DIRECTV Now to drop browser support

[Scott Greczkowski]

At the end of June DIRECTV Now is planning on dropping support for all browsers except for Google Chrome..

I am told that a major reason for this is because of the program Playon which can record streams from DIRECTV Now.

So if you want to keep watching on your PC after the end of june you will need to use Google Chrome.

 

[Zookster]

That seems like a pretty extreme, and petty, approach to prevent what I'm sure is a very small percentage of DirecTV Now users from recording programs. PlayOn is great when you can get it to work as advertised, but it is not the most user friendly means of recording off the internet. At the same time, the recordings are tagged with your user ID info, so it would be almost impossible to sell or distribute the content without anyone knowing the source of the copyright violation. I had such a terrible experience with PlayOn recording content freely available on the internet, I resorted to watching on demand or waiting until the show's new season was added to Netflix/Prime.

 

[stmcld]

That seems like a pretty extreme, and petty, approach to prevent what I'm sure is a very small percentage of DirecTV Now users from recording programs. PlayOn is great when you can get it to work as advertised, but it is not the most user friendly means of recording off the internet. At the same time, the recordings are tagged with your user ID info, so it would be almost impossible to sell or distribute the content without anyone knowing the source of the copyright violation. I had such a terrible experience with PlayOn recording content freely available on the internet, I resorted to watching on demand or waiting until the show's new season was added to Netflix/Prime.

Short sighted decision by DirecTV IMO.

 

[primestar31]

Playon records via an internal browser. It also has constant updates all the time for reasons such as this. If they think this will stop Playon from recording their streams, I seriously doubt that outcome.

 

[Radioguy41]

I have never understood why a company will go out of it's way to shoot itself in the foot but then it is DirecTV. While Chrome can exhibit a huge share of the pie, that is very misleading in that those numbers are skewed by all the mobile devices running Android and the assumption that those Android users haven't replaced Chrome with something better (I have). That's the same mistaken assumption that MS has made for years, thinking installations is the same as users. Just because it's installed on a device doesn't automatically mean the people actually use it. When it comes to desktops Chrome is in, or close to, the basement.

 

[Claude Greiner]

That seems like a pretty extreme, and petty, approach to prevent what I'm sure is a very small percentage of DirecTV Now users from recording programs. PlayOn is great when you can get it to work as advertised, but it is not the most user friendly means of recording off the internet. At the same time, the recordings are tagged with your user ID info, so it would be almost impossible to sell or distribute the content without anyone knowing the source of the copyright violation. I had such a terrible experience with PlayOn recording content freely available on the internet, I resorted to watching on demand or waiting until the show's new season was added to Netflix/Prime.

There are always prepaid cards with fake accounts.

But still dumb