One of the foremost reasons why the general public stick to the cable is for the reason of sports and news channels. There are large numbers of online services that provide live sports and TV, and they incline to be more costly than regular streaming services.
The basic Fubo and Hulu Live packages are around $54, however, you have got to pay some extra amount if you need access to additional channels. Sling basic packages price starts at $30, though, it also has add-on bundles.
Add-ons? Will you have to pay more for additional channels? This sounds familiar. But why won’t this, for the reason that Live TV streaming companies are run and owned by the cable companies?
Dish Network owns Sling TV, whereas Disney would be one of the major stakeholders of Hulu in a couple of months, and we are assuming you already know who the owner of DirecTV Now is.
A few live stream services are just not cable replicas. Nevertheless, the sports industries and televised news are completely dedicated to the set-up of cable TV. They’ve developed with cable TV services which include Spectrum cable, Mediacom, Cox cable, etc. If sports or news started being displayed on services like Twitch, then they will have to reform their format entirely.
They’d be required to do publicity differently, they’d have to keep their viewers from transferring tabs, besides they would be obliged to take into consideration a worldwide and time-zone-less audience. In addition to it, if people are signing up for online versions of their cable TV providers, then in this scenario, the sports and news networks have got no motive to change their format.
Through the live TV services, customers are already quitting on their cable company to subscribe to an online account of their respective cable service providers. They’re getting charged a smaller amount right now, on the other hand, live streaming TV services are gradually becoming pricier.
In the US, there is three major live streaming video on demand (SVOD) content providers:
- Hulu
- Netflix
- Amazon Instant Video
Netflix and Hulu are subscription-based streaming services, where you have to pay a flat fee on a monthly basis for unlimited access to their video content. Amazon Instant Video is pretty much like cable TV where you pay-per-view; usually you could rent a title for one day to a week, or buy the title and keep it forever. Similarly, if you sign up for Amazon Prime, then you obtain an abundant amount of the Amazon Instant Video content for free.
Much of the copyrighted cable-TV content is accessible using SVOD. Furthermore, HBO has a standalone deal with the name of HBO GO, and they are also enabling their content accessible through Amazon. Plus, Amazon also has lately begun to amass content from various other providers, which include some popular like Showtime and Starz.
Content creators use OTT platforms and services to deliver their content more effectively, leveraging the flexibility and reach that these platforms provide. Any OTT service provider, in turn, creates platforms that align with the creators’ preferences and audience demands, further enhancing the viewing experience.
Two classifications are not thus far well functioned by SVOD:
(1) Live sports, and
(2) Live news.
A few American sports leagues have introduced SVOD based subscription services. In some circumstances, you have got to be a cable TV subscriber to access them, but this is commencement to change.
You would perhaps want to watch this content on your TV, so you’ll need some way of interfacing your TV with your home Internet service. There are several options. The most popular are:
- Roku
- Chromecast
- Apple TV
- Amazon Fire TV
These devices are very much like set-top boxes that come with cable-TV. They are connected with the TV and the Wi-Fi and comprise software to get in line with the aforementioned SVOD services, along with various others. Unlike the cable TV, in which the cable service provider gets you both the set-top box in addition to the content, with SVOD, these two are not paired. Your purchase, let’s say, a Roku box, then you would never be required to pay something to Roku another time. You acquire the content from Hulu, Netflix, etc. Roku may charge a payment for the smaller SVOD services as they don’t have their separate billing system.
Conclusive Notes:
As soon as you set up, the experience is pretty similar to watching your regular TV, with the exception that you have on-demand and instant access to virtually the whole lot that has ever been created; you could rewind it, pause it, or whatever you would want to do, whenever; you can watch it anytime you would want to, not only when the TV station decides on to show it; besides that, you would never have to watch the advertisements.