davgreg

The trade papers report that the now merged ViacomCBS will be rebranding the CBS All Access service.
My guess is that this is an interim step as Showtime was a CBS property sold apart from the CBS/Paramount content. 

I want to get away from bundles and want a la carte, which apparently the companies that own most of the content seem willing to avoid at all costs.

For the life of me I do not see the value in the service.

If I were the Chinese owners of the service I would slow walk the process as it looks like Trump is a one term wonder. He will be a lame duck in less than a hundred days.

So how do we know it was a success without any trusted metrics?

I know many people who qualify for the free year of Apple TV+ and almost nobody uses it.
I qualify by multiple devices and do not see much of anything worth watching.

sdw2001 said:

I never use Apple news. But I can say the New York Times is an absolute disaster. The paper has always been biased, but they at least tried to offer a veneer of accountability and impartiality in the past. The opinion pages have now utterly infected the news room. They are 100% propaganda and fake news at this point.  Anyone who has researched it knows they played an integral part in the “spygate“ scandal.  

This decision is obviously about money. “Reader engagement” and “relationship with our readers “are just terms for “we weren’t making any money from it.”  

The NYT has seen a massive spike in digital subscribers during the Trump administration and is by all public accounts doing well. They experienced a near death financial crisis as they transitioned to a paywall as subscribers dropped and ad revenue went away.

The paper went through multiple rounds of buy outs and layoffs as they streamlined the staff and rationalized the editorial process. They also sold off other assets-like TV stations to get the cash needed to make the transition. That process has largely been completed.

I agree that there is a bias problem in the political coverage and on the opinion pages. It is neither Democratic or Republican, but rather a corporatist centrist viewpoint that manages to aggravate progressives and conservatives equally. They are just as hostile to Bernie Sanders as they are to Trump.

They are also heavy handed in comment moderation. Comments too negative to their viewpoint get posted, but often many hours to days later- preventing them from being seen by most readers. Comments that follow the company line get posted almost immediately. Supposedly moderation is now mostly automated, so that is suspicious.

The recent handling of the Tom Cotton op-Ed is also a problem. I disagree with my Senator on most things, but his voice as a Senator is important and worthy of the opinion page.

I am a digital subscriber to the NYT, WaPo, LA Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Digital, Der Spiegel, Ars, Wired, and The Economist.