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492 points storf45 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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cryptozeus ◴[] No.42157120[source]
Everyone here talking like this something unique netflix had to deal with. Hotstar live streamed india va Pakistan cricket match with zero issues with all time high live viewership ever in the history of live telecast. Why would viewers paying $20 month want to think about their technical issues, they dropped the ball pure and simple. Tech already exists for this, it’s been done before even by espn, nothing new here.
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al_borland ◴[] No.42157893[source]
The Independent reports 35m viewers of that cricket match [0].

Rolling Stone reported 120m for Tyson and Paul on Netflix [1].

These are very different numbers. 120m is Super Bowl territory. Could Hotstar handle 3-4 of those cricket matches at the same time without issue?

[0] https://www.the-independent.com/sport/cricket/india-pakistan...

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jake-paul-...

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dilyevsky ◴[] No.42158595[source]
Majority of superbowl viewers watch it on cable. Streaming gets fewer than 10M concurrents
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SoftTalker ◴[] No.42160477[source]
Do people even have cable TV anymore? I have internet from my "cable" company but I don't have the "cable" connected to anything but the modem. Everything I watch is streamed. The only thing connected to my TV is a Roku.
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cabinguy ◴[] No.42160690[source]
I assume you know the answer to your questions is: of course they do. However, I’m in the same boat as you. The joke’s on us, I guess.
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SoftTalker ◴[] No.42160743[source]
I guess my question is: why? "Cable boxes" are uniformly awful to use in my experience. The UI is clunky, they take up space and it's another remote and another tangle of wires to try to hide. What advantage do they offer in 2024?
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yearolinuxdsktp ◴[] No.42161776[source]
https://www.cabletv.com/blog/why-people-still-pay-for-cable says it’s inertia, live sports and ease of use.

Don’t act so surprised—-streaming is a pain in the ass to figure out. People have been trained to tolerate a 3-second UI lag for every button press (seemingly all cable boxes are godawfully shitty like this—-it must be the server-side UI rendering design?)

BUT! You can record your game and the cable TV DVR is dead reliable and with high quality. There is no fear of competing for Wi-Fi bandwidth with your apartment or driveway neighbors, and the DVR still works even if cable is out. And as long as you haven’t deleted the recording it won’t go away for some stupid f’ing reason.

Finally, the cable TV DVR will let you fast forward through commercials—-or you can pause live TV to break for bathroom and make a snack, so you can build up a little buffer, now you are fast forwarding commercials on nearly-live TV. You can’t fast forward commercials with most mainstream streaming anymore. Who broadcasts your big games? Big players like Paramount+ won’t let you skip commercials anymore. The experience is now arguably worse. Once you settle in, forward 30sec back 30sec buttons work rather smoothly (that’s one part of cable TV boxes that has sub-half-second latency).

Your concern about extra remotes and extra boxes and hiding wires is a vanity most don’t care about. They are grateful for how compact big-screen TVs are these days compared to the CRTs or projection TVs of the past. They probably have their kids’ game console and a DVD/BluRay player on the same TV stand anyway.

Apparently movies purchased on Roku are now on Vudu. I hope that people who bought movies on Roku were able to figure it out. This is how technology sucks. Movies purchased with my cable provider’s Video On Demand are still with me, slow as shit as navigating to them is.

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vel0city ◴[] No.42164556[source]
I last regularly used a DirecTV DVR. There were a surprising number of times where it wouldn't let me fast forward through ads. Not only that, sometimes it would connect out to the internet to download new targeted forced ads on stuff that was recorded a while ago.
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1. yearolinuxdsktp ◴[] No.42166700[source]
The horrors! I stand corrected. :(