Yep definitely not on my Xiaomi Android 10 phone. I can do the steps in Google Maps but that doesn't trigger the Smart Lock. Also nothing in my settings for Smart Lock. Oh well.
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.
You can get some of what's offered on YouTube TV without commercials in other places, but it's a piecemeal adventure. If you shut down YouTube TV in favor of Amazon Prime, for example, you could pay for a subscription to AMC+ on Prime and watch "The Walking Dead", "Discovery of Witches", etc, without commercials. Or, older stuff, like "Law and Order" that has commercials on YouTube TV, but comes with Prime, no commercials.
"Roku's standard terms for partner channels include 20% of subscription fees and 30% of ad inventory, which has driven away Peacock, as it is currently airing fewer than five minutes of ads per hour. Meanwhile, WarnerMedia has been looking to retire the HBO service now sold through Roku to promote HBO Max, which Roku has turned down singularly."
To me it just reads like Roku has grown it's subscriber base to the point where they can negotiate with content providers in the same way that cable companies used to. Which isn't great for end users, but it is what it is. Both HBOMax and Peacock ended up on Roku, so some deal was reached in both cases.
This is exactly where died for me, when I went from being a buyer of their hardware to a potential source of monthly revenue and made it more difficult to get content I want as a result. They established a customer base and good will and once that was in place, the rent seeking started. At this point once a company that make a product I like goes public, it seems like a good tome to start looking for alternatives.
I switched away from Roku to an Nvidia Shield (an Android TV device) precisely because of the Roku HBO Max thing. Maybe these smaller players don't have the sheer number of captive eyeballs needed to demand such commissions. Although I guess HBO would still have the Play Store fees? In any case, I haven't noticed this sort of customer-hurting hard negotiations yet.
As long as you can watch something on the web, you can always cast it, right? (I find Chromecast is an underappreciated device from Google. I basically never touch any of the smartTV features on my TV. I do everything from phone, tablet, or Chromebook.)
Google hasn't evolved Chromecast past a cheap, dumb dongle since it was first released. No telling what the future holds but the current trajectory is promising.
It does, because it's essentially the same thing as old school cable TV. You're getting access to ABC, CBS, PBS, NBC, Fox, FX, CNN, TNT, EPSN, BBC America, Food Network, HGTV, and so on. There's not really any service that offers (all of) that content without commercials.
You can use their cloud DVR to "record" something, and after that happens, you can fast forward through the commercials. Which is similar to what you would get with a old school cable and a real DVR.
I also hate commercials, and while you can find commercial free versions of some of the YouTube TV content, you can't find it for everything they air.
Streaming is so fragmented now, both in content and features, that you have to do quite a lot of research before buying.
"You can use their cloud DVR to "record" something, and after that happens, you can fast forward through the commercials."
Has this changed? When I tried YouTubeTV a couple of years ago, you could record things to the DVR, and sometimes not only would they not let you fast forward through the commercials, they replaced them with their own completely un-fast-forwardable commercials. Sometimes it would let you fast forward as normal though. This is what caused me to drop the subscription immediately.
I have not had that problem. But, you do have to specifically wait for the actual air time to come and go before you're able to play it with fast-forward capability.
Once that's done, I've never had an issue with fast-forward. The UI does differentiate between "recorded" and "on-demand" content.
What I have run into:
- Something I recorded is no longer available, I assume because some contract expired.
- Something that's immediately available as on-demand isn't scheduled to air "Live". I can still click the thing that says to record it, but it never airs and so never records. That's pretty rare, but it's happened.
Even if you ‘record’ something to your YouTube TV DVR, if there is an on-demand (with ads) version available from the network, your DVR recorded version will be replaced and you will be forced to watch the on-demand (with unskippable ads) version
Maybe it depends on the channel, but in my experience you can pick which version you want to watch. Take this screenshot from SNL for example: https://i.imgur.com/s7eCDi8.png
There are 3 versions currently available to me for S46 E16: two DVR and one VOD. If I select either of the two DVR versions, I can skip commercials as expected. The VOD version forces me to watch commercials (also as expected, I guess).
Since the article notes that each participant had 30 balloons, and the quoted feedback suggests that 50 pumps is a possible value, we can estimate that the expected value of the experiment to the participant is somewhere between £10 and £15.
The seven years worth of "omg, thanks!" comments is pretty cool. Too bad the "small internet" is dying. Had it been a facebook comment or old tweet, it likely would have melted into obscurity.
After looking at Millionshort, it's pretty sad to go back to Google and realize that it is unable (or unwilling) to move beyond simple ranking and group results into categories.
