What the Heck is Rabbit TV?

With early growth having outpaced that of Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and other well known companies, you’d think that Rabbit TV would be a household name. The service is used by over 3.5 million users, and is on the shelves of over 35,000 major retailers nation wide, including Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Sears, Radio Shack, Bed Bath and Beyond, and more. Yet surprisingly, one of the questions I get most often, wherever I go, is this: “What is Rabbit TV?” Even among those who don’t ask, confusion abounds. Some see our product as a Netflix clone, while others even believed that we beam some sort of TV signal to their computers via the USB device sold in stores. With so many questions, you might think that Rabbit TV is a complicated product, but in reality it is quite simple and makes a lot of sense when it’s explained. So I’ve decided to break it down and explain it in two parts, with this first one directed towards consumers.

Part of the reason for the confusion is the sheer multitude of features that Rabbit TV Plus offers. In addition to a large video-on-demand library featuring over 250,000 TV shows and 100,000+ movies, we’ve got several features that you just won’t find anywhere else. First we have over 275 live channels, which deliver constant programming 24/7, just like the channels on cable TV. Rabbit TV Plus also offers a ton of live concerts and as-it-happens coverage of other well known events. While video gets all the attention, Rabbit TV Plus is also home a wide variety of music, including a massive library of music video channels from all genres and years, plus over live streaming 50,000 radio stations that you can’t even get with satellite radio. What’s really unique about Rabbit TV Plus is that it brings paid content into the fold. With Netflix and other monthly subscription libraries, you pay for access to a collection of content, but if you want something outside of that, you have to get it elsewhere.

Rabbit TV Plus is an electronic media guide that works on all your personal internet-connected devices: PCs, tablets, smartphones, and more. Think of it like the TV guide you used to get in the mail, reimagined for the 21st century. The TV Guide helped people find when and where they could watch their favorite shows among dozens or hundreds of channels, but there’s more content on the internet than there’s ever been on television, spread across thousands of sources. Rabbit TV Plus isn’t a closed content library like Netflix or Hulu, it’s a tool to help users find literally anything they want to watch, from any source, free or paid. While the service costs just $10 a year, it has the potential to save users thousands, since it makes it possible to get everything you’d get with expensive cable TV and more for much much less.

What really sets Rabbit TV Plus apart and makes it possible for us to offer everything, is that we include pay-per-view and subscription based offerings. If you want to watch a show that isn’t available online for free, we let you know if you can watch it with another subscription service that you may already have like Netflix or Hulu Plus, or if you can rent or purchase the show from Amazon, Vudu, iTunes, or other online content sellers with price comparisons. We also include access to premium pay channels, many major sports leagues such as the NBA, NFL, MLB, HHL, WWE, etc, and even television stations from overseas through services like Guao TV and KyLin TV. As more cable TV networks begin to offer streaming services of their own, we’re excited to be able to add those to our lineup as well.

While we see the addition of premium content as a great advantage, many customers aren’t accustomed to paying for content on a per-show or per-channel basis. It definitely takes some getting used to, and at first can start to feel like being nickled and dimed, especially for long-time cable subscribers who are used to paying one bill for everything. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that even though they may be paying more often, they’re saving money. With the average cable bill topping $86 a month you can pay for multiple subscription video-on-demand services and buy or rent dozens of shows à la carte, and still pay less than you would with cable.

One way to look at Rabbit TV Plus, is as the cable company of the future. Once upon a time, “television” was free, with a limited number of channels transmitted over the air and picked up with an antenna. Cable TV came along and served as an aggregator for that very same content and more, bringing local broadcast stations and eventually hundreds more niche networks like HGTV, ESPN, the Food Network, and more, together in one place. The flip of a channel replaced the adjustment of an antenna, and gave cable customers access to far more content than they’d otherwise have. But cable has struggled to keep up with the digital revolution, having stayed largely the same despite the advent of powerful mobile communications and computing devices. While the technology has changed little, the price has changed a lot, reaching triple digits for many customers. Rabbit TV Plus reimagines the same concept for the 21st century. We give you everything that cable has and more, in a single user interface that’s available on all of your devices, and at a far more reasonable price.

Many of our critics have been quick to point out that all of our content comes from other sources, which users can go to themselves, bypassing Rabbit TV Plus all together. Some have taken issue with paying for a service which provides content that is already available for free elsewhere. But that’s the whole point of the service, which updates over 2.5 million sources daily, finding and organizing content that you may not otherwise have ever guessed would be available online to watch. This criticism quickly opened our eyes to the need to better explain our product, in particular an article by Ted Kritsonis of Digital Trends who gave us a hard review originally, which inspired us to make some changes with the new Rabbit TV Plus which have benefited our growth. However, in his most recent review of the revamped product, there were some comments that were not accurate. Our live channels are not powered by FilmOn exclusively. Just a few of over 275 channels come from FilmOn while many more are curated by FreeCast staff, and other major channels like Bloomberg, Animal Planet, and CBS News come from the networks themselves. Rabbit TV is also not limited to showing only what is available online for free. Premium and pay-per-view content is also included within the guide, with most offering multiple sources from which to purchase or rent a given TV show episode or movie, displaying the price from each for comparison.

Many of the people who purchased Rabbit TV Plus believed that they were subscribing to a Netflix-style video-on-demand library. They didn’t understand that we were selling not the content itself, but the convenience. Yes, you could find anything on Rabbit TV Plus elsewhere, but to do so often means jumping between multiple sites and apps, browsing and searching each one. Rabbit TV Plus puts everything into a one-stop-shop where content is easy to find regardless of its source, which over the course of a year adds up to hours of time saved and selections being brought to those consumers attention that they would not have known about otherwise. It’s both a tremendous convenience, and a powerful content discovery tool, all for the price of a couple of cups of coffee. Just like the TV Guide told you what was going to be on TV for over 50 years, Rabbit TV Plus tells you what is on the web to watch today, including shows and movies from the past 50 years.