I usually spend my evenings watching TV, and I have gotten used to time-shifting everything because I can't watch two shows at once, so the channels offered and the recording capabilities are important to me.
I think the way you have to approach it is to first determine what channels you want to watch - not all services offer all channels, so that takes a little bit of research, which is probably the most complicated part. You also have to consider your viewing habits - for instance, I don't binge-watch anything, so a service that offers an archive is not really useful to me. I'm a person who likes to watch a number of shows that all happen to air at the same time on the same day - I need a Cloud DVR so I can go back and watch those shows that were airing yesterday while I was watching something else.
An interesting thing about binge-watching - I read an article several months ago that said Netflix has changed the way we watch a TV series. In the past, we would watch a show and possibly talk to friends and family or co-workers about each episode and what might happen next. A perfect example is Game of Thrones, where there was a lot of speculation about the next episode.
Netflix dumps an entire season at once - all episodes available the day the season starts. What that does is eliminate that conversation entirely, because the person you're talking to at the water cooler may have seen more or fewer episodes than you have - so how can you talk about it? |
