by ·Comments Off on Wednesday Notes (fuboTV Edition)

A wall of multi-colored sticky notesFuboTV, which really needs to be capitalized at the start of a sentence, added a few more local affiliates to its lineup, according to a note in Cord Cutters News. It’s got CBS, ABC, and Fox coverage for over two-thirds of US households, which is impressive. Which reminded me of a thought about fuboTV that I hadn’t shared yet.

Despite my minor squabble over billing, I don’t bear fuboTV any ill will. The more choices we viewers have among over-the-top streaming services, the better. However, and I’ve been wrong before, I just don’t see how fuboTV can reach the critical mass of subscribers it needs to survive long-term.

It’s one of the most expensive services, running $45/month for its standard plan. But more telling is its focus – fuboTV wants to appeal to OTT sports fans, but it doesn’t carry the ESPN channels. That’s like a cooking-focused service without Food Network. The Diffusion Group estimated that fuboTV had only about 150,000 subscribers at the end of 2017, and last week it turned out to be about right on its Sling estimate of 2.3 million subs.

I sympathize with fuboTV, which started as an inexpensive, niche soccer-focused OTT service. Some time in 2016, it determined, probably correctly, that it needed to go big or quit. To its credit, fuboTV expanded its lineup well except for those Disney-owned channels. If you really are a sports fan who doesn’t care about ESPN, it’s for you. But are there enough people like you out there?

by ·Comments Off on AirTV Player Adds OTA DVR
Close-up of icons

OTA recordings show an antenna symbol, while Sling’s show a cloud

Finally finding a use for the second USB port in back, and answering my occasional complaint here, Sling announced yesterday that it has added a DVR for over-the-air TV to its AirTV Player. It’s just a beta for now, but it’s open to all AirTV Player users, at least the ones who hear about it. I first noticed it in a story by Jeff Baumgartner at Multichannel News, although I later found the press release at PR Newswire (registration required). But I never saw an email from Sling or AirTV about it.

As its information page explains, there are still plenty of caveats to this early OTA beta. The USB hard drive has to be fast enough to handle HD recording, which means that most portable hard drives are good but many thumb drives are too slow. Viewers can’t watch a recording until it’s finished. Rescanning for local channels removes any pending recording requests. Buffered viewing, with pausing and rewinding, still isn’t available for live OTA TV. And the the AirTV uses a single OTA tuner, so viewers can’t watch one OTA show while recording another.

One plug in a USB port, showing the other USB port emptySpeaking of that tuner, I was amused by AirTV’s illustration (shown right) of where to plug in the USB hard drive. Looking at the unit from behind, they suggest the leftmost USB port, although mine is working fine in the right port. What’s missing from that picture is AirTV’s OTA tuner, which is a Hauppauge dongle that plugs into the other USB port. If you don’t have them both attached, you don’t have an OTA DVR.

In about 12 hours of testing, I couldn’t find any big problems yet. OTA recordings line up with cloud DVR recordings of Sling programming. They also populate the Continue Watching ribbon as appropriate. The guide appears to be Rovi-based, and shows everything scheduled for about six days forward. I couldn’t find anything through Search, but I can scroll over to any show I already know about, and the AirTV Player will allow series recording like a TiVo Season Pass.

This Local Channels DVR Service is free during the beta period, matching Channel Master’s DVR+ (which still supports Sling at the moment) and Stream+ (which “will be shipping here any day”). Despite the limitations of a single tuner, it’s a big step up for the AirTV Player. We’ll see whether the finished product will be enough to make it the cord-cutters’ favorite.

by ·Comments Off on Where To Watch Free Baseball On Local TV
View of the infield during a baseball game

Philadelphia and Toronto – two of the teams that will appear on WPIX’s Yankees and Mets broadcasts.

Friday’s post was about the excitement of watching some spring training baseball games on free-to-air satellite TV. Once the regular season arrives, FTA satellite dish owners will be just like most other American viewers, with almost no major league baseball games available on free broadcast TV.

Unless you live in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, your free-TV exposure to regular-season games will probably be limited to 10 Saturday games on Fox. WPIX in New York will carry 22 Mets games and 21 Yankees games. KTLA in Los Angeles starts with five Dodgers games, all before May 1. Last year, KTLA belatedly added a few more Dodgers games in September.

The big winner is Chicago. WGN plans 55 regular-season White Sox games while WLS, the ABC affiliate, will show 25 Cubs games. Having the Cubs on a station other than WGN just doesn’t feel right. I’ll get used to it.

Everyone else is pretty much out of luck. As I wrote two years ago, there are a few minor-league baseball teams that show local games, but most big-league teams squeeze every dollar by putting every possible game on a pay-TV regional sports network. Especially with the growth of cord-cutting and cord-nevers, I think they’re taking the short-term cash while blocking a new generation of potential fans. Let’s hope that one day some other teams will see the light.

by ·Comments Off on Time For Free Baseball Via Satellite

Baltimore vs. Tampa Bay Spring Training gameFebruary always means the start of a particularly happy season for me and other free-to-air satellite viewers – Spring Training baseball season. Regular-season games are always scrambled or handled through terrestrial pipes, but plenty of the February and March exhibition games are freely available as they’re beamed back from Florida and Arizona.

For example, today I checked on Rick’s Satellite Forum for likely game candidates. I had my choice of Toronto vs. Philadelphia, Atlanta vs. the Mets, Tampa Bay vs. the Orioles (pictured), and later the Angels vs. Oakland. And that’s just for this first day of intersquad games; the list typically grows longer as February turns to March.

As with most sports wild feeds, these FTA satellite broadcasts usually forgo commercials, substituting candid shots of the field, or the crowd, or the next set of graphics they plan to show when the game resumes. It’s part of the fun to be able to peek behind the scenes like that.

As construction equipment jackhammers the street by my office and the temperature outside struggles to stay above freezing, it’s great to be able to glance over at my satellite monitor and see palm trees, short-sleeve shirts, and baseball. It’s going to keep me happy over the next few weeks.

by ·Comments Off on How ATSC 3.0 Looks Today

ATSC 3.0 logoIf you want to take a peek at the next generation of broadcast TV, you’ll want to read Phil Kurz‘s detailed description of the ATSC 3.0 demonstration hosted this week by WRAL. The story is at TV Technology, which also ran a parallel article by James O’Neal about Sinclair’s state-of-the-art research and testing facility, currently mostly devoted to ATSC 3.0.

At the demonstration, WRAL Director of Engineering and Operations Pete Sockett said that the ATSC 3.0 transmitter was using just 40 kW to cover all of Raleigh, compared to the full million watts that the existing ALSC 1.0 signal uses. Kurz wrote, “ATSC 3.0’s OFDM modulation scheme is so much easier to receive than ATSC 1’s … that the new standard will make it possible for broadcasters to reach viewers over-the-air using smaller home antennas, on the road and even in their basements, (Sockett) said.”

Later, Jim Goodmon Sr., CEO and chairman of the board of Capitol Broadcasting Company, returned to the idea of putting broadcast TV chips in cell phones to handle the (rare) problem of watching TV in a moving vehicle. I’d say that I beat this subject to death years ago, but in retrospect it seems clear that Mobile TV was always DOA. Goodmon apparently doesn’t see it that way, as he said, “Mobile DTV didn’t take off because we couldn’t get the content. If we would have gotten the content out there, the chip makers would have made the chips, and I think people would have put the chips in the phones.” No, if FM broadcasters can’t persuade carriers to allow active FM radio chips in phones, I can’t see how OTA TV chips will be an easier sell.

There’s much more in the article about the positive add-ons, such as targeted emergency information, that ATSC 3.0 enables, but nothing about the scary stuff I still worry about. As a throwaway note, Kurz mentioned that one part the demo featured an ATSC 3.0 gateway taking in the off-air signal and retransmitting it to a tablet via wifi. I’ve got several devices already that take an ATSC 1.0 signal and send it over my local wifi network. Will the folks who run ATSC 3.0 allow such third-party reuse once it launches? We’ll all find out soon enough.