by ·Comments Off on Wednesday Notes

A wall of multi-colored sticky notesIt just doesn’t feel like Wednesday today, since Monday felt more like a Sunday than most Sundays do.

We now know that the New Year was not the soon event that Sling mentioned in its email three weeks ago. As of this morning, Sling still looks great on my Channel Master DVR+. Seriously, are they going to pull the plug during CES? Maybe as part of a press conference, using props?

Rex Sorgatz at Wired explained in mid-December how to be a television futurist at holiday parties, and I just now noticed it. His conclusion / punchline is close to my answer to the future of TV: Discovery and curation. Make a great UI to help viewers find happy surprises, and present them with exactly what they’ll want to watch.

 

by ·Comments Off on Wherever: The Newest, Oldest OTT Service

Wherever.TV logoToday, Wherever.TV put out a press release to announce that it had relaunched its service “after an extensive overhaul.” Considering that it’s been around since 2007, well before anyone coined the term “over-the-top,” this makes Wherever both the newest and one of the oldest internet-based streaming services.

Wherever was founded by Mark Cavicchia, who also invented “its core patent,” the Global Interactive Program Guide. The service picked up a lot of buzz at the 2009 International CES (don’t call it the Consumer Electronics Show, but for 2018 you can call it just plain CES), named by show organizers one of the top 30 new innovators. “That’s what blew me away more than consumer interest, the fact that big, big companies are coming to us, figuring out ways to integrate our product into their existing products to expand what they do for their customers,” Cavicchia told the Pittsburgh Business Times that month.

In subsequent years, Internet Archive-captured pages show that Wherever listed American over-the-air broadcast channels, American pay-TV channels such as Fox News, Fox Business, and the Weather Channel, and a variety of international channels. The press release that Wherever issued in December 2015 when Cavicchia stepped down as CEO said that the service and the guide were inspired in 2005 when he was living in Shanghai and wanting to watch US-based channels on the internet.

With the revamp, things look different at Wherever. It offers only a few packages: Choice, Spanish, World News, and Faith. Choice is the most complete, with 40 lower-tier channels such as eScapes, One America, and Mav TV, and runs $9.99/month.

An old Wherever Facebook post suggested Choice14 as a free trial promo code; it worked for me, so I loaded the service today. It was a brief test, and I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t try every channel, and the majority loaded okay, but there were six that failed including my beloved eScapes. Scrolling through the guide, I found Comedy Time at the beginning and Comedy TV almost at the end. The “classic movie channel” Films On Reel was showing a public domain Beverly Hillbillies episode. Clicking the TVGuide button showed me “Programming not available”.

I never root against a plucky OTT startup, even a rebooted one, but right now I don’t see anything to recommend Wherever unless you’re that much in love with one of its channels that aren’t available elsewhere. As it stands now, I’d rather have Pluto TV’s free package of channels than Choice’s, and it’s hard to imagine too many viewers paying $10/month for these lesser-known channels to stand alone or to supplement cable TV, Hulu, Netflix, or Sling. I hope that Wherever gets better again.

by ·Comments Off on I Forgot To Remember To Cancel FuboTV

FuboTV logo(Updated. See below.) I subscribe to a lot of over-the-top, internet-based streaming services. I want to try the different interfaces, to see what each is like to use, and to keep tabs on bad news. When a service is happy about something, it sprays a news release and everybody hears about it. When something less happy occurs, often only the affected subscribers hear about it, as happened a couple of times recently.

In December 2016, I ponied up for a year’s worth of fuboTV, the upstart OTT service that was about to expand from a niche product into a more comprehensive service. I wanted to play around with fuboTV apps and to see what kind of upgrade offer I’d get later on. (Answer: Alas, nothing worth writing about.)

It’s December again, and I hadn’t seen any emails from fuboTV for a few months, so I logged on to cancel my subscription. I found out that fuboTV had already auto-renewed it for another full year. I sent a note to apologize and ask for a refund of my 50 weeks or so of as-yet unused service. Today I received a reply that said in part, “you would not be eligible for a refund at this time as your request does not fall within our 24 hour Refund Policy window.” But don’t worry, now they definitely have it on file not to bill me again in mid-December 2018.

Does any other subscription service do this? Satellite radio provides a refund in similar circumstances. So do newspapers and magazines. So do cable TV companies, Dish Network, and Sling. I honestly can’t think of another subscription service that refuses partial refunds. (If you know of one, please leave a comment so I’ll stop thinking fuboTV is alone.) (Sling also keeps the monthly subscription fee after a service is cancelled.)

And so, dear reader, if you are considering a subscription to fuboTV, an otherwise interesting sports-centric collection of channels, please pause to read its Refund Policy. You might find your purchase is more like buying a non-refundable ticket for a flight than subscribing to other streaming TV services.

Update 1: With more time to search, I have found other subscription services that don’t offer partial refunds – NBA League Pass, HBO Now, and Dropbox – except where it’s legally required. MLB.tv probably doesn’t either, but I know it emails me before its annual renewal.

Update 2: A couple of days later, fuboTV offered to convert my annual subscription to its more comprehensive fubo Premier monthly package and refund the difference. It’s a lot better than nothing, and now I’ll get a few weeks to experience the dozens of channels on that plan. I’ll let you know how it goes.

by ·Comments Off on FitzyTV Adds Some Out-Of-Market Locals To Pay TV

FitzyTV logoIf you’re a pay-TV subscriber, there’s another way to watch some of your channels away from home. FitzyTV provides a nice selection of free channels, including four possibly out-of-market local stations, after authentication through your provider.

Based on its domain’s whois information, FitzyTV is a product of James Fitzgerald of San Diego. It’s currently available in the Google Play App Store, though its web site promises that the iOS version is coming soon. (The Android version, published by Fitzgerald Technologies LLC, is still in beta.)

That App Store description reveals its main emphasis. “FitzyTV turns your Android phone into a DVR for the online TV channels you have access to as part of your cable or satellite subscription.” Although watching live channels on an Android phone (or tablet) is free, the cloud DVR is $5/month for 20 hours of recordings.

Even without a DVR, FitzyTV’s free version has its uses. It includes Chromecast, even for channels that don’t otherwise support it. Four full-time local stations – WNBC and WABC New York, plus KNTV and KRON San Francisco – are available even for pay-TV subscribers outside those cities. There are also primetime feeds for Fox east and west, though CBS is absent.

The other channels in FitzyTV are: ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPNews, HGTV, MSNBC, CNBC, FX, FXX, FXM, AMC, Bravo, E!, Oxygen, USA, Food Network, Disney, Disney Junior, Universal Kids, Syfy, Comedy Central, TV Land, MTV, NatGeo, Olympic, Golf, NBC SportsNet, and a few NBC RSNs. If the associated pay-TV subscription doesn’t include the channel, FitzyTV won’t play it. For example, when I logged in with my Sling Blue account, it wouldn’t play ESPN or ABC, but both were available when I logged in under my cable subscription.

As a Mountain Time resident, I’m really surprised that my locals would be okay with me watching the earlier east coast feeds of NBC and ABC. FitzyTV seems like a helpful service, but I wonder how long it will last.

by ·Comments Off on Free Movies For The Holidays

Once upon a time, when the wife and I would take our break over the holidays, we would run down to the video store or the library and max out on movies that we had always planned to watch. Then in the first week of January, we’d return the stack, having actually seen maybe two or three. (Our unofficial record of 11 rentals without watching goes to Airheads, which still looks like it might be fun when we get around to it.)

These days, of course, we can skip the step of bringing home physical copies. With so many free, ad-supported movie services available, there are any number of films we can virtually thumb through and plan on watching tomorrow. Here are a just a handful of the titles that are available:

The Roku Channel: Mixed Nuts, Total Recall, Windtalkers, Les Misérables (the Liam Neeson version), Men at Work.

Crackle: The Nutty Professor, Battle Los Angeles, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 300 (which I always expected to be a bowling movie).

Pluto TV: Mad Max, Fiddler on the Roof, Manhattan, A Fish Called Wanda, The Last Waltz.

Vudu (the free Movies On Us section): True Grit (the Jeff Bridges version), Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Fantasticks, The Gumby Movie, Drillbit Taylor.

And Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes on Shout Factory, and so many free movies on Tubi, Popcornflix, and any number of other niche channels on Roku.

Although I never have to bring them back, this wealth of choices means that I have that many more films to feel guilty about not watching. Too bad I can’t find Airheads streaming anywhere.