Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Cable Cutting Revolution is Beginning

This past week, in my humble opinion, was a historic week for television. Both CBS and HBO announced their own streaming serves. CBS All Access launched this week, and for $5.99 a month you will have complete access to current shows, such as The Big Bang Theory, the ability to stream a CBS affiliated station live,and watch classics such as Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, very big news in regards to CBS. However a large amount of their older content is already on Netflix, or another streaming platform. (The selling point of this new service will be access to The Big Bang Theory.)

But the bigger news has to be HBO's announcement of a streaming service that will not require a cable or satellite subscription. This is mind blowing to me!!! For years, cable and satellite companies have been set up as an all or nothing system, where customers bought channels that they may not have wanted or watched. This very well could be the beginning of an "a la cart" system where individuals will be able to purchase the channels that they want.

I'm very interested how the cable and satellite provides will react once this new HBO platform is launched. For decades HBO has been one of the primary features that have convinced customers to sign up for cable.  If this goes through, you will be able to get HBO without such an expensive cable bill along with it.

I want to do more research on this, and possibly write out a longer piece with a little bit more background and content.

2 comments:

Matt Maldre said...

My number one desire with TV is to have local news in chapters. That is, if I don't want to watch a particular segment, I can click "next" and it will skip to the next segment.

I don't see why the local TV news won't cater to what their viewers want. I want my own custom newscast with the segments I want. So for instance, my newscast wouldn't have any of the stories about murders, fires, and extreme weather. Right now I don't watch the local news, because I don't like having to sit through all those type of "if it bleeds, it leads" stories.

Matt Maldre said...

Or to put it another way. If it bleeds, I leave.