Weekly output: FuboTV rate hike, Varjo, NextGen TV, Washington Apple Pi, sustainability at CES, Twitter apps, Mark Vena podcast

Posted on January 15, 2023 by robpegoraro

You can imagine how much I appreciate having this holiday weekend follow CES. I came home last Sunday morning exhausted and with a cold–but fortunately not Covid, as verified by three negative tests since then.

(Speaking of CES, Patreon readers got a post sharing more of my notes from the show.)

1/9/2023: FuboTV Increases Rates by $5 a Month, Tacks on ‘RSN’ Fee, PCMag

I have to wonder if Fubo doesn’t have some kind of a death wish, because there’s little else to explain why it would want to adopt one of cable TV’s more loathsome practices by sticking subscribers with a new surcharge for regional sports networks–and doing so on the same day it hikes its advertised rates by $5.

1/10/2023: On the Virtual Road With Varjo’s XR-3 Mixed-Reality Headset, PCMag

I got to try out this high-end headset at the end of a long Friday at CES and came away impressed–not that there’s much consumer-relevant in a device with a five-figure price tag.

1/12/2023: NEXTGEN TV’s CES sales pitch: strength in numbers, Fierce Video

I thought I’d see more manufacturers shipping TVs with NextGen (aka ATSC 3.0) tuners, but on the other hand I didn’t expect to learn that those sets made up 8% of all TVs shipped to U.S. dealers last year. That already makes NextGen much more relevant than 8K TV.

1/12/2023: Afternoon Learners SIG, Washington Apple Pi

I joined the virtual meeting of this group (SIG being short for “special interest group”) via Zoom for about an hour to share my impressions of CES and answer questions.

1/13/2023: Green tech and trends at CES 2023 point to environmental progress, Fast Company

After noting all of the green shoots I saw at CES, I had to remind readers of how much Las Vegas remains a monument to car supremacy.

1/13/2023: Third-Party Twitter Apps Stop Working in What Appears to Be a Widespread Outage, PCMag

The fact that Twitter management remains silent about blocking third-party clients shows a colossal amount of disrespect for both the developers of those apps and their customers.

1/14/2023: S03 E43 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

I shared my impressions of CES and discussed smart-home technology in the first 2023 edition of this podcast, also available via video.

Weekly output: Supreme Court stops Texas social-media law, Russian digital attacks, NESN goes DTC, new bipartisan privacy bill

Posted on June 5, 2022 by robpegoraro

Until a few hours ago, my agenda for the week ahead involved flying to Denver to moderate a panel at the Stream TV Show. But after a few days of feeling a moderately sore throat–and having months ago made a self-test part of my pre-departure routine before any work or personal trip–I broke out one of the antigen tests we got for free from the government. And this time, I got to see in person what a positive test looks like on one of these things.

As a result, the post I wrote this week for Patreon readers about my busy travel schedule this month is now… not inoperative, but certainly less operative.

6/1/2022: Supreme Court Ices Texas Social Media Moderation Ban, PCMag

I filed this the morning after I arrived in Helsinki for WithSecure’s Sphere conference, taking advantage of jet lag having me awake way too early.

6/2/2022: Why Russia’s Cyberattacks on Ukraine Have Failed to Make a Significant Dent, PCMag

That event–as in, this event that covered my travel costs–had some enlightening talks. But the only one that I felt yielded a newsworthy post, given the constraints imposed by the conference schedule and my own jet lag, was this talk by WithSecure chief research officer Mikko Hyppönen about why Russia hasn’t been able to leave much of a digital dent in Ukraine.

6/3/2022: Red Sox Regional Sports Network Launches $30 Streaming Service, PCMag

After waking up for no apparent reason before 4 a.m. (have I mentioned how bad jet lag whomped me on this trip?), I decided to take advantage of that sleepless time and bang out a post about NESN finally going direct to consumer (aka “DTC”), giving cord-cutting Red Sox fans an alternative to paying for a traditional pay-TV bundle.

6/4/2022: Legislators Introduce Bipartisan Digital-Privacy Bill That May Not Be Doomed, PCMag

My Saturday work–Friday having been spent nodding off on the two flights that took me home–was reading up on and writing about a new privacy bill that seems like it might offer a workable compromise. I mean, except for the fact that Congress has spent the last decade finding new ways to fumble away opportunities to pass meaningful federal privacy legislation.

Weekly output: Qwoted, 5G frontiers, T-Mobile turns off TVision, pay-TV-free MLB, Mark Vena podcast, “Other” iOS storage

Posted on April 4, 2021 by robpegoraro

It’s Easter Sunday, and my favorite sign of reborn life today is the CDC reporting another 3.37 million coronavirus vaccine doses administered yesterday.

3/29/2021: ‘Qwestion’ & Answer with Rob Pegoraro, Freelance Journalist, Qwoted

This platform set up to connect experts to journalists quizzed me over e-mail at the end of last year.

Screengrab of my CCA panel, showing one panelist's cat perching on this chair.

3/30/2021: New Frontiers For 5G, Mobile Carriers Show

A year ago, I was supposed to moderate a panel discussion about 5G wireless possibilities at the Competitive Carriers Association’s spring conference. That event got scrubbed, and then I wound up doing an online panel about 5G at the same organization’s virtual event this spring. My fellow panelists: T-Mobile chief network officer Ulf Ewaldsson, U.S. Cellular chief technology officer Mike Irizarry (his cat makes a cameo in the screengrab here), Ericsson consumer lab head Jasmeet Sethi, and Nex-Tech Wireless director of operations, network and engineering Nathan Sutter (who somehow has his caption swapped with mine in the screengrab above). Two days later, panel host Fierce Wireless wrote up our talk.

3/30/2021: T-Mobile Turning Off TVision, Will Bundle Philo And YouTube TV Instead, Forbes

T-Mobile dumping the streaming TV service it launched half a year ago, and which I wrote up at the time, made this an obvious story candidate.

4/1/2021: As Streaming Services Drop Baseball Networks, Many Cord-Cutters Can Only Say ‘Wait Till Next Year’, Forbes

This year’s version of what’s become an annual fixture covered how multiple streaming-TV providers have run away from the regional sports networks that carry most baseball games, and which have socked local viewers with regional-sports-network fees that increase a little more every year.

4/1/2021: SmartTechCheck Podcast (4-1-21), Mark Vena

This week’s episode of this podcast (also available in video form) involved my gripes about the thin availability of baseball games on streaming TV (see above), Amazon’s clumsy stabs at persuading politicians and their voters via Twitter, and more.

4/2/2021: What does ‘Other’ mean in your device storage? Dealing with the dark matter of iPhone and iPad data, USA Today

Once again, a family member’s request for tech support led to a tech-support column for USAT.

Updated 4/6/2021 to add a link to the video version of Vena’s podcast.

Weekly output: Toyota’s Woven City, baseball on streaming TV services, TikTok, broadband out of reach

Posted on July 26, 2020 by robpegoraro

A year ago this week, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. These days, touting America’s ability to apply technology towards a national purpose is a harder sell.

7/20/2020: Woven City: Toyota’s Planned Proving Ground in Japan, Urban Land

This feature about the smart-city project Toyota touted at CES grew out of the piece I wrote for the Urban Land Institute’s magazine from that show. The piece is also supposed to run in Urban Land’s Japanese-language edition, but I don’t have a link to that yet.

7/23/2020: Finally: Every Baseball Team’s Sports Network Is Available On At Least One Streaming Service, Forbes

Two days before baseball’s belated Opening Day, I thought five teams would once again shut out cord cutters because their regional sports networks would not be available on any streaming-TV services. Then all five got on board–yes, even the mismanaged Mid-Atlantic Sports Network that carries Nationals and Orioles games.

7/24/2020: The Feds Want You To Freak Out Over TikTok. You Shouldn’t, And They Can’t Ban It Anyway., Forbes

The two business trips I made to China to attend the (now-scrapped) CES Asia show helped inform my perspective on TikTok–having poked around WeChat after having to use it during both trips, I can’t see the video-clip app being anywhere in the same league in terms of data thirstiness.

7/26/2020: Broadbanned: Still no affordable fix for a broadband internet connection just out of reach, USA Today

This story started when a reader saw the piece I did in 2015 about a reader who found himself out of reach of the nearest broadband connection. This piece set off a vigorous conversation on Twitter and has already led to four more reader e-mails about similar cases of ISPs asking for tens of thousands of dollars to extend broadband to their homes.

Speaking of topics that become self-replicating through a steady stream of reader requests, on Patreon I noted that writing once about password-reset problems with Google accounts has apparently ensured I will get pleas for help with that problem from readers for the rest of my life.

Weekly output: sports-network fees without sports, astroturfed “reopen” domains

Posted on April 26, 2020 by robpegoraro

My home-baking experience has gotten more analog this week after our beloved and much-used KitchenAid stand mixer fell off a counter and took enough damage to break some non-user-accessible part of its motor. After hand-kneading the dough for two loaves of bread, a pizza crust and a batch of English muffins, I can report that old-school baking provides a decent upper-arm workout.

4/26/2020: How sporting is this? Sports-network fees stay in the pay-TV lineup despite no live action, USA Today

If you were hoping one tiny upside of the novel-coronavirus pandemic would be a break from regional-sports-network fees on your TV bill, you’re going to have to wait for the leagues involved to announce formally that their 2020 season either won’t happen or will be cut back by a large and defined margin. Sorry!

4/26/2020: Suspicious “reopen” domain names, Al Jazeera

I appeared via Skype on the Arabic-language news network to discuss reports from Domain Tools and my old Post pal Brian Krebs that many of the sites suddenly created to urge reopening the U.S. from coronavirus lockdown were actually created by the same set of sketchy right-wing activists. This led me to ask my producer in AJ’s D.C. bureau how you’d say “astroturfing” in Arabic; he said the closest thing would be “التنجيم” (pronounced “tanjeem”), which apparently has a dictionary translation of “astrology” but has lately picked up other meanings.

Weekly output: the future of pay TV (x2), wireless choices

Posted on May 19, 2019 by robpegoraro

I returned from Denver Thursday afternoon, and Monday morning I fly to Toronto to start my sixth week in a row of travel–after which I’ll have a whole eight days at home. This streak should end on a high note: the Collision conference there has me moderating three panels, I’m happy to return to Toronto after my years-overdue introduction to the city last year, and I always get a ton out of Web Summit’s events.

5/14/2019: Fireside Chat- State of the Market with Wolfe Research and S&P Westminster Ballroom, The Pay TV Show

I quizzed analysts Ian Olgeirson, research director with the Kagan group of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and Marci Ryvicker, managing director and senior equity analyst at Wolfe Research, about the present and future of streaming TV.

This was a weird panel for me: Right after moderating it, I got hung up over the words that I’d stumbled over and some subpar clock management that led me to drop a couple of topics and then have a minute to fill at the end of the panel. But every attendee who shared an opinion with me said the panel was great, and their opinion overrides mine. Well, at least the opinion of the FierceVideo managers who are covering my travel costs for this show.

For more on our discussion: FierceVideo and Streamable both covered my panel, and each one ran a photo that shows me talking with my hands.

5/17/2019: You might soon have to choose between local channels and cheaper TV prices, Yahoo Finance

I wrote up my major takeaways from the show for Yahoo, and I have to imagine that sports fans and people lacking good over-the-air TV reception won’t be happy with them.

5/18/2019: The Big Four Of Cellular Plans and Their Inner Workings | #204, Popular Technology Radio

I talked to host Mike Etchart how the big four wireless carries have evolved (yes, I name-checked Sprint Spectrum) and how to choose among them.

Updated 5/28/2019 to add my radio appearance.

Weekly output: watching baseball online, ATSC 3.0, 5G media, CDA 230, alternative DNS, Lyft vs. Uber

Posted on April 8, 2019 by robpegoraro

My college newspaper celebrated its 50th anniversary this weekend, which both let me catch up with not enough of my long-ago colleagues and contemplate anew how important the Georgetown Voice was to this business I’ve chosen. Without all those insane (and unpaid) hours, I might have still made my way into journalism–but I wouldn’t have had four years of learning to report, write creatively but quickly, deal with frequently-brutal edits by peers, and get back to it for the next issue.

4/1/2019: Why these 6 baseball teams still won’t let you watch their games online, Yahoo Finance

For the third year in a row, I ranted about regional sports networks–yes, I very much have the Nats’ Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in mind–that still limit their distribution to traditional cable and satellite bundles instead of following cord-cutting viewers to streaming TV services.

4/2/2019: ATSC 3.0 hits the road at NAB 2019, FierceVideo

I wrote a short post for this trade publication about likely storylines at the National Association of Broadcasters’ trade show involving this next-generation broadcast-TV standard.

4/2/2019: 5G brings optimism and concern to NAB Show 2019, FierceVideo

My second NAB-show preview outlined what this conference, happening this week in Las Vegas, might have to say about media ventures built on 5G wireless.

4/3/2019: Why killing a law that shields tech companies would actually cement the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Yahoo Finance

When I wrote this post unpacking a recent bout of criticism of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act–the statute that says online forums aren’t publishers and can’t be held liable for everything their users post–it came in at well over a thousand words. It took multiple rounds of editing to get my precious prose down to a manageable size (sound familiar, my former Voice editors?).

4/4/2019: Primer: When (and how) to dump your Internet provider’s DNS service, The Parallax

I wrote a how-to post about using such alternative domain name services as Google and Cloudflare to work around reliability and privacy issues you can run into if you stick to your Internet provider’s DNS.

4/4/2019: Lyft exec says ‘we’re a company of values’ when asked about Uber, Yahoo Finance

I wasn’t sure the lunchtime talk by Lyft public-policy chief Anthony Foxx at the Washington Auto Show Thursday would yield a story until he answered an audience question about how his employer differentiates itself from Uber with that company-of-values line. I’m not sure how many of my readers bought that self-assessment; at UberPeople.net, a forum for ride-hailing-service drivers, the reaction was distinctly cynical.

TV-shopping bookmarks for cord-cutters

Posted on April 2, 2019 by robpegoraro

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:

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.

Weekly output: watching baseball online, broadband privacy, Apple secrecy, Comcast wireless, Tech Night Owl

Posted on April 9, 2017 by robpegoraro

This week saw me at two Opening Days: On Monday, I attended the Nats’ home opener, and today I kicked off the 2017 lawn-mowing season. In both cases, I’m worried we’re going to fade down the stretch.

4/3/2017: The cheapest way to watch baseball online, Yahoo Finance

For once, I had good things to say about the availability of sports programming online, thanks to many regional sports networks now showing up on services like Sling TV, PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now. Alas, the Nats’ Mid-Atlantic Sports Network is not among them.

4/5/2017: Broadband privacy, Al Jazeera

I talked about the swift, Republican-led dispatch of privacy regulations for the Arabic news network.

4/6/2017: How Apple’s secrecy can hurt consumers, Yahoo Finance

Apple’s unprecedented revelation of even broad details about the next Mac Pro and iMac kicked off this post about the unhelpful hangup many tech companies–no, not just Apple–have about keeping customers in the loop.

4/7/2017: The hidden details in Comcast’s wireless plan, USA Today

The amount of interest in Comcast’s upcoming Xfinity Mobile wireless service–which will run off Verizon’s network as well as Comcast’s network of WiFi hot spots–is remarkable, given that you’ll need to subscribe to Comcast Internet to use it. Also remarkable: how many details Comcast left out of its opening sales pitch for Xfinity Mobile.

If you look at the comments, you’ll see a complaint from a reader that an accompanying chart didn’t list the correct price for Google’s Project Fi wireless service. That chart now lists the right rate–yes, I do try to read comments, and in this case I sent a quick note to my editors advising them of the error.

4/8/2017: April 8, 2017 — John Martellaro and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I returned to this podcast for the first time since August (had it really been that long?) to talk about Apple’s tepid gesture at transparency, Xfinity Mobile, and the state of broadband privacy and competition.

Rob Pegoraro

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

Tag Archives: regional sports networks