Update on Cord Cutting (Cable TV) 2017 - 2020

[zinger1457]

That $65 is a decent deal... but it is a promotional rate... fine print says "After 2 years, then-current everyday prices for all services apply."

The poster stated that they offered him the promo rates when he called to cancel, but it did come with a 2 year contract requirement.

 

[JoeWras]

The curse of the unlimited DVR.

Both YTTV and Philo have "unlimited" DVRs. YTTV's is 9 month expiration, Philo is 1 month.

This is both good and bad. The good: you tag shows, and you get the whole session load that is available, including on-demand that you may not have captured in recording.

The bad: what was recently played? What is the latest? Which one have I watched? What should I watch? In Philo's case, I want to watch the DVR'd version so I can FF through commercials. Which one did I capture? Gotta sort through it all.

Let me just say this way of presenting recordings is an adjustment. Maybe I'll learn some tricks.

BTW: the trick that Philo people use is "save EVERYTHING". Any show you have the least bit of interest in, hit save. This way when you watch it, you can FF commercials, as long as you find a DVR'd version.

 

[explanade]

You want to hear about real cord cutting?

AT&T is looking to sell Direct TV a few years after paying $50 billion for it.

They will still offer streaming under their own brand. But the satellites are up there on their own. At one time, their future was that they'd migrate the DTV customers from satellite to streaming.

But they started bleeding customers and now, they apparently don't care about retaining DTV customers, which were 26 million subscribers at the time of the acquisition.

They reportedly hope to get $20 billion but even that's unlikely. So it isn't literally cord cutting, just pulling the plug on satellite, at a cost of as much as $50 billion, if they don't find a buyer for DTV.


Before they bought DTV, they spent some billions on Uverse, to use telephone copper lines to deliver faster Internet than old DSL and IP video. But unlike Verizon FiOS, they decided to go cheap, running fiber only to the neighborhoods, not all the way to the home like Verizon (called FTTP).

Imagine if they spent that $50 billion to roll out FTTP. People wouldn't give up fiber Internet and then they could run all manner of video over it.

They'd be able to monetize those fiber connections for the rest of the century.

Look at how cable TV companies are still raking in cash after they started running coax to homes 40-50 years ago.

Pennywise pound foolish.

 

[JoeWras]

You want to hear about real cord cutting?

AT&T is looking to sell Direct TV a few years after paying $50 billion for it.

They will still offer streaming under their own brand. But the satellites are up there on their own. At one time, their future was that they'd migrate the DTV customers from satellite to streaming.

But they started bleeding customers and now, they apparently don't care about retaining DTV customers, which were 26 million subscribers at the time of the acquisition.

They reportedly hope to get $20 billion but even that's unlikely. So it isn't literally cord cutting, just pulling the plug on satellite, at a cost of as much as $50 billion, if they don't find a buyer for DTV.


Before they bought DTV, they spent some billions on Uverse, to use telephone copper lines to deliver faster Internet than old DSL and IP video. But unlike Verizon FiOS, they decided to go cheap, running fiber only to the neighborhoods, not all the way to the home like Verizon (called FTTP).

Imagine if they spent that $50 billion to roll out FTTP. People wouldn't give up fiber Internet and then they could run all manner of video over it.

They'd be able to monetize those fiber connections for the rest of the century.

Look at how cable TV companies are still raking in cash after they started running coax to homes 40-50 years ago.

Pennywise pound foolish.

Bolded mine. Yes. I couldn't believe it when they bought DTV. It was pretty clear by then it was on a down slope. Then again, I shouldn't criticize too much, because my old megacorp made some similar purchases.

I was an early Uverse sub, with the cleaned up copper lines. They eventually replaced them with fiber a few years ago, and I get a clean 1G experience. I measure in the mid to high 900s when I try a speed test.

I should mention that right after the DTV purchase, when I'd call to renegotiate my Uverse, they would HARD PRESS me to move to DTV. I had to threaten an immediate cancellation if they persisted with that talk. They were relentless. And then last year, it was "What's DTV?" Just like that.

Even though I now have fiber AT&T, I realize my neighborhood is typical. We are a bit of an anomaly, and a wonderful one it is. Fiber to the house.

 

[Jimmie]

Considering you can get Dish 190 channel package for 2 TV's for ~$65/month how did you come up with a $100/month savings?

Quite easily actually. America's Top 250/HD 250/Local Channels: $130. Hopper 3/Joey Fees: $32. Taxes: $3. You are referring to new customer pricing, which goes up dramatically when special expires.

 

[zinger1457]

Quite easily actually. America's Top 250/HD 250/Local Channels: $130. Hopper 3/Joey Fees: $32. Taxes: $3. You are referring to new customer pricing, which goes up dramatically when special expires.

I have no problem with switching to a streaming service, I will look into it when my current Dish contract ends, it just seems to me many of you are really overstating the savings. I have no doubt the prices listed above was what you were paying but the Top 250 package is not comparable to Fubo, and with the promo Dish offered you could have switched to a lower Dish package with more channels than Fubo for less than half that amount.

 

[JoeWras]

but the Top 250 package is not comparable to Fubo, and with the promo Dish offered you could have switched to a lower Dish package with more channels than Fubo for less than half that amount.

Yep. More channels in those packages. But...

Here's what got me to switch, ultimately to Philo, for now at least.

Channel content has been decimated

News? Nope. Just political wings of the two parties.

Sports? Nope. Covid, and now platforms for activism.

Specific content? Nope. The weather channel shows trucks being towed out of the ditch. The learning channel shows pimple popping. The history channel shows hucksters negotiating junk. Tru TV is fake TV. Comedy Central is politics central. Music TV is ridiculousness TV. Video Hits 1 is not that.

Scripted TV? Some of the best shows are not on the networks. And the networks have gone from 39, to 24, to 13 shows per year.

And so on.

So I had to stand back and ask myself, "What do I really need to watch?" Hmmm. Turns out there is a little of something interesting scattered among the various services. So, onto the idea of streaming rotation. I'm currently on Philo, so I can get some "reality" junk, and also some favorite stuff on Science channel. Other people like the "History" channel stuff. That's cool. Later when my sports team is in action, I can switch to Hulu+live or YTTV for sports. But I don't have to do it all season.

The cable/Dish monopolies want you to stick with them and make it hard to leave. Contracts. Fussy CSRs who give you a hard sell when you want to cancel.

Instead, consider rotating through the seasons for various services, and maybe even taking a break all together to save some dough.

For premium services, rotating through Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, etc. is possible. And maybe just taking a break, perhaps when you go on vacation. No fuss, just a click from the web site.

Networks? Try an antenna. If not, maybe just subscribe during the few months of the year that your favorite show is on. It won't be many.

Need some mindless background noise? This is a common need. PlutoTV is free and full of it. You can watch Baywatch 24/7. You can watch dogs or cats running around 24/7. My favorite is watching the view from the engineer's chair on various train trips on Slow TV. Nothing but the view from a train. Awesome stuff! And I'm not joking.

Pluto also has some surprising good content we used to pay for on cable, like actual weather and actual news. Who knew?

 

[JoeWras]

I have no problem with switching to a streaming service, I will look into it when my current Dish contract ends, it just seems to me many of you are really overstating the savings.

I agree with this statement, especially if you go to YTTV or enhanced Hulu+live. Savings are only minimal.

I think savings can come if you are willing to pause it, or downshift on a seasonal basis, as mentioned in my previous post.

 

[MichaelB]

I tried Peacock, the Comcast/NBC new streaming service, last night. The middle tier service, Peacock Premium, is no charge for Comcast Xfinity subscribers. For some reason I thought the premium service was ad-free. Sadly, this is not the case. Same amount of ad time as regular commercial programming.

The catalog is difficult to search, basically it’s just scrolling through different lists of shows or films, categorized in a way that makes sense to someone. It’s not easy to assess the breadth or depth of the catalog.

We may use this again, at least the commercials (so far) seem free of politics and elections, but this is not something we pay for. Not sure yet how Comcast / NBC plans on making this a competitive offering.

Edit to add. One additional comment, the programming is accessed through the Comcast STB. This is a bit of a pain, I much prefer the Roku or Amazon device. The Comcast STB is slow and Comcast is pushing the voice control remote, which I think is gimmicky instead of useful.

 

[JoeWras]

I tried Peacock, the Comcast/NBC new streaming service, last night. The middle tier service, Peacock Premium, is no charge for Comcast Xfinity subscribers. For some reason I thought the premium service was ad-free. Sadly, this is not the case. Same amount of ad time as regular commercial programming.

The catalog is difficult to search, basically it’s just scrolling through different lists of shows or films, categorized in a way that makes sense to someone. It’s not easy to assess the breadth or depth of the catalog.

We may use this again, at least the commercials (so far) seem free of politics and elections, but this is not something we pay for. Not sure yet how Comcast / NBC plans on making this a competitive offering.

Thanks for the head's up. We have too much to view before we try it, although I suppose we'll check it out some month in the future.

Finding and sorting content is a challenge on many services.

On Philo, you can FF through ads only if you DVR'd them. The problem is finding WHAT you DVRd. They are dragging their feet on making it easy. People suspect it is to hook you into viewing a VOD instead, so you have to consume ads. The CEO acknowledges it is #1 request, but has little to say if they'll fix it.

BTW. PlutoTV is fine, but FULL of POLITICAL ads! Ads must be super cheap to place there.

 

[Midpack]

Wow, big outage this AM, almost an hour for us so far.

Cloudflare Down: PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Hulu, Discord, PayPal, CenturyLink, Electronic Arts (EA), Riot Games And More Popular Services Suffer Outages

 

[RonBoyd]

Wow, big outage this AM, almost an hour for us so far.

Cloudflare Down: PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Hulu, Discord, PayPal, CenturyLink, Electronic Arts (EA), Riot Games And More Popular Services Suffer Outages

Strange things happening on the Internet this morning. I had difficulty accessing some websites and minutes later they open without issue. Then others remain unavailable. I was unable to get Internet Radio on any device. Then after an hour my Internet Radio (the device) played without issue but my computer could not. Then a half hour later the computer had no problem. Now, four hours later, Alexa still cannot access Internet Radio stations. I still have the issue with certain URLs. Very strange.

Update: The problem with Alexa seems to have been with Tunein -- they were down. Alexa now plays Internet Radio.

 

[RunningBum]

nytimes.com is also down.

 

[pb4uski]

No issues here. DW was watching a HGTV show on Hulu earlier this morning.

OTA is working fine too.

 

[statsman]

Wow, big outage this AM, almost an hour for us so far.

Cloudflare Down: PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Hulu, Discord, PayPal, CenturyLink, Electronic Arts (EA), Riot Games And More Popular Services Suffer Outages

I wonder if that explains my inability to bring up Yahoo's home page earlier this morning.

 

[RonBoyd]

nytimes.com is also down.

I checked and found that I can access all networks/channels with ROKU, Shield and Fire TV so my access to TV is unaffected. But I, too, cannot access the New York Times.

 

[Midpack]

I checked and found that I can access all networks/channels with ROKU, Shield and Fire TV so my access to TV is unaffected. But I, too, cannot access the New York Times.

We have Hulu again, so the outage was about an hour here - longer/shorter elsewhere? And it was large but regional, we have Roku’s and lost service. Glad it’s back, we’ve been all streaming since Feb 2018 and never had an outage that long...

 

[JoeWras]

Sounds like someone did "maintenance" and it went FUBAR.

DW retired exactly because of this. Sunday morning maintenance windows were real heartburn. Many Sundays lost to recovery.

Right before she retired, they changed it to Monday morning, 2AM. This helped because when stuff broke after the change, at least the fix was during a work day.

Yes, they tested all the fixes first. But, well, stuff happens.

 

[Midpack]

Sounds like someone did "maintenance" and it went FUBAR.

DW retired exactly because of this. Sunday morning maintenance windows were real heartburn. Many Sundays lost to recovery.

Right before she retired, they changed it to Monday morning, 2AM. This helped because when stuff broke after the change, at least the fix was during a work day.

Yes, they tested all the fixes first. But, well, stuff happens.

From the DNS thread...

Graham-Cumming claimed that internet service provider CenturyLink (CTL) were responsible the outage, which took Cloudflare and its many customers down with them.

CenturyLink, formerly known as Level 3, confirmed there was an IP outage impacting Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and that all services had been restored as of 11:15 AM ET. The telecommunications company said it was unable to comment on certain customers because of customer proprietary network information.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/30/tech/internet-outage-cloudflare/index.html

 

[davidfin]

Improvement in cord cutting experience

I have been very happy with our cord cutting experience. Saved $$$ and get a wide choice. The only fly in the ointment was positioning our wireless router to provide whole house coverage. Since we use Amazon recast for remote viewing, we wanted symmetrical upload and download data rates. Ziply (formerly Frontier) FIOS offers pretty much the only alternative. However, the 5 GHz WiFi channel degrades very quickly as the signal does not propagate well over distance and through walls. The solution I chose was to run a MOCA signal through the now unused coax installed in the walls of the house. Instead of marginal wireless signal from router to family room where Amazon Cube and Recast are located, with a MOCA adapter tied to a Netgear wireless access point I’m getting 100+ mbits up and down. Super easy and makes a huge difference and much cheaper than a mesh network costing $400.

 

[stephenson]

I've used one of the inexpensive attic solutions in a couple of previous houses - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MYMVPVX - worked great - make sure to check station locations on one of the sites - I use tvfool.com, then used my iPhone to point accurately.

Last house an attic install was more problematic, so got one of these -
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07W52G8Q5 - works pretty darn good. It works best if outside of cabinets, but even at 2' above the floor, and in a cabinet pointing through the back of the cabinet, and through at least 10 walls, I still get 36 channels, including my most sought after, PBS. Most of the channels I got when it was outside the cabinet and higher are dupes, so not a big loss.

 

[RetiredAndLovingIt]

Netflix now offering a limited selection of free movies to non subscribers thru a browser. Went to check it out but was unable to access through Roku app and for some reason could not cast to my Roku TV from my Chromebook. I should be able to get it on my Firestick via the browser but not that interested at this time, will check it out later.

https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/netflix-launches-a-free-section-with-no-subscription-required/

https://www.netflix.com/watch-free

 

[pb4uski]

We are now officially cord cutters! Actually, we may have been cord-cutters a month or so ago when we gave Dish TV the boot... ironically later than day YTTV announced their $15/month increase.... and we stayed with YTTV at the $50/month rate and gave them the boot at the $65/month rate.... our service stopped about 90 minutes ago.

In the interim, I discovered that we actually are able to get OTA in our location so I put an antenna in the attic. We didn't get ABC at first but I think they were working on their towers and not at full power... but a rescan pulled up 29 channels including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS and the CW and the other common digital channels like Movies!, Circle, StartTV, MeTV, Laff, Grit, Quest, CourtTV, Bounce, et al.

I ordered a Fire TV Recast today so we can DVR content for later viewing and skip commercials.

In addition to the above we have PBS Passport and Prime Video and access to some cable channels like HGTV and Hallmark via TVEverywhere apps using our winter condo credentials. We'll see how that goes... we only have a couple months left here and may subscribe to Hulu without commercials or Philo next summer if we feel conent deprived.

The Fire TV Recast arrived today. Initial impression is that it is excellent. The functionality is similar to the Hopper that we had when we had Dish TV... all tvs in the house can access the DVR for both live TV and the DVR. Unlike Dish were all 4 tvs can access both live TV and DVR, Fire TV Recast is limited to two tvs at a time... but 90% of the time only DW and I are here so that shouldn't be an issue. Another limitation is that it can only record two shows at once, but that shouldn't be an issue for us either.

I bought this limited 2 tuner version on eBay as an interim solution to see how it would work for us. I'm hoping that they come out with a new/improved version by next summer and then I'll spring for the 4 tuner model.

The other thing that I like about this solution is that there is no input switching so only one remote. If DW wants to go from the DVR to HGTV, she can just hit the back or home button and then click on the HGTV icon for HGTV Anywhere using our Florida condo Xfinity credentials.

Total cost... ~$43 for antenna, $26 for signal amplifier, $158 for Fire TV Recast... total $227 upfront... ongoing monthly costs $0!

Though we did subscribe to Hulu for $13/month with no commercials. Blow that dough!

 

[Chuckanut]

I bought this limited 2 tuner version on eBay as an interim solution to see how it would work for us. I'm hoping that they come out with a new/improved version by next summer and then I'll spring for the 4 tuner model.

I think that would be wise. My Tivo has four tuners. And while I rarely use all four, I very often use three of the four.

 

[RetiredAndLovingIt]

Locast expanding again. For a company that's being sued by all the networks, they don't seem to be afraid to keep expanding.

We are pleased to announce we are now delivering more than 60 local TV channels to viewers in the Detroit TV market, reaching the following Michigan counties with streaming TV: Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland, Sanilac, St. Clair, Washtenaw, and Wayne .
With pending local and national elections, rising coronavirus cases and the expected kick-off of the pro football season, access to local TV is more important than ever in order to stay alert about important local news, emergency updates, and weather and storm coverage as well as entertainment programming. Sports will also play a focal point with the September start of the professional football season.
And whether you prefer English or Spanish, Locast has you covered, anywhere and anytime, with multi-language support. You can watch – for free – dozens of local TV channels, including foreign-language channels, on internet-connected devices.