Cordcutting Fortnightly provides readers with a collection of news in cordcutting that has occurred over the past two weeks. View last fortnight’s news.
Twitter Starts New Shows
After Twitter’s successful earnings call, where they beat expectations and shot the stock price up, they have continued to dive into live video as a central part of their platform.
They announced a partnership with Bloomberg to stream their video live 24 hours a day according to The Verge and The Wall Street Journal. This should start in the fall.
are with WNBA, MLB, , and many other live sports. Technology, business, entertainment, and music are all areas where Twitter wants to start showing high-quality live content in an attempt to keep users engaged.
There is a Twitter for Android TV app.
YouTube to Start Producing Free Original Content
Do you subscribe to YouTube Red to get access to those original shows? Maybe not, as they recently announced numerous new original shows on the platform that everyone will be allowed to watch, without that premium subscription.
These will star high-profile celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Hart and be supported through ads, potentially to prevent the recent pull out of advertisers.
Facebook to Add 3000 Live Video Moderators
Last month, there were several cases of murders and other high-scale violence being streamed live on Facebook using their new live video tool. While the company removed the stream, they have been criticized for being slow to respond.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to hire another 3000 employees to the 4500-person “community operations team”. In theory their task will be to respond quickly to these streams and prevent them from being broadcast.
But it does seem like the company wants to spend more of their time on premium content, with plans to produce episodic content along with advertising on those shows.
CBS Bundles with Showtime in $15 Cordcutting Bundle
If you like to watch both CBS and Showtime, you may be interested in this new deal which should make their over-the-top services more attractive to cordcutters. For $15/month, you can now access both .
For the moment you’ll need to subscribe through the website, but then you should be able to watch on all of their supported platforms.
PBS Kids Plug & Play Streaming Stick
PBS Kids has provided countless hours of entertainment for children, and now they want that content to be even easier to access. With their new hardware, the PBS Kids Plug & Play, which looks very much like a toy, children will be able to watch live streaming content or their shows on-demand.
It comes with 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of Flash storage. In addition to streaming videos, one can also play original games. It was made in partnership with Ematic, and doesn’t report any specific operating system.
Cannes Film Festival Adds Rules Blocking Netflix Movies
Netflix is premiering films at the this year, but a new rule introduced this year requires films being shown to be in French theaters. This creates some tension, as other French laws prevent films from being streamed for three years after it debuts in theaters. Clearly, Netflix would not want this much of a delay in this content.
Pluto TV Adds Video-on-Demand
Pluto TV is a nifty web-based set of channels which you can stream 24/7, tying in well with Android TV’s Live Channels. A recent update to the app adds about 1000 movies to a new video-on-demand library that you can watch at any time, if streaming content isn’t for you.
The VOD feature only seems to be on Android TV for now, with the app description noting that “on Android TV, get access to our free VOD library of over 1000 entire movies and full TV episodes.”