly fees to return a tuner box–now makes financial sense for a lot more people.

Weekly output: selling online video, online privacy

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I’m going to spend most of Monday on airplanes as I make my way from D.C. to Shanghai for CES Asia. I’m helping to emcee the Last Gadget Standing app competition, after which I hope to learn a thing or two about the state of consumer electronics on the other side of the Pacific.

5/30/2017: How To Sell OTT To Cable, Satellite And ‘Cord Never’ Subscribers, FierceCable

The highlight of reporting this feature about how online video services try to pitch themselves to potential viewers: having to lean into my laptop to hear an interview subject when I realized I didn’t have a hands-free kit with me. (I’d already answering the call on my laptop instead of my phone, for reasons lost in the mist now.)

6/1/2017: How Washington is throwing away its shot at protecting your privacy, Yahoo Finance

Sometimes, what people don’t say matters more than what they do say. This piece offers some recent evidence for that, in the form of a new bill from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tex.) that’s surprisingly favorable towards consumers and has been ignored by some of her usual allies.

Weekly output: sketchy pop-ups, DirecTV Now, environmentalism under Trump, iCloud calendar spam

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I’m in the middle of what I trust is my final lap of business travel for the year, which started with a conference at MIT’s Media Lab Saturday and will include another in New York Tuesday and Wednesday. The chance to see family and friends in Boston and NYC was not irrelevant to my booking this travel.

usat-icloud-spam-post11/28/2016: Don’t let sketchy pop-up ads scare you, USA Today

This column started with a question posted by a friend on Facebook. Spammy pop-ups on the Web aren’t exactly news (I should confess that I may have just seen one spawned by an ad on this blog), but it doesn’t hurt to remind readers that they’re almost always lies.

11/29/2016: AT&T’s DirecTV Now challenges Sling TV, PlayStation Vue…and DirecTV, Yahoo Finance

My unpacking of AT&T’s new over-the-top video service was held up slightly when the company spent 45 minutes touting the service without saying which channels would be available on which price plans. That PR foolishness and DirecTV Now’s initial glitches aside, I still think it’s a big deal for one wired subscription-TV provider to start selling video service into the markets of others–witness how then-Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt completely dodged my question about that possibility in 2011.

12/2/2016: Why Trump’s election hasn’t crushed the hopes of environmentalists, Yahoo Finance

A visit to New York three weeks ago for yet another conference got me thinking about how environmentalists might do well to shift their attention after Jan. 20 from the White House to large companies that, whatever their other faults, accept the scientific consensus around climate change instead of saying it’s a hoax cooked up by the Chinese government.

12/4/2016: How to squelch iCloud calendar spam, USA Today

My contribution to the growing genre of stories about this problem, most quoting the exact same statement by Apple PR, advised readers that Apple has known about this issue since at least July. I also reminded them that while iCloud’s site will normally brush off mobile browsers, iOS and Android let you work around that restriction to change the setting allowing spam invitations to pollute your iCloud schedules.