Our weekly news brief summarizes cordcutter news from around the Web. In this week's round-up: Facebook is creating an app for TV streaming devices, New York sues Time Warner Cable for delivering promised Internet speeds, Dish and Sling TV may be an acquisition target, and more.
Cordcutters prefer Netflix original productions over those from other streaming services such as HBO and Amazon. Those are the conclusions of a Forrester survey of cord-cutters and likely cord-cutters.
That same survey also found that consumers think Netflix is the best value for the price, with only only 5% of US adults surveyed thinking that Netflix was too expensive at $9.99 per month. That compares to 11% who thought Hulu was too expensive at $7.99-a-month and 18% who thought HBO Now cost too much at $14.99-a-month. The worst values? Those would be from broadcast networks: 23% through CBS All Access was too expensive, and 24% said the same about NBC's SeeSo.
Plex is expanding its media offerings with the acquisition of Watchup, a streaming news service that has partnerships with new broadcasters that include CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Fox News, PBS and WSJ. Variety reports that Plex "plans to add news feeds from local broadcasters and other publishing partners to its app in the coming months." The client-server media player is commonly used to stream personal media from local computers and other storage, and the Plex Roku app is one of the most-watched channels on Roku.
Cheddar, a live news service with a focus on business and technology, is expanding to additional streaming bundles. Cheddar's CEO, who calls it "the MSNBC, CNN, CNBC for people under the age of 60," plans for the service to be on two additional services in the next couple of months. It can currently be found on Sling TV and Amazon.
Is Dish Network, and it's Sling TV service, a target for acquisition by Verizon or another buyer? That's the speculation by Multichannel News author Mike Farrell. Dish is consolidating hardware and software assets of sister company EchoStar Communications and Farrell says that this "just smacks of getting the house ready for company." He goes on to explain that "Cleaning up the house is never a bad thing... For example, consolidating 100% of Sling TV into Dish – about 10% was held by EchoStar – saves any potential suitor from having to do that later."
BitTorrent has created a free, and legal, Android app for streaming live TV. The Streaming Observer website reports that the service, previously available only on FireTV and Apple devices, has mostly "sports, music, and news from networks like NASA... FightBox HD, Newsy, Clubbing TV, One World Sports, Newsmax, France 24, QVC, Awe, Fast & Fun Box HD, FilmBox Arthouse, One America News Network, and more." You can find the Android app in Google's Play store.
Still more research showing the decline of traditional pay TV: Pivotal Research Group conducted an analysis showing a median decline of 1.9% in the number of pay TV homes. But the growth in number of U.S. homes with TVs was 1.7%. This gap between pay TV subscriber declines and the rise of overall TV was "worse than any month during which we have data back to 2010," according to a senior research analyst at Pivotal.
New York State is suing Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary, saying that they "allegedly conduct[ed] a deliberate scheme to defraud and mislead New Yorkers by promising Internet service that they knew they could not deliver." An announcement from the state's attorney general claims that "subscribers' wired Internet speeds for the premium plan (100, 200, and 300 Mbps) were up to 70 percent slower than promised; Wi-Fi speeds were even slower, with some subscribers getting speeds that were more than 80 percent slower than what they had paid for." TWC allegedly described one trick for showing better performance in FCC speed test scores as "lipstick on a pig," and a TWC executive said in e-mail that "We just have to make it work temporarily."
Facebook on TV? The Facebook app on Roku has been malfunctioning for years, but according to a recent report Facebook is creating a new app for set-top boxes including Apple TV. But don't expect to find your friends' photos and videos. "Facebook will stock it with original long-form programming it will either fund or acquire."
