Why Does DirecTV Now Suck?

Hello, my name is Michael, and I’m a cordcutter. Years of cable rate increases, additional hardware requirements, and garbage network selection recently drove me to canceling my cable subscription. I already have a home theater PC and Chromecast hooked up in my living room, so the addition of a streaming service was pretty straightforward. My HTPC has a tuner card installed, which lets me use an antenna for broadcast stations (FOOTBALL), and I use Kodi along with a NAS for media. I know that might sound like a lot of complexity to some folks, but it’s not bad if you’re willing to just put a few hours into it, and the flexibility is fantastic. When I first moved to streaming TV, I used Sling. Sling was far from bad. What got me to jump was the initial DirecTV offer of their penultimate streaming package for $35/month. I’ve been using it a while now, and given that time, I feel obligated to bitch about some stuff. Like I do.

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Newspapers’ User Experience Failure

For quite a while now, newspapers have been fighting upstream against other news outlets, blogs, and content sources in a battle for readership. Hell, even things like Twitter can be better and faster for getting eyeballs on an issue than mainstream sites. They’ve had many run of the mill issues, like simply lacking aesthetically pleasing designs with good information architecture that invite users in. But then there have been more specific problems like paywalls, popover ads, and interstitials which have been subject of much derision (and savvy users have been capable of working around them since nearly day one). Read More