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0 pointsascagnel_10y ago0 comments

Never gonna happen.

* Comcast makes millions, if not billions a year off of equipment rental fees. $8/mo for a gateway and $12/mo for an HD box (at minimum) for cheap, crappy equipment.

* Streaming video has gotten good, but streaming live video is still a tough nut to crack. You can't pre-buffer things that haven't happened yet (said by someone who's used the NHL's offering for the past few years).

* Sports are keeping cable TV alive. NBCSN prints money for Comcast, and they pay the NHL a ton of money for that content, and the NHL has one of the smaller North American TV deals (due to demographics, regional popularity, and the weak Canadian dollar).

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4 comments · 2 top-level

exelius10y ago· 1 in thread

* They do, but thinking is evolving that the TCO of having to develop and support those devices isn't worth the revenue they provide. Because the CableCard scheme used in the US is essentially proprietary to the US, the US cable companies have to develop custom hardware at great cost.

* Very true; but there is a lot of investment being made here. Also, if you're watching over the Internet, do you really care if there is a 5 min delay from live action?

* RSNs are a zero-sum game for the cable operators; the money NBCSN makes for Comcast ends up going back out the door to the other RSNs like FoxSN, RootTV, etc. The cable companies would rather not have to pay for any of it. They just use it to bleed each other for money.

ascagnel_OP10y ago

For point two, a delay is a problem. Twitch had to introduce a delay as they grew, and it made it difficult for the streamer to respond to things happening in the chat channel. Sticking to traditional TV sports, notification of a scoring event shouldn't happen before the video stream reaches you (ie: ESPN's app notifies you of a scoring event before you see it on a "live" video feed).

CoolgyFurlough10y ago· 1 in thread

As somebody whose main source of entertainment is Twitch.tv I can tell you that streaming live video would be much better if these very same cable companies would get their heads out of their asses and make their Internet services more reliable. The speeds you get from a cable connection are more than enough to stream live HD video, the infrastructure is just terrible in a lot of cases.

exelius10y ago

This is likely a problem with Twitch and not with the ISPs. With live streaming video, the biggest problem is transcoding; not bandwidth.

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