Roku Fixes One of Its Biggest Issues

welcome back to court cutting today where we break down some of the biggest stories happening in the world of Court cutting including today Roku is fixing one of its most annoying low quirks that a lot of people hate finally getting fixed ESPN's new streaming service has a few more details out some good some maybe not so good and Direct TV and Direct TV stream May soon lose ESPN that clock is ticking away very fast and the deadline's coming soon we'll tell you what's happening in these stories and a whole lot more coming up in a minute first off if you want to read these stories and come up with your own opinions I'll put a link to each story down below and in the show notes and in the first pin comment you can read them there and leave me a comment let me know what you think I love to hear your thoughts with that also if you like what we do here consider hitting that subscribe button consider hitting that thumbs up let YouTube know you enjoy what we do here so YouTube recommends V our videos to more people it really does help us with that said let's dive into it now one of the things you Roku owners love most is that Roku City screen saver it's a screen saver of a fictional city full of all kinds of movie and television references and now ads well some of these ads scroll by the front and promote different streaming services movies televisions and if underneath it is a little icon where if you hit the play pause button it will um launch that app that movie The whatever is being promoted problem is a lot of people hit the play button thinking they're going to relaunch the movie or television show they're watching and instead they get a um the ad they're they exit out of their movie exit all of their app whatever it may be and they lose it you actually have to hit the back button while Roku is testing right now changing that to the astri key the minu key on your Roku that little asterisk key there that now will launch the ad the play button will resume the whatever you were watching I think this is a great feature for some reason Roku is just beta testing this right now it's only available on some Roku devices none of mine happened but I've had multiple readers send me screenshots showing it on their Roku hopefully this rolls out to more it's nice to see Roku listening to user feedback that they didn't like that that that's something they didn't appreciate and making changes with it to be more user friendly now I'm sure Roku you know for them I'm sure you know play bun opens they add more maybe they like that more I don't know but for the user it wasn't a great experience again don't know when this will roll out to everybody don't know if it will Roku sometimes tests these things for a week or two and it rolls out to everybody sometimes it takes months sometimes they test it and then never do it I think this one will roll out eventually to everybody all right ESPN Standalone streaming service was announced last year it will allow you to stream all the ESPN channels for a flat monthly rate without anything else alicart TV or a step closer well ESPN had their media days yesterday where their um executive chair got up there answered questions of the media about the future of ESPN talked about a whole bunch of things including the new streaming service a few things that were interesting there the first thing being that ESPN could become the new Regional um Sports networks you know balet Sports and others are struggling ESPN for sometimes has reportedly been looking at launching a partnership to take over local broadcasts of NBA um NHL and uh MLB games well according to them this app will be able to do that streaming online where it'll be able to geolocate you see if you're inside the correct Market to watch a particular sport Channel and with that they will stream to you for example if you live in Michigan and the Detroit Tigers or maybe NBA the Pistons are there they will then stream that on the app for where you live if you live in Texas you won't get those games it's basically turning ESPN into a regional Sports Network run by ESPN with all the same issu of that but stream through the ESPN app instead the other thing is he came out and said that they were going to price this at a point where they won't care if you cancel cable and switch over to this because they'll make the same amount of money one of the things Disney has said is they priced Disney plus and others too cheap at the beginning they were more interested in attracting new subscribers than they were actually making it affordable to run and they don't want to make that mistake it seems like with this now pricing rumors have been anywhere from 20 to 30 bucks I've susp expect about 25 to 30 is more realistic many others have said that too it seems like that'll be true now ESPN gets about $9 and change per subscriber for its channels from cable but you're forgetting all the other Disney channels that they make money on you're paying for cable to get ESPN but you're also getting FS1 or excuse me not FS1 that's Fox FXX is what I was thinking of the Disney Channel free form and others well you add that all together they're getting probably 20 or more dollars and now Disney says hey if you cancel Comcast to get this or you cancel YouTube TV to get this I'm losing a bunch of money from all those other channels I need to count that into the price of this service I think it'll be wildly successful about 20 bucks but we'll see what happens here the new venue Sports service is going to come out oh if it ever does launch in a low $40 range I think that they would be wise to try to keep this around 20 if they have any hope of it being successful we'll see but seems like they are looking at prices on the higher end that's all speculation we know that they want to be profitable we'll see what the pricing is when it ever is announced ports are it will launch in 2025 all right we talked about this over the weekend but we're getting closer to the Direct TV and Direct TV streams deadline to strike a new deal with Disney speaking of Disney or they lose lose ESPN speaking of ESPN with this they have until September 1st so Sunday to strike a new deal or they'll go dark now college football fans good news Saturday games would air but the Sunday night Monday night games would not if this happens of course you have many options to stream ESP and now you can temporarily do with this though um Direct TV is pushing to get a um a deal in place to be able to watch uh or to do smaller packages as well I me they wanted more flexibility a lot of what many people are saying will Disney agree to it Spectrum was able to get Disney agreed to some conditions drop some channels make some changes but that resulted in a rather long blackout for such an important large Channel could drag TV be seen the same last time they renewed this in 2019 it came down to the wire and it was kind of funny watching them do the competing messages and actually try to cover up the others messages on the screen was quite funny but I'm interested to see what happens here um the world of just raising the price of TV and accepting what networks want is gone networks are having a hard time accepting that DirectTV knows if they raise the price too high it would just exacerbate the number of people canceling and leaving causing them even more trouble we'll see what happens fingers crossed I all play out and work but for now I think we're probably looking at a blackout if I had to say pick one I would probably lean more likely than not we'll see a blackout here now I don't think that's forever I just think that's part of a negotiation tactic we'll see what happens all right local now the free streaming service added two new channels this comes as they recently added a ton of BBC content local now added 48 hours and Declassified 247 channels to their free at sport streaming service really great one lot of content there check it out if you have not local now available on many popular streaming players speaking of free streaming players tclv plus the new free streaming service available on Roku it's like Google TV devices Plus mobile devices is adding some new channels including the Waypoint TV channel check it out this is from TCL we reviewed it recently it's not a bad streaming service not a great streaming service check it out they're adding more content and Spectrum has filed a complaint with the Better Business bureau's National advertising something or other NAD is what it works long history of about Business Bureau independent group so what's happening here is spectrum's parent company charter has filed a complaint saying that that um Verizon's 5G home internet's advertising is misleading one of the complaints I thought was kind of funny was they were saying well because they're advertis as 5G people are going to think it's five gigs and I've always because you know Comcast advertises their 10 gig Service as 10g now they've actually received complaints arguing that hey you're making it sound like this is 10 times better you know technology-wise than 5G I think 5G is pretty well understood in the market and the NAD group agreed that there's no need to change that now they did argue a few things first of all they asked for changes relat to unlimited data well there's no data cap you could suffer or a no data cap that charges you money or Cuts you off you could see your speed reduced if you're a heavy user during prime time I hear very few people complain about that though I don't think it happens that often but it could happen um and there were a few other changes they asked for but most of the complaints I found it interesting that the NAD kind of said hey Spectrum your complaints don't hold water we're not going to do it this comes as 5G home ainet services are adding hundreds of thousand subscriber in the first half of 2024 as many cable companies lose subscribers including spectrum and Comcast uh this comes as I talked about many times core cutting 2.0 core cutting 1.0 was canceling the TV side of cable 2.0 is canceling the internet side and moving to other services so we'll wait and see what happens but very interesting to see a growing trend of of this back and forth that they're taking this I think a little bit more seriously than they did core cutting 1.0 because I think they learned their lesson that hey with 1.0 we dismissed it by the time it was taken seriously it was way too late to try to do anything about core cutting 1.0 I'll be interested anybody here A C cutter 2.0 have you canceled your cable airnet switched to fiber satellite 5G so many other options it's not just about 5G home AET it's about all the new options out there for home AET that weren't now I know not everybody has options but you'd be surprised a growing number of people have new options of course pretty much everywhere now SpaceX is available and next year starlinks internet service or excuse me star Amazon's home internet service from space will also be available we'll see what happens well that's it for today take care be safe I'll be back again tomorrow and if real quick if you're heading out for an extended Labor Day and you're going to be gone on Friday or tomorrow take care I'll see you all on Tuesday no video on Monday take care everybody