OT: NFL Network Cutbacks

[203Pat]

I'll add that boomers aren't necessarily all 'linear TV' people.

I am a tail-end boomer and cut the cord in the early/mid 2010s and set up an OTA HDTV antenna just so I could keep watching NFL. At first I was buying a few seasons of various shows I liked from the networks, but that got replaced by u2b very quickly.

My mom is in her 80s and even though her condo gets cable on a very low cost package deal she rarely uses it. When I visit her for Thansgiving and want to put football on the TV, all the batteries in all the remotes are dead. When she wants entertainment she uses a tablet to watch u2b videos. Her hobbies are sewing and quilting and there's tons of content on that stuff on u2b and zero on mainstream TV.

My parents are in their mid 60's and generally DVR everything they watch since they go to bed super early and hate commercials so while they watch traditional cable they watch it in a more modern way. They used to have a bunch of channels and didn't watch 95% of them so I finally got them to downgrade to the basic package and I don’t think they missed the other channels once. My MIL is roughly the same age and watches almost no TV. She stayed with us for a few months when my kid was born during the beginning of covid and I don’t think I saw her watch a single minute of TV unless someone else was already watching first. With that being said these streaming services seem to be slowly bundling themselves together so I assume we will come full circle in the next few years.

 

[203Pat]

I think I irked him a while ago when I said something similar on here about the aggregation and the fact he didn’t credit the source as well as he should, and not long after that he stopped linking anything here (he’d occasionally grab quotes from the transcripts and link back, albeit not mentioning the site and highlighting “said [person]”). So I’m assuming he’s not a fan.

Although I’ll give him credit. He pushed back against adopting the previous terrible NBC Sports template and pushed to keep the look and format he always had to maintain the same experience for his users, so kudos to him on that. That part I always thought was cool of him.

I listen to the Around the NFL podcast and one of the guys on there (Gregg Rosenthal) used to work for PFT and while he doesn't take direct shots at Florio based on how he talks about his time there he doesn't seem to have much love for Florio. He just seems like a generally sensitive guy who does not like to be challenged in any way which makes for some thin skinned Twitter back and forths. I think part of that sensitivity is getting rid of the comment section on his site.

 

[203Pat]

Sounding like the ESPN NFLN merger/acquisition is imminent.
ESPN Deal to Acquire NFL Network is Reportedly 'All But Signed' as League Set to Invest in Family of Networks