In the case of Locast, part of the Aereo ruling was that it was a for profit service. Locast is able to do this because they are not charging the end user.
My last company was a grocery coupon app. We used to go to Apple Store's around the Bay Area (especially on iPhone Launch Day) and pay people $1 to install and try our app.
Was your service programmatically reading and/or writing the Google Sheet "database"? I've built some small sites that used JavaScript to load data from a read-only Google Sheet. It was a surprisingly productive way to get a prototype running, but I never had to handle more than a few hits a day. :)
Did your MVP using Google Sheet impact or influence the design of future versions of your backend?
The data we were using didn't change more than a few times a week. So we would generate JSON files using Python and the Google Sheets API. Since we never had to hit the Google Sheets API in any live fashion, it was basically small cached data files.
This was fine even as we approached >100K monthly uniques.
We moved more the data to our CMS as traffic grew for ease of use, but we could have used this method basically indefinitely.
AT&T heavily subsidizes HBO for TV and telecom subscribers. $5 with DTV Now or free with AT&T Unlimited plan.
They are definitely playing long game if they’re willing to lose 2.5 million Dish subscribers. HBO makes about $8 per sub from cable companies, so $20m per month. They are probably trying to push it up to their OTT price ($15).
People can still subscribe to HBO Now. Mildly annoying to get it from a separate interface or you have bad internet, but at least there are options.
"Is HBO Now good these days? Last time I used it, it was terrible."
This isn't an issue for me because I have DirecTV, etc., but if it were I would simply sign up for HBO Now, pay full price, but never use it and download from bittorrent in leech mode[1].
I will happily defend that behavior to a jury of my peers.
[1] Or whatever your client calls the mode where you don't seed the torrent.
Why in leech mode? I agree with you that you'd be morally ok by paying for HBO to consume the content, but I'd say you're morally wrong for leeching without seeding. If you want to participate in the network, you should take and give.
I remember having HBO now for a while and it seemed fine. I just got rid of it because Netflix has much more content, and the price point was a bit unjustified IMO. Does HBO Now have all of HBO content or is it just a subset?
What's terrible about it? It's the only way I've consumed HBO shows since the day it came out (and the reason why I instantly dropped my cable subscription as soon as standalone HBO became an option with HBO Now).
> Is HBO Now good these days? Last time I used it, it was terrible.
If you don't watch live shows anyway, it's (IME) better than HBO-on-Cable, even accompanied by the HBO Go app (which is far more terrible than HBO Now ever was.)
Most of the services were around 30 second delays, with the best being around 15 seconds and the worst around 60 seconds.
At this point there needs to be a technology shift if its going to get any better than about 10 seconds.
It even varies by device. iOS defaults to 10 second chunks, but you can reliably get it down to 6 seconds. You generally need to store at least 2 chunks or you'll have bad buffering.
https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker