About this episode
On this week's show we have an essay from one of our listeners on why he wants to stick with his DVR over streaming. We also take a deep dive into Automatic Content Recognition and how to turn it off on your smart TVs. As usual we also read your emails and take a look at the week's news. News: Disney pulls channels from YouTube TV as carriage deal expires DIRECTV now offering the Disney Bundle free to select customers TV Set-Top Box Losing Market Dominance Please support Movember and enter to win great prizes from Bright Side Home Theater Movember Raffle — Bright Side Home Theater Swimming against the Stream - An essay from Jorge Beltran I know I will sound old and swimming against current, but I would like to go back to my world where we had our cable subscriptions, DVR and Netflix. Simple, vs having to manage 5-7 subscriptions to watch what we want at a cost we can pay. The proliferation of streaming services is turning out to be a way for content owners to extract more value from customers and significantly increase the amount of work customers have to do to find and track the content we want to watch. Even sports. Furthermore, it has backfired to content producers, with less opportunity to monetize content, driving them to look for economies of scale again. I follow or used to follow La Liga, Premier League Soccer, ski, college football, and formula 1 racing. Back in the day I knew what channel carried all of these sports on my cable line up, would set it to record on my DVR and done. I could watch it when I wanted and where I wanted since I could access my DVR from anywhere but the plane. Netflix was just growing and buying "older" content from the major networks and allowed us to binge watch old series we had missed. Some new exclusive content was coming out and that made paying the 10 - 12 $/mo a good value. Fast forward to today: The best games of Premier League have been taken off the over the air or regular cable channels are now behind a Paramount or someone else's paywall. Why am I going to pay for access to content that is mostly CBS that I can get over the air?. Worst of all, you can not skip commercials when you stream this content nowadays. You can't DVR the content and skip the commercials. I have lost track of who is now airing La Liga, but last time I checked was behind some other streamer. Fubo has a lot of soccer but is now super expensive too. Conclusion: I have stopped following La Liga and Premier League. My enthusiasm for good Futbol has gone down tremendously. I turn
