Our weekly news brief summarizes cord-cutter news from around the Web. In this week's round-up: You can stream every March Madness game, but it's complicated; this season will offer more MLB viewing options; Netflix is replacing star ratings with a thumbs up/down option; a new Fox Now app is on the way, and more.
Trying to figure out how to stream every March Madness game? Writing for Yahoo Finance, Daniel Roberts says that "it is possible to stream every single game without a television — but it's complicated." Other than being complicated, the bad news is that it "in most cases requires cable authentication."
Baseball fans will have more TV viewing options for the 2017 season. CIO.com reports that "Sling TV and the soon-to-launch YouTube TV have broken the stranglehold of MLB.TV and various regional sports networks over broadcast rights and will be streaming major Major League Baseball games in a number of markets this season."
Pay TV providers are losing customers at a faster rate. Data analysis from Leichtman Research Group shows that the largest U.S. pay TV providers lost around 795,000 video customers in 2016, versus 445,000 in 2015.
Meanwhile, "the percentage of U.S. homes with broadband but not pay TV has more than doubled in the last five years, according to research company The Diffusion Group" and reported by FierceCable. Twenty-two percent of broadband households presently are without cable TV.
Sling TV has been busy working with Microsoft, and has announced that Windows 10 devices will now come preloaded with the popular over-the-top streaming service, and that the Sling TV Xbox One app has finally been updated to use the interface that came to Roku at the end of 2015.
Fox has launched a new Fox Now app, currently available only on Apple TV, that brings together content from the Fox network, FX and the National Geographic channel all in one location. Fox says it will roll out to other platforms, including Roku and mobile devices, by midyear. Sorry, cordcutters, it will still require authentication with a participating cable TV provider.
Viacom programming won't be on Hulu's soon-to-launch live streaming TV service, and it dropped out of PlayStation Vue in November. Discovery Communications, Scripps Networks Interactive, and AMC Networks currently lack spots in the lineup, and they aren't yet scheduled for YouTube TV, either. TheStreet explains that "to differentiate their products and keep down their monthly subscriber costs, operators are becoming more selective. When possible, they're opting for skinnier bundles than the 100+ channel bundles that cable TV and satellite operators traditionally have offered." That means less room for media companies that grew out of cable TV service.
Do you get tired of watching the same intro on every episode of the TV show you're binge-watching? TheVerge reports that Netflix is testing a button for skipping the opening credits. And in another change, Variety reports that Netflix is replacing the star rating system with a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system. Why? Consumer testing showed that "thumbs got 200% more ratings than the traditional star-rating feature."
