Acorn TV. Priced at $4.99 per month (first month free) this service bundles the best shows from the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The service is starting with 60 exclusive titles that include a lot of drama, police who-dunnits and dry British comedy.
Sling TV. The service has grown from very simple to having a wide range of options. They have added a ton of new programming such as Fox Sports and other Fox Shows, They brought in the NBC suite including the live NBC feed, USA, Bravo, SyFy and BBC America. They beefed up the sports offering with some regional sports networks. The NBC live feed will be the first place that local NFL games will be broadcast on the web. They have added E! and Oxygen to their Lifestyle package. And they’ve added BBC World News, CNBC and MSNBC to their World News Package. Overall this is starting to become as large and confusing as looking at cable packages!
Hulu. The company has confirmed it will soon be launching a skinny bundle. Much of the content is going to come from the owners of Hulu including a suite of packages from ABC / Disney including ESPN, a package from NBC Universal, and a package from 21st Century Fox. Plus Hulu is making a deal with CBS. This would make Hulu the first to offer all of the major networks’ feeds live online, with ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. The company has said that their base package will be around $35, and this makes it a true skinny bundle since it includes the networks plus other most-watched channels. As I was writing this blog Hulu announced they are ceasing all free / ad-based program and are now all-subscription.
Tubi TV. Tubi TV is taking a different approach from the other services and is free to customers and is ad-supported. The service carries a lot of content aimed at millennials, who supposedly are most interested in free content. The service includes Japanese anime 2-days after being aired in Japan as well as a lot of movies and various series of interest to millennials. The service has made deals with over 200 content provides including MGM, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures and Starz!
Comcast brings in Netflix. In an attempt to keep viewers on their platform and under their channel guide Comcast has made a deal to bring Netflix into the fold. Netflix will appear in the lineup like any other network and customers can navigate using their remote control.
Speaking of remote controls, Comcast distributed a lot of new voice-controlled remotes in time for the Olympics in the hopes of keeping customers from cutting the cord. We’ll have to watch to see how customers like the new devices.
Networks go Directly Online. All of the major (and many not-so-major) networks are taking their content online, but with different business models. It will be interesting to see which of these approaches is the most popular.
Fox has announced that it is now online for customers using the Fox.com website or the Fox Now app. This is an authenticated service and customers have to be verified as a customer of a cable provider and already paying for the Fox programming.
ABC is re-launching its unauthenticated streaming service (free for anybody) and showing older series for free, supported with ads.
CBS has taken the premium subscription approach and is a monthly subscriptions for $5.99 it’s calling CBS All Access. The company is producing original content just for this platform including the next Star Trek Series.
NBC has chosen to produce OTT content through its Seeso platform. This is going to consist of a number of different types of programming, with the comedy platform launched late last year. The comedy channel costs $3.99 per month. It includes older NBC comedy series as well as twenty new comedy series produced only for the Seeso platform.
Even smaller networks like CW now have an unauthenticated ad-supported platform called CW Seed that is showing older shows such as MadTV, Constantine and the O.C.