T-Mobile Unveils 'TVision' Skinny Pay-TV Bundles Starting at $10 per Month in New Play for Cord-Cutters (variety.com) 40
T-Mobile is taking an aggressive new swing at the U.S. pay-TV sector, threatening to further roil the market's dynamics: The carrier announced a new suite of TVision internet packages, available nationwide, that start at just $10 per month. From a report: With the new over-the-top TV play, T-Mobile wants to attract cord-cutters -- and also poach existing cable and satellite TV customers who are fed up with traditional pay TV's high prices and restrictive channel packaging. The TVision services are available in-home and also on wireless apps virtually anywhere in the U.S. T-Mobile also is introducing TVision Hub, a $50 Android TV-based adapter (with a remote) that plugs into the back of an HDTV to provide access to the TVision OTT services and 8,000-plus apps including Netflix and YouTube. "People sure love TV -- but they sure don't love their TV provider," T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said in livestream announcing the TVision lineup. He said incumbent cable and satellite TV providers are holding customers "hostage," because they bundle in "live news and sports with hundreds of other channels you don't want."
No ads? (Score:3)
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I'd be tempted if there was some guarantee of no ads ever.
Gee, even Netflix and Amazon throw in ads you know. Maybe not all the time, but they are there.
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Only for their own new content. Ads for other free content I might be interested in are and which have a "skip" button are annoying but aren't attempts to sucker me into giving up my money.
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Amazon Prime Video also carries programs from other sources, some of which contain ads.
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Interesting. I've never encountered programming which contains ads on prime. I've watched plenty of content that was ad supported on the original programming but it always has the ads stripped.
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I've never seen an ad on Netflix, using a 3rd-generation Apple TV.
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I don't even see them mention no ads, or content quality (SD vs HD).
From the article, it looks to be the same offer as cable providers, except without the junk you'll never watch. So it's the same poor service and a cheaper cost IMO.
Terrible, Terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
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Horrible predefined bundling like everyone else. How is this better?
Exactly. According to my quick check, to be able to watch CNN or NBC, I must buy the sports package at $40/month.
Their $10 "Vibe" package only has the stay-at-home-mom channels.
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$10/month will get you... what you can get for free between the network websites and/or other free streaming services that 'TVify' streaming services....
They proudly tout appealing to cord cutters as they provide exactly the same services and price points they would be trying to displace...
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Horrible predefined bundling like everyone else. How is this better?
Because it has T-Mobile's marketing spin, that's why. It's astonishing how many people haven't caught on that this has been T-Mobile's shtick for awhile now. Dazzle folks with promotional swag on Tuesday, run ads about how you're the "uncarrier" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to actually mean, maybe it's a reference to their lack of coverage), and nobody will notice they're paying the same per month and locked into the same awful contracts (except now they're called "finance agreements"), just as with
Sinclair Broadcast still won't let me watch MLB (Score:4, Interesting)
Then in 2018 after Disney bought out a large portion of FOX, the regional FOX sports networks were required to be sold to someone else. That someone else turned out to be the Sinclair Broadcast Group [wikipedia.org]. Sinclair kept the names but quickly increased the costs that cable and satellite companies had to pay to broadcast their networks. This quickly priced discount online providers like Hulu and Sling out of carrying the regional sports networks.
And now it looks like the same is happening with TMobile. We see other sports network options; notably FS1 and FS2 in the base while Live+ gets you a bunch of college sports channels, but never do we see the FOX regional networks. It appears that Sinclair is demanding too high of a fee from TMobile as well.
It's a good thing I found a fairly reliable way to pirate baseball. They can't say I didn't try to give them my money; they just asked too damned much of it. If I can't get baseball without paying $80 a month to cable, then I won't pay them at all. Sinclair Broadcast can go to hell.
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you should be happy supporting your team and the players making $10 million or more a year
$80 a month to watch the games is pretty cheap for that
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I have an easy job but like all my colleagues, I earn $15 hour. That's the minimum wage at Sinclair. How do you think they are able to pay that wage? By charging for content.
I encourage you to look further into wage distribution at Sinclair. They have a lot of executives that are making a lot more than that. Likely they could double the salary of the lowest paid employees and hardly see a difference in their bottom line.
By charging for content.
Being as they have had many providers refuse to pay the new increased prices - and why did they buy the RSNs if they can't make money selling carriage for them at previously established prices? - it doesn't seem probable that they need to jack up these price
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The CEO made 1.84 million last year. Image that 20% of Sinclair's 8,400 employees earn minimum wage...If the CEO gave ALL his money to these employees, they could have a grand total of $1000 extra per year.
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So even if we only account for the cash part you're off by almost a factor of 2.
I also mentioned they have other millionaire execs; it is well known that the Smith family controls the network and others from the family are pulling in very large salaries as well. If Sinclair is handing out $7-8M in total per year to each member of the family the distributio
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It wasn't that long ago that I could watch most of the games of my local baseball team with just an antenna . . . If I can't get baseball without paying $80 a month to cable, then I won't pay them at all. Sinclair Broadcast can go to hell.
I'm just curious . . . what would season tickets cost for your local team . . . ?
I just had this random stark raving mad thought that maybe someday folks will dump TV altogether and get back to experiencing life real, and not through the boob-tube.
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I'm just curious . . . what would season tickets cost for your local team . . . ?
I looked at my local MLB team as I had honestly never looked at it before. A single seat, full season, goes for ~$1,200 for the cheapest seat and goes up from there (most expensive seat around $26k / season!). Certainly paying $80 per month over those 6 months is a lot cheaper if I want to watch all the games at home.
That said, I was able to watch baseball through Sling recently for $30 per month. I was happy to pay that as I thought it was a good product and I could drop it any time. Now the price
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What I do mind is paying more to watch it on TV when I have to pay for a bunch of shit I don't want in order to do it.
Way back when, the term SNR in telecommunications used to mean Signal to Noise Ratio.
In these cable and streaming days . . . it means Shit to Noise Ratio.
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I live 180 miles from my favorite MLB team, so attending games on a regular basis is not feasible. This was the first year since 2001 I haven't been to a single game - I bought 4-6 game plans for a friend in that city and me for a number of years, picking several weekends when schedules lined up. As a baseball fan, an in-person game is such a different and better experience... but I can't get that very often. My area has a local minor league team again, so I'll probably go to some of those games once MiLB s
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I'm starting to wonder which providers actually pay Sinclair these days - not Dish/Sling, not Frontier, not Hulu, not FuboTV, not YouTube TV. So that leaves DirecTV and Spectrum? How's that plan working out?
Don't forget Xfinity. I don't know what the distribution looks like nationwide but I know more people who see the RSNs on cable than through any kind of satellite service.
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Whatever (Score:2)
T-Mobile would have to build a cell tower somewhere within a mile of me for this to matter at all. As usual their "coverage map" is 99% myth.
In other words, (Score:2)
Pretty much the only people still on conventional cable now will be the elderly who don't know any better. It causes me to grind my teeth that my mother insists on paying $300 per month for cable TV
This is not a la carte (Score:2)
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They are still bundling just with different naming....
I'm sure you're right, but the bundles are smaller and cheaper. They're trying to survive, and with any business in decline, they're doing the minimum that they think is necessary.
HAhahahahahahahaha *guffaw* hahahaha (Score:2)
*still have an antenna*
*still not regretting dumping cable TV*
*still not regretting not falling for the 'streaming' troll-meme*
Re: HAhahahahahahahaha *guffaw* hahahaha (Score:2)
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<serious_face>No sane adult reacts this way</serious_face>
I'm mocking the so-called 'cord cutters' yet again, because they all dumped cable for 'streaming' back when it was free, and now they're falling right back into the same old kind of trap that cable TV was.
It pains me to have to explain something like this to a Mister Serious Face like you. Lighten up, maybe? Or just keep your Mister Serious Face comments to yourself?
Ads (Score:3)
None of these companies are listening. Many of us have NO interest in streaming commercial-laden content that we can't record and can't skip. That is NOT competition to cable TV with a DVR where we have full control to avoid all annoying ads.
I would rather pay $100 a month for cable TV with TiVo than get 1,000,000 channels of forced commercials for $10 a month.
I also don't really want 20 different streaming "services" that all have just a few things I would want, all have different setups and accounts, all charge something different, all have different crappy user interfaces, and with no way to find anything or know what is on and when/how.
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YouTube TV offers unlimited "virtual DVR" recordings. At $65/mo, it appears to be strictly better than the $100/mo cable TV w. tivo option.
To get the channels I want woud cost ~$90/mon. (Score:2)
What is not clear as well does a single subscription allow use of multiple devices for multiple TV sets? Our house, and likely many other family homes, have more than one TV set requiring a device for each. Again, bandwidth
Horse. Door. Barn. (Score:2)
T-mobile tries to close the door after the horse is already out of the barn. Who wants to go back to network TV, talking heads, time shifting, commercial breaks, couch potato bullshit when they have the entire internet at their disposal, at a time and place of their choosing.
This is just bad (Score:2)
Why would I want this?