[gregmac]

I'm a bit amazed these "live TV" style services even still exist and people use them. It kind of makes sense for specifically live content -- sports, mainly -- but these are basically 1980's style cable TV delivered "over the internet".

The killer feature of services like Netflix is not really the "over the internet" part, it's the "watch any show on demand" and "massive library so you can start watching from S1E1, if you want to". Streaming live TV services fail at both of these.

CloudDVR I guess kind of gets part way to on-demand, but in a frustratingly stupid way. Clearly, the service just has a single recording of every show from every channel. If a subscriber clicks "record" all it is really doing is opting them in to access to future recordings. I assume people can't get access to old recordings (then it would just be "on demand", not "DVR"). Are there also limits on how many recordings you can access (emulating a limited size hard drive)? Do recordings go away after some time? Does it also record commercials, and does it allow skipping?

Everything about these just seems like a relic of a by-gone era. They've even added artificial limitations to emulate the old actual technical limitations. The only real thing they have going for them is access to content not available on other streaming services, Otherwise everything about a service like Netflix seems to be superior in every way. If Netflix (or similar service) had live sports streaming and all the other shows, even at the same price as traditional cable, my guess is the cable industry would be dead within a year.

[rchaud]

Since moving out of my parents' house ~15 years ago, I have lived without cable TV of any kind, and I miss it.

Live TV offers a 'channel surfing' experience that does not exist on streaming. I want to be able to come home from work and plop down on my couch and just turn the TV on and have something be showing. If I don't like it, I switch channels. I have discovered numerous TV shows, movies and documentaries this way, even if I come across it halfway through an episode.

It is a completely different experience from streaming, where my home screen is basically a billboard, and I have to invest time in selecting something and then start it from Season 1, Episode 1, timestamp 00:00. That seems like a big commitment for something that's recreational, especially when TV shows start off slowly to introduce all the characters.

I come to this realization every time I am in a hotel room that has cable TV. If it's 1 in the morning, I'm fine with watching the Veronica Mars movie or Baby Driver even if it started an hour ago.

[ghaff]

It's definitely something people differ on. I basically never turn on a TV in a hotel room and hardly ever have TV on at home as mostly background--unless it's a webcam or something like that. I actually dropped my live TV last year because I hardly ever used it any longer.

[smashmore]

Channel surfing is nice in that it reduces the number of choices to a small set. Instead of having to pick from an entire streaming catalog, you pick from 10-300 channels which can easily get filtered to a smaller set of choices (2-7) which is easy to pick from without any brain effort.

[rchaud]

For me, the more important factor is randomness and immediacy. Randomness because channel surfing will bring me to a TV show I likely do not know the name of, and I will be shown a scene at a particular timestamp. So I can start watching without the lengthy exposition that's common in the first few episodes of shows.

Immediacy because there is no load time when switching channels, so it's frictionless to jump from sports, to weather, to syndicated TV sitcom. On streaming platforms, there is no such mechanism. Switching to a new show means I start from scratch. I could manually select a random episode and fast forward to a random timestamp, but that would be defeating the purpose.

[tzs]

One thing I liked about the older days was that when I watched something interesting many of my friends and coworkers were also watching, and we could have interesting discussions about it the next day.

Nowadays, especially with places like Netflix releasing a whole season of a show at once, it is often the case that all your friends and coworkers are all at different points in the series.

[mikestew]

That is what I enjoyed about Game of Thrones: we're all on the same page at any given point in time. I don't know if I'm quite to the point of being Old Man Shaking Fist at Clouds, but it is one thing I miss from the old days. Said as one who cut that cord over a decade ago, too.

[dec0dedab0de]

The killer feature of services like Netflix is not really the "over the internet" part, it's the "watch any show on demand" and "massive library so you can start watching from S1E1, if you want to". Streaming live TV services fail at both of these.

I think being over the internet is the killer feature. Cable companies had on demand for a decade before netflix streaming, being over the internet meant you were not locked into a monopoly or duopoly.

That said, I agree it seems old-timey and the wrong way of doing it.

[truth_]

Surprisingly, there still exists demand for "live TV" rather than choosing the show because some people don't like to decide what they want to watch. Netflix is testing "live TV" in France [0][1][2].

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/7/21553998/netflix-linear-c...

[1]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/11/06/netflix-is-experime...

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/06/netflix-tests-a-programmed...

[cardiffspaceman]

Cable on demand used to be more clunky than Netflix because the baseline was they were going to charge you, so they had to inform you and you had to accept. When the baseline is that the whole library is bundled, then certainly the bundled content can just start without creating a contract first.

[halfmatthalfcat]

There’s still a lot of Live TV: news, sports and serials. There’s an aspect to live that, while is going through a transformation, will always exist. You might not find any utility in it, but over 100M households in the US alone still have a pay TV subscription.

[gregmac]

It's interesting to look at the age breakdown [1], though. Less than 50% of respondents under 50 have cable. How much of the older population does, just out of inertia and being used to it?

There's a generation growing up now with a very different experience.

I distinctly remember my kid experiencing cable for the first time around age 3 or 4 (rainy day while we were staying at a cottage): "this is in the middle, start it over at the beginning", "I want to pick a different episode" and when the first commercial came on "hey! Put my show back on! I don't want to watch this".

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-s...

[halfmatthalfcat]

Yeah the pendulum is definitely swinging (or has swung) in the opposite direction (VOD) but live will always have a place (sports, news, serials, award shows, etc). Not saying there has been a massive paradigm shift in the past 5 years but the news of linear TV's death is greatly exaggerated imo.

[ghaff]

Part of it is too that a lot of people just like to have the TV on with whatever sports, documentaries, cable news, etc. is on as a sort of background even if they're not really sitting down to watch it.

[kschwab]

There is still a set of people that like their local news a lot. Or don't want to figure out the piecemeal way to get access to their cooking show, some current ABC/NBC/CBS show, BBC America, old episodes of Forensic Files, etc, from X different places. Though I agree, I do see it dying out.

[rufius]

You basically nailed it specifically on live TV and sports for my use case.

I subscribe to Hulu Live for a portion of the year when the European football season is in full swing. Typically I tune in for the second half of the season.

But as soon as the season wraps and the major trophies or shields are awarded, I downgrade to the regular subscription.

I just don’t watch enough TV, on demand or live, to justify it otherwise.

We’ve got Netflix, Hulu, HBO (included with cell plan), and Disney. That already feels like one too many but our family has a weird breakdown:

- I watch shows on Hulu

- My wife watches shows on Netflix

- My wife and I watch shows on HBO together

- Our family (kids + adults) watch shows on Disney

It’s not ideal but we have the disposable income for it and so it is what it is.

[lftl]

The unique thing about YTTV was that it kind of combined the live content, and watch any show on demand. Their DVR option gives you unlimited storage, and keeps shows you record for 9 months. So you could basically just spend an hour when you signed up clicking record on anything you're interested in, and then in a few months you basically had access to everything that's been on the TV for the past few months whenever you want.