America’s next over the air broadcast TV standard is arriving this year and you will need to purchase a new television capable of receiving it or rely on a converter add-on box that is currently almost impossible to purchase to receive ATSC 3.0 broadcasts on your existing television sets.

ATSC 3.0 (dubbed “NextGen TV” by the marketing people), will be available to watch in over 60 cities this year, reaching up to 70% of all U.S. television households. The benefits of the new television standard include significantly improved pictures, better reception (especially in fringe areas away from the transmitter), a dramatically larger number of available “sub-channels” available to offer ancillary services like Me-TV, Grit, Retro TV, and dozens of others, and customized, targeted advertising based on your viewing habits.

A handful of stations are already up and running with NextGen TV, with many more signing on during the second half of 2020. Here is a complete list of cities where NextGen TV broadcasts will start this year:

Already on the air — These cities have NextGen TV stations already on the air:

Boise, Idaho
Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas
Las Vegas
Nashville, Tenn.
Orlando-Daytona Beach-Melbourne, Fla.
Phoenix
Pittsburgh
Portland, Ore.
Salt Lake City
Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Currently testing or preparing to launch in:

East Lansing, Mich.
Los Angeles

Planning to launch during the second half of 2020 in:

Albany-Schenectady-Troy, N.Y.
Albuquerque-Santa Fe, N.M.
Atlanta
Austin, Tex.
Baltimore
Boston
Buffalo, N.Y.
Burlington, Vt.-Plattsburgh, N.Y.
Charleston-Huntington, W.V.
Charleston, S.C.
Charlotte, N.C.
Chattanooga, Tenn.
Chicago
Cincinnati
Cleveland-Akron, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Davenport, Iowa-Rock Island-Moline, Ill.
Denver
Detroit
Flint-Saginaw-Bay City, Mich.
Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo, Mich.
Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson, S.C.
Asheville, N.C.
Hartford-New Haven, Conn.
Houston
Indianapolis
Kansas City, Kan.-Mo.
Little Rock-Pine Bluff, Ark.
Memphis, Tenn.
Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
Milwaukee
Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.
Mobile, Ala.-Pensacola, Fla.
New York
Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News, Va.
Oklahoma City
Omaha, Neb.
Providence, R.I.-New Bedford, Mass.
Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
Rochester, N.Y.
Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, Calif.
San Antonio
San Diego
San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Calif.
Seattle-Tacoma, Wash.
Springfield, Mo.
St. Louis
Syracuse, N.Y.
Tampa-St. Petersburg-Sarasota, Fla.
Washington, D.C.
West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce, Fla.

AT&T has created a streaming television bundle that cable and satellite subscribers can appreciate. Replicating the kind of promotions familiar to DirecTV subscribers, AT&T debuted its new streaming TV service nationwide this morning with three promotionally priced packages that start at a relatively low price and end with a very high one.

AT&T TV is intended to fill the gap between bare bones, slimmed-down packages offered by services like Sling TV and the bloated television packages offered by traditional cable and satellite providers. The new service is part of AT&T’s plan to gradually wind down DirecTV satellite service and U-verse TV, delivering video content over the internet instead of by cable or satellite. AT&T has already ceased marketing its U-verse TV service and intends to do the same with DirecTV, which had been heavily advertised for years. The best new customer promotions will likely be targeted towards its new streaming service as well.

AT&T TV’s set-top box and remote control.

Unlike AT&T’s cord-cutting package — AT&T TV Now, AT&T TV features hundreds of channels, a 500-hour DVR that will store recordings up to 90 days, and over 40,000 on-demand shows. AT&T TV carries just about every cable channel imaginable, along with a healthy amount of regional and national sports, most local stations, scores of international channels in several languages, and premium movie channels galore. AT&T TV does not have the bandwidth and capacity constraints U-verse and DirecTV have, so the service can offer as many channels as customers can afford.

To watch, you need an internet connection with at least 8 Mbps for “optimal viewing.” If you want to bundle AT&T’s gigabit fiber service with AT&T TV, the company offers an extra $10/mo off for the first 12 months of your 24 month contract.

One of AT&T’s biggest selling points for its new TV service is its bundled set-top box, powered by Google’s Android TV. That gives subscribers access to apps in the Google Play Store, which means integrating Netflix, Hulu, and just about any other music or video streaming app is easy. Customers also can benefit from AT&T’s voice remote, which uses Google Assistant.

A careful review of the terms and conditions quickly reveals that this new service is not intentioned for cord-cutters. For starters, AT&T TV channel lineups are larger than other cord-cutting services, and are priced accordingly. The cheapest package on offer — Entertainment (~73 channels), is priced at $93 a month after the new customer promotion expires. AT&T TV also includes a two-year term contract satellite users are well familiar with. If you cancel early, you are subject to an early cancellation penalty of $15 for each month remaining on your contract. A sports programming fee of up to $8.49/mo is charged separately for some customers. A $19.95 setup fee also applies, along with equipment fees of $10/mo for each additional set-top box (the first one is included). Customers can also buy the box outright for $120.

AT&T protects its other video services from revenue cannibalization by disallowing new customer discounts for existing DirecTV and U-verse TV customers. For everyone else, here is what you can expect to pay:

• Entertainment: $49.99/mo for months 1-12, $93/mo for months 13-24.
• Choice: $54.99/mo for months 1-12, $110/mo for months 13-24.
• XTRA: $64.99/mo for months 1-12, $124/mo for months 13-24.
• Ultimate: $69.99/mo for months 1-12, $135/mo for months 13-24.
• Optimo Más: $54.99/mo for months 1-12, $86.99 for months 13-24.

Some other points:

• AT&T TV allows up to three concurrent streams.
• Regional Sports Fee of up to $8.49/mo. applies to Choice and higher packages.
• Additional set-top boxes are $10/mo or can be purchased for $120.
• A $50 AT&T Visa® Reward Card is available if you order AT&T TV online. Expires: 3/31/2020. For new residential customers only. Residents of select multi-dwelling units not eligible.
• Save an additional $10/mo. for 12 months on TV when you bundle with internet or wireless.
• $19.95 activation fee.
• Early termination fee of $15/mo for each month remaining on agreement.
• Equipment non-return fee may apply if you fail to return equipment when ending service.

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is now missing from Comcast TV subscribers’ basic package, moved to a high-cost add-on primarily known for its added sports channels.

Xfinity customers must now subscribe to a $9.99 “Sports Entertainment Package” to get the popular commercial-free classic movie channel back on their televisions, and many are howling in anger about the change.

“Comcast’s greed is unparalleled in modern history,” wrote Dennis Haefler. “Big oil, banks, and the railroads of the last century have nothing on Comcast.”

Customers on Comcast’s basic and economy television packages with the fewest channels will have to pay even more than $10 a month to get TCM back. Only customers signed up for at least Xfinity’s 140-channel “Starter” package and up can add the “Sports Entertainment Package” to their lineup. That could cost some as much as $30 more a month to get back a single channel. That add-on package is an odd place to put TCM, considering it is primarily a dumping ground for costly sports networks like NFL RedZone, CBS Sports Network, ESPN Goal Line & Bases Loaded, MLB, and other sports-related channels. To instantly bet on sports, feel free to visit platforms such as Babu88 লগইন করুন.

Comcast told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in a statement it moved TCM because most customers do not watch it:

“Every month, Comcast pays programmers like networks, local TV station owners and others, for the ability to bring their programming to you. We regularly review our programming and sometimes make changes to ensure we’re offering a wide variety of programming at the best value. We look at a variety of factors, including customer viewership and programming costs when making these decisions. Viewership of TCM is low, as over 90% of our customers watch less than two movies per month. Given this and contractual limitations on offering TCM a la carte, we decided to move TCM to the Sports Entertainment Package, which will help us manage programming costs that are passed on to our customers while continuing to make the channel available to those who want to watch it.”

TCM is making available a chart of alternative providers where subscribers can still get TCM without paying for a costly upgrade to get channels many do not want:

Jeff Kagan is a name familiar to anyone that follows the cable industry. For over 30 years, Kagan has been tracking consumer perceptions about the telecom industry and offering insight into the challenges these and other businesses were likely to face in the future. More recently, Kagan has been fretting about the growing trend of retail businesses paying more attention to cultivating their relationships with Wall Street while targeting their customers for abuse.

“I have been noticing how in recent years, retail is becoming increasingly unfriendly to the customer. This is a mistake,” Kagan offers in a new opinion piece on Equities.com. “New technologies and new ideas may be good for the bottom line in the short-term. They may solve problems like shoplifting, and that may make investors happy today. However, in the long-term, these customer unfriendly trends will take their toll as customers will shop where they feel appreciated, respected and wanted. Customers shop at stores they love. Love is an emotion. So, we must think of winning the customer with emotion. This is difficult for most businesspeople to understand.”

‘My way or the highway’-type attitudes from retailers come from all sorts of businesses. Warehouse clubs make you pay for the honor of shopping there. This is by far the best warehouse, with a good structure and flooring from warehouse-flooring.uk. And if it happened that you encountered concrete floor damage, don’t hesitate to call the concrete repair professionals from a site like https://concrete-repair.uk for help. Chains like Walmart are beefing up security teams, and in some places, they now demand to see receipts from customers exiting the store. But nobody has abused customers better and longer than the telecom industry. Not even the cattle-car-like airlines.

Kagan

After literally decades of almost bragging about their “don’t care” customer service while throwing attitude and intransigence at customers unhappy with service or pricing, the nation’s biggest cable and phone companies are now experiencing long-overdue customer revenge. Kagan notes that cord-cutting is not just about switching to a competitor for service. Many customers are literally thrilled to see the back end of their long hated provider.

Decades of monopoly service made abusing customers a risk-free and very profitable strategy for companies like Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Cox, Mediacom, and Verizon. In fact, someone turned the concept of the “cable guy” into a horror movie. Did you stay home from work to wait for a service call that never materialized? Tough luck. Don’t like yet another rate increase? Too bad.

“The reason they did this was, they had no competition in their market area. That meant the customer could not leave them,” Kagan noted.

After years of getting a bad reputation, only two things threatened to scare telecom companies straight — the fear of imminent regulation, such as what happened in 1992 when reregulation of cable companies turned out to be the only bill that year to be vetoed by President George H. W. Bush and overridden by the U.S. Senate to become law.

The other, much more scary fear is competition. In the mid-1990s, the nation’s biggest phone companies including what we now know as AT&T and Verizon were contemplating getting into the video business. This proved far more threatening than the much smaller home satellite dish business, which attracted around three million Americans at the time. The cable industry spent years taking shots at satellite competitors, including sticking dishowners with the cost of buying a $300 descrambler box up front, and charging as much (or even more) for programming than cable customers paid, despite the fact homeowners had to purchase and service their own dish, often 6-12 feet wide and not cheap to install.

The cable industry feared phone companies would charge ratepayers to subsidize their entry into the television business and sought protective legislation prohibiting the same cross-subsidization the cable industry would later rely on to introduce broadband and phone service.

More recently, after the country reached “peak cable” — the year the highest number of us subscribed to cable TV, the industry recognized it was likely all downhill from there. Comcast, in particular, specialized in empty lip service gestures to improve the customer service experience. For years, it promised to do better, only to do worse. The company even attempted to shed its bad reputation by changing the brand of its products from Comcast to “XFINITY.” Customers were not fooled, but that did not stop Charter from following Comcast’s lead, introducing the “Spectrum” brand to its products and almost burying its corporate name, which it barely references these days.

Kagan notes not following through on the customer service experience made cable companies ripe for stunning customer losses as new competitors for video service emerged. Comcast and Charter are among the biggest losers of cable TV customers, but their bad attitudes persist. Their latest ideas? Keep raising prices, rely on tricky Broadcast TV surcharges that are soaring in cost, end customer retention offers for dissatisfied video customers, and make up the difference in lost revenue by jacking up the price of broadband service, which is already nearly all-profit.

“The bottom line for any business is always focus on the customer. If they are happy, your business will remain strong and growing,” Kagan warned.

At some point, customers will get more choices for broadband service. Community owned broadband solutions have been very successful in communities that have experienced the worst abuse AT&T, Comcast, and Charter can deliver. In the future, fixed 5G wireless may provide perfectly respectable internet service if it is not data capped. Next generation satellite providers, interloping independent fiber to the home providers, and mesh wireless providers may offer consumers a number of options that can deliver suitable service and perhaps finally put cable and phone companies in their place.

As more paid streaming services debut, consumers have signaled they are increasingly willing to pirate their favorite shows and movies to save money.

A new survey conducted by Broadband Genie found the percentage of consumers willing to evade TV paywalls will double if content continues to be scattered across multiple streaming platforms.

Although the survey was confined to UK consumers, North Americans are also getting frustrated with the number of subscription services that are launching, because many of those same services are also responsible for removing content from popular services like Netflix. Consumers will need to subscribe to the new service to get that content back.

Like in North America, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are the most popular paid streaming services in the United Kingdom, partly because they maintain very deep content libraries with thousands of movies and TV shows. But with content balkanization now underway, more and more customers are finding their favorite shows are no longer available on those platforms. At least 30% of UK consumers report one or more shows they want to watch are now only available from a service to which they do not subscribe.

“As more legal services have exclusive releases, it’s harder for people to get everything they want from one place,” Ernesto van der Sar of TorrentFreak told Broadband Genie. “Instead of signing up for paid subscriptions at a handful of services, which may go beyond one’s budget, some then turn back to piracy.”

At least 48% of those surveyed reported their single biggest frustration with streaming services is the growing number of them and their combined cost. About 37% indicated they were now willing to get content for free from unauthorized websites or file sharing networks that violate copyright law.

Many consumers report their budget for streaming television is already straining, yet almost a half-dozen new services are yet to launch, each priced between $7-15 a month. Recent price increases by Netflix and live TV streaming providers also complicate matters. Netflix’s own subscriber numbers are under stress after their latest price hike, which may signal a price ceiling. If content becomes too expensive or difficult to access, increased piracy will probably result.