TV streaming STARTED fragmented. Just it was all bundled together in a cable subscription. The (ineffective) moderator in that were the cable companies like Comcast, who were always trying to negotiate the price of a channel down. Suddenly with streaming, you could start your own service and getting dropped by someone like Comcast wasn’t the death sentence it used to be. The TV content creators are dealing with the end user for the first time.

The music industry long ago learned they get better sales when all their vynal/cassettes/CDs are available at Kmart/Walmart/Best Buy/etc. The music industry DID fragment a bit with online streaming, but those quickly failed. And the artists soon realized that being cool and exclusive to iTunes lead to less money for them.

The heady days of using Copy-b and Copy-c in the Commodore 64 days. Back when floppies were really floppies.

Are your stations actually encrypted? Because mine were working fine until recently as many stations encrypted as the NFL playoffs started.

Or maybe you’re just s-p-e-c-i-a-l!

Meh, my Plex server is slowly failing anyway because it’s on 17 y/o hardware.

How do you manually upgrade to the beta?

Except that’s not the experience everyone has. HDHR isn’t getting keys, because the networks don’t allow it for the HDHR devices.

Plex doesn’t support ATSC 3.0 yet, specifically the audio. So it can’t play ATSC 3.0 broadcasts.

It’s usable until your local stations decide to encrypt. Then HDHomerun will not work.

Lots of TV stations in the US are moving to the new broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0, encrypting the channel, and stopping their ATSC 1.0 broadcasts. This makes an antenna useless. And the only digital boxes that are allowed are ones that have to be plugged into the TV directly with HDMI. This means you’d have to have an antenna and expensive converter box for EACH TV.

Basically, broadcast TV is an unreliable mess now.

Thunderbird in 2024 still doesn’t give you the option to use 12 hour time.

It is, but not enough to move the needle. It also carries a bunch of bloat.

I remember being laughed at when I admitted I still buy CDs, DVDs, or BluRays a few years ago.

Going that way is a great way to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Messing with their equipment is going not going to end well.

Ad block is NOT piracy. And use Ublock Origin.

Way back in the day, my best friend had a family friend that owned a computer software store. He rented games and gave us copies of the latest and greatest copy programs with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge.

Remember, no business is required to tell the truth. Had a pipeline go through my backyard and you would not believe the lies that company told. Glad I lawyered up instead of believing the lies.

Only if you sold it. Back when cassette tapes first came out, the mystic music industry sued, and the Supreme Court ruled it fair use. So VHS tapes were under the same umbrella. We wouldn’t get that same ruling now.

Holy hell, that was one hell of an autocorrect on mobile.

It the same mechanism. They can do it, they just don’t want to.

They can. I buy and gift games to my son all the time.

That info can go stale quickly as content licensing changes. I’ve ran into that plenty.