Cordkillers 238 - $1.99 is the New Free (w/ Jeff Peterson)
What types of new shows are the streaming services making, new TiVo hardware, and some of y'all really like NVIDIA Shields! All this and more on Cordkillers! With special guest Jeff Peterson.
CordKillers: Ep. $1.99 is the New Free
Recorded: October 1 2018
Guest: Jeff Peterson
Intro Video
Into the Dark
Primary Target
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube original content genres
- Recode' Rani Molla has an article about the types of content the different streaming services are making according to Ampere Analysis
- Netflix makes the most with 245 shows available and 257 on the way.
- Amazon has 80, HBO 69 YouTube Premium 60, Facebook Watch 45, Showtime 40 and Hulu 34
- UPCOMING SHOWS
- Netflix: 21% comedy 20% SciFi/Fantasy, 16% Drama
- Amazon: 27% Drama, 25% SciFi/Fantasy 16% Comedy
- YouTube: 40% Comedy, 21% Reality, 19% Documentary
- Hulu: 36% Comedy, 26% Drama, 15% Crime and Thriller
- Facebook: 30% News, 19% Entertainment, 19% Reality
- Apple: 26% Comedy, 26% Crime and Thriller, 22% Drama
- HBO: 39% Drama, 20% Comedy, 17% SciFi/Fantasy
- Are Streaming services going to differentiate into genre channels?
How to Watch
The $99 Caavo Control Center is a universal remote built on machine vision
- Caavo has introduced a cheaper version of its universal remote system, the Caavo Control Center, down from $399 to $99 but with an ongoing service fee and half the HDMI ports at 4. It's also just a black box, no more customizable wooden cover. For $1.99 a month or $20 a year, you get its machine vision system, which now works with smart TVs not just set-top boxes, to recognize what's going on and use HDMI CEC, API or IR to execute what you want it to do, without you having to think about it.
TiVo’s 4-tuner $250 BOLT OTA set-top box goes after cord cutters
- TiVo has a new set-top box, the TiVo BOLT OTA, which will join its existing lineup of TiVo BOLT-branded devices, including the voice-controlled BOLT VOX DVRs, launched last year. The new device is aimed at people who watch live TV over-the-air, and will replace the TiVO Roamio OTA DVR, which will no longer be sold. While the 1TB BOLT VOX is $299.99 with a $14.99 per month TiVo service plan, the new 1TB BOLT OTA is $249.99 and has a monthly fee of $6.99. TiVo BOLT OTA is available online now and coming to stores October 7.
What to Watch
A new trailer for Star Wars: Resistance shows lots of space battles. Star Wars Resistance flies onto the Disney Channel and Disney XD October 7.
A new season of MST3K will arrive on Netflix Thanksgiving day, November 22.
Netflix will show DC's Titans series outside the US. In the US it will be on DC Universe starting October 12. No date on the Netflix premiere.
Hulu's got a first-look at season 2 of Marvel's Runaways. This season, Hulu is dropping all episodes at once on December 21.
In the first Dark Phoenix trailer, Jean Grey burns the world to the ground
- The first trailer for Dark Phoenix which is an X-Men movie with the James McAvoy Professor X shows Jean Grey played by Sophie Turner pretty much being furious for good reasons. Dark Phoenix is out February 14.
Eyes On
Brian: Better Call Saul, The Good Place S3 E1, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Spider Man game
Tom: Poldark
Jeff: Paradise PD
On the Lookout: Extinction
Front Lines
Netflix Is Planning a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ‘Black Mirror’
- Bloomberg's sources say an upcoming episode of BlackMirror will let Netflix users choose what happens at certain points in the storyline. It's the first interactive story meant for adults and the first of several experiments. The sources say Netflix has a deal for one more live-action interactive story and is negotiating rights for two others. Some of them are based on video games.
Plex kills off support for Cloud Sync, Plugins and bookmarking features
- Plex is trimming features it says are not used much, like plugins, cloud sync and the watch later bookmarking feature. Plex even jokingly tweeted “DM us a photo of your Cloud Sync library and today’s newspaper." Plugins, which let users add services from places like Pandora and CNN was used by fewer than 2% of Plex users. It's protocol is out of date and would need to be rebuilt to keep it working. Plex also added support for subtitles, which will roll out to Plex Pass Preview in the next few days.
MoviePass is now forcing former users to opt out of new plan or risk being charged
- MoviePass has been re-enrolling lapsed subscribers in its service as part of a "Select test group of a new plan. If you didn't opt in to the most recent change to a three movies a month plan you're subscription was suspended but as of October 5 some of those users will start being charged again for a new plan that lets them get one movie a day "from existing inventory". Subscribers have until 9 PM Eastern October 4 to opt out of having their subscription re-started.
AMC’s MoviePass competitor hits 380K users in 3 months, will increase US attendance
- Meanwhile, AMC Stubs A-List plan announced it has signed up more than 380,000 users in the three months since it launched July 26. Members watched more than 363 different movie titles to date. AMC is projecting that it will see increased U.S. attendance for the first time since 2015. AMC also offers a 12-month protection guarantee against changes to the program that could impact its pricing or benefits.
Dispatches from the Front
Hi Brian and Tom,
The other Nvidia Shield owner here, emailing in as requested. Please tell Steve 'hi' for me.
I'm still enjoying the Shield and like that for some apps it will keep the last few items viewed on the home page so that picking up where I left off is more convenient. Having not used a Roku in quite a while I don't know if this is a unique feature or not but is appreciated. Also, it's fun to be able to side load some of the games from my phone onto it, and of course being able to tap into all my PC games to play at 4K on the biggest screen in the house.
Keep up the cord killin',
- Will
Hi there, just a quick message to say that I use an NVIDIA Shield TV too.
In Europe and generally outside the U.S. they are quite common, they
provide a certain degree of freedom in the choice of apps and they're
the only boxes with PLEX SERVER, as far as I know.
keep up the good job
- Stefano
I am one of your producers watching and supporting. I heard a call out for my help so here you go.
I started with Amazon Fire TV's on my 11 TV's (yes I live in Indiana where big houses are inexpensive) 3 years ago. I dabbled with an Nvidia Shield when they first came out but I couldn't justify the cost on multiple TV's so kept with the Fire TV's. I then moved to Roku when Google blocked YouTube on the Fire TV. I then missed the ability to customize by sideloading apps so I went back to the Nvidia Shield. I currently have 4 Shields, one Mibox and 6 Fire TV's. The Shield TV's are hands down the most powerful devices I've used. They get updated regularly and now the Nvidia Gamepass is free. It has console quality games with no additional cost.
As far as running a Plex server without a PC, you can run a Plex server on an Nvidia shield. The Shield allows you to connect to network shares in the OS so every app including the Plex server can access the shares. You can also connect a USB drive as an option too.
Thanks again and keep up the good work.
The Other Shield Guy.
- Keith
Hey Killerz,
I’m currently using a Synology DS918+ to host my Plex server. It works great for my small household and the couple of family members who occasionally access my library remotely. The Synology OS is very user friendly and easy to manage remotely. Hope this helps out the emailer from last week!
Your boss,
- Tom
Hi Brian, Tom, & Bryce -
Ok, so Brian asked for it, so here it is - I have an Amazon Echo spot and I regularly use it with video. I picked up one, thinking I’d use it in my bedroom and I actually decided to put it in my home office (my primary work space). This office is upstairs and I can’t hear the doorbell, BUT I have an amazon cloud camera out front (as well as one out back) and I can ask *you know who* to show me the front yard or back yard. The most recent use case was Friday as I waited for my new iPhone. I get alerts when a person is detected in my front yard and could pull up the camera quick enough to see if it was actually a fed ex truck or just ran down foot traffic going by the house.
Brian didn’t specifically ask for entertainment versions of video with the spot, so I hope I showed you one he hadn’t thought of.
Also, as someone who’s helped build products in this space, Tom was right when he said it would be harder to exclude the spot (and bad pr if they did). they expect no one to use it for this, but don’t want to stop someone who might for the lulz.
- Andy
In regards to the Apple TV story and them canceling the Dr Dre show and asking other shows to be less dark or more up beat so it will be more family friendly. I'm fine with there being another family friendly channel because I'm sure there is a market for that. The thing I didn't understand is if that was the goal all along why didn't they tell the people making the show that they were looking for family friendly in the first place? Also don't have Dr Dre do a show and expect it to not be what they got, I mean just listen to one of his albums to get a flavor for what you are going to get.
What this actually sounds like is a company that doesn't have clear idea about what they are looking to be in the market. Or at the very least they didn't know what what Tim Cook was looking for in this endeavor. Like Brian I have very low expectations for what Apple is doing in this space as it isn't part of their core competency as a company and so far they don't seem to have any idea about what they are doing nor where they want to go.
- John
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