"Select your TV provider to........unlock full episodes." Why?!

Just now I was going to watch the pilot for a SyFy channel show and was sent to a page asking me to select my TV provider. Huh? I don't have a TV provider, which is why I wanted to watch it on my laptop. So now SyFy will miss out on a viewer seeing their sponsor's commercials i.e. lost revenue.

Why do so many networks pull this stunt?

 

Contracts with the cable/satellite companies.

 

O.K. (and thanks) but I don't understand what Syfy is missing out on if I watched their production if I am not signed up with a cable or sat company......or is this a profit-driven (and selfish IMO) requirement by the sat and cable companies to carry the SyFy channel?

 

To protect the interests of cable companies and satellite TV companies, who pay huge fees for exclusivity to certain channels. I'm puzzled as to why they worry about this with commercial-supported channels like AMC, SyFy, and so on.

 

We got so fed up with AT&T and Uverse here with awful internet service (12-20mbps) and Uverse TV we dropped the TV part and saved $150 and now just use our Roku box and what we can get from it. With HuluPlus ($10 a month) that is quite a bit as we are not much TV watchers anyway. I did buy the MLB.TV package for $129 for the year to watch tons of baseball now that the Cubs were not on WGN America anymore, but now I can watch all the games and all the teams.

Watching network TV through Cable and others is a ripoff to me. I have TV antennas outside that I will hook back up if my wife wants. I am only 25 miles outside Atlanta and can pick up the networks for free if she wants. I don't really care anymore.

 

These restrictions are usually temporary, a week or two at the point where the program is brand new. It's similar to the window that movie theaters demand from film studios before a title is released on video or the window that Redbox can get to exclusively have a title before it appears on Netflix. I'm sure that SyFy would love to go directly to the consumer and bypass the middle man, but that balance of power hasn't shifted completely. At this point, the cable companies still have leverage to bring fees to the table over and above the ad rates.

Note also that content owners must pay Screen Actors' Guild residuals on streaming in the first seven days after a program airs on TV, so it's in the content owners' best interest to keep the free viewing restricted until those 7 days are up. A similar action is Hulu restricting episodes to their paying users for the first week.

 

Appreciate all the info minerwerks - thanks.

But here's the frustrating part: the pilot aired back in 2014. And I just checked Netflix and they don't have it (yet?).

I'm not signing up for cable/sat for just one show , so SyFy just lost this viewer.