Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-about-2-million-eyes-have-it dept.

It took a little more than a year for AT&T's DirecTV Now streaming video service to reach its first million.

The Dallas telecommunications provider said Tuesday that more than 1 million consumers have subscribed to its service, which offers a mix of live television channels and on-demand content over the internet to your phone, tablet or TV box like a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick.

The figure marks solid progress for the upstart service, though it still lags behind Sling TV, which Comscore said in June had more than 2 million customers. DirecTV Now launched last November, while Sling TV launched in February of 2015.

Will AT&T be able to build a content pipeline that's robust enough?


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:55PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:55PM (#606167)

    for some reason, though, i don't see this as a good thing. its just one more way AT&T can sell marketing to you. they watch what you watch and sell that info to the advertisers that pay for you to watch what's in between what you paid to watch.

    i wish there was a way to pay for such things and to have it be ad free, but those days were short and are far gone.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:40PM (#606195)

      Will they now stop calling me daily to subscribe?

  • (Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:12PM (6 children)

    by Sourcery42 (6400) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:12PM (#606177)

    I cancelled DirecTV about four years ago because it got way too expensive. Replaced it with an antenna on the roof for OTA network TV and Netflix. The whole family adapted and is just fine with the situation, except for the wife around the Holidays. She really missed those cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies they run continuously in November and December. I'd looked at Sling and Youtube TV in the past, but at the time never saw a good way to get Hallmark back without a costly cable bundle. Enter DirecTV Now - it has not one but two frickin' Hallmark channels. Candace Cameron is now on my TVs nonstop and the wife is happy. The service is still a little janky compared with Netflix, but mostly it gets the job done. I've turned on Monday night football a few times, and ABC once when it was super windy and my antenna was struggling. It's not at all worth the $35/month for my usage, but stopping the bitching about lack of Hallmark is priceless. Best thing is, there is no subscription or equipment, so if no one is using it come January I'll happily cancel it until next November.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:35PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:35PM (#606191)

      You're lucky. Mine is addicted to the "Murder Channel" (ID). I think I need to start taking notes about what mistakes to avoid during the shows.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:45PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:45PM (#606200)

        1. Keep your back to wall.
        2. Don't sleep.
        3. Dump and run.
        4. Kill first.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2017, @11:11AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2017, @11:11AM (#607153)

        I see, she likes to watch large groups of craws.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:18PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:18PM (#606216)

      > stopping the bitching about lack of Hallmark is priceless

      Half of your assets, typically.

    • (Score: 1) by Revek on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:52PM

      by Revek (5022) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:52PM (#606235)

      Ah hallmark. The best in Canadian television.

      --
      This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:01PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @06:01PM (#606242)

      My ex also likes that Hallmark crap, but she's told me that Hallmark now has put all their stuff on YouTube and you can just watch it there for free. I haven't verified this of course.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Sulla on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:13PM (2 children)

    by Sulla (5173) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:13PM (#606179) Journal

    This may be off-topic as it is a comment about DirectTV's TV services, but others might find it useful. DirectTV allows you to build channel collections by going through and selecting just the channels you want to have on your tv, example would be to bring in all sports channels and nothing else (not even those QVC shopping channels or the scam movie channels). When someone is channel surfing it only goes to the ones in this collection. This is great if you have a kid you don't want accessing channels outside of this group or if you have someone with dementia/Alzheimers who gets lost while trying to find something to watch. This compares to Comcast where you get stuck in no-mans land getting a message telling you to subscribe if you want a channel and to push "ok" and then surf down and repeat for 400+ channels. Comcast has no acceptable solution for this, they told me it would be less of a problem if i just subscribed to all of the channels. Really appreciate that DirectTV allows this.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:24PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:24PM (#606219)

      wow i must have been spoiled as a kid, because our 25" CRT tube TV had the same thing (along with both antenna and coaxial in, for using either one, or both, with the picture-in-picture feature, although we hooked the antenna to the VCR and used the VCR for that feature so we could change channels on the VCR and watch it in a little window--or record one thing while watching another).

      Anyway for the channel elimination, I believe they called it a 'parental lock' back then. You could press channel-up and the unwanted channel was not in the line-up. You could even type in the channel number and it was as if it never existed.

      It wasn't a "v-chip" or something--it was built into the TV that you could configure it to never display specific channels ever, and then if the cable company screwed up the channel numbers as they occasionally did, the TV didn't know the difference and it'd need to be reconfigured.

      I guess it is not surprising that with smart tvs comes the requirement to subscribe to a different service in order to do what used to be built into the dumb tvs.

      • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:12PM

        by Sulla (5173) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:12PM (#606290) Journal

        Parental lock on comcast still gives the option to log in with a pin, so the channel still exists in the lineup.

        --
        Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:18PM (#606183)

    steal it all! [hdonline.is]

  • (Score: 1) by Revek on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:47PM

    by Revek (5022) on Wednesday December 06 2017, @05:47PM (#606230)

    They lost nearly as many subs in the same time frame.

    --
    This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @11:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @11:20AM (#606761)

    Who's Mark? And why is he referred to as "1 million customer"? And why does DirecTV Now pass him?

(1)