Update on Cord Cutting (Cable TV) 2017 - 2020

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mpeirce said:
I do pay a month add on to get the Tablo automatic commercial skipping service. Doesn't work on live shows that you are buffering (like the 10 O'Clock news),
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I am always curious about this issue (and many say this). Do you expect a live show to skip past the commercial interruptions? If so, wouldn't you, then, finish watching the program before it was broadcast? Or am I missing something?
 
RonBoyd said:
I am always curious about this issue (and many say this). Do you expect a live show to skip past the commercial interruptions? If so, wouldn't you, then, finish watching the program before it was broadcast? Or am I missing something?
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Sometimes you get in a habit of starting a program late so you can skip commercials. If you do it right, you see the whole program and end at the correct live end time (or near it) and skip commercials. This way you can be in tune with your friends on social media and discuss the content right away. :)
 
mpeirce said:
Exactly.

For example, we start dinner at about 6:10. We put on the 6 O'Clock local news. We manually skip the commercials.
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I think I'd rather watch the commercials and skip past the "news".[emoji848]
 
JoeWras said:
Sometimes you get in a habit of starting a program late so you can skip commercials. If you do it right, you see the whole program and end at the correct live end time (or near it) and skip commercials. This way you can be in tune with your friends on social media and discuss the content right away. :)
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Got it. Starting a program late is not "live," it is a recording. Therefore, commercial skipping is possible... as it is in any recording.
 
pb4uski said:
Dunno why... anyway, how would I know? Just a single $40 antenna from Walmart.




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If you point it at the transmitting antenna, the signal is direct, if you point in elsewhere for best reception, it is probably a reflected signal.
 
It is pointing at the antenna farm +/- a couple degrees... it does seem quite sensitive though. In the past, if I move the tip of the antenna a couple inches one way or the other I get pixelation and/or lose channels. I believe that all of the broadcasting towers are near each other.

If I go to Settings/LiveTV/Manage Channels/Fire TV Recast it reports that the signal strength from every channel is "Good"... but at the same time I still get some pixelation occasionally, especially if it is raining hard.

I'm expecting what I hope is a better antenna to be delivered today.

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I've found that my old Leaf Mohu antenna works better than a GE Pro antenna I put up in my attic last year. It's wasn't a totally fair comparison. I used the same TV, but had a much longer coax cable run to the attic antenna. I also couldn't play with pointing the attic antenna as well either. When I saw just how many stations I could pull in clearly with the Leaf it just wasn't worth trying for anything better. I'm picking up from 3 different cities. 2 are just a few degrees off from each other, ESE 25 and 78 miles away, but the 3rd is due north about 30 miles away with mountains in the way. antennaweb.org doesn't even show it for me as a possibility, even with the "antenna 30 ft in the air" box checked.

Obviously all this means is that I'm getting multiple CBS, PBS, MeTV, etc, stations, but every once in awhile one station will be carrying a local sports game I want to see, or won't be when I want to watch a show another has preempted for the game, so it's a little helpful to have a choice.

Even odder, I'm designated to be in the area of stations from a pair of cities to the south, so with Dish and then YouTubeTV I get those for locals instead of the ones I get OTA. I'm more blocked by mountains to the south, but they are still 30 and 50 miles away. The one that covers where I am best for news and weather is one I get OTA.
 
How to make $20B in satellite TV?

A takeoff of an old winery joke. In this case, how do you make $20B in the satellite TV business? Answer - start with $50B. Looks like that’s the plan with AT&T according to this news item.
AT&T is reportedly moving ahead with its plan to sell DirecTV despite receiving bids that value the satellite division at less than one-third of the price AT&T paid for it.

AT&T bought DirecTV for $49 billion in 2015 and has lost seven million TV subscribers in the last two years. In late August, news broke that AT&T is trying to sell DirecTV to private-equity investors and that a deal could come in at less than $20 billion.
./.
Opening bids from a coterie of buyout firms came in at around 3.5 times DirecTV's roughly $4.5 billion of EBITDA, implying a valuation at around $15.75 billion, according to a source close to the process," the Post article said. Despite the low first-round bids, AT&T "last week invited a handful of suitors into the second round of an auction of the struggling satellite-TV broadcaster," the Post wrote.
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More here https://arstechnica.com/information...ld-be-a-fire-sale-as-company-weighs-low-bids/
 
MichaelB said:
A takeoff of an old winery joke. In this case, how do you make $20B in the satellite TV business? Answer - start with $50B. Looks like that’s the plan with AT&T according to this news item.

More here https://arstechnica.com/information...ld-be-a-fire-sale-as-company-weighs-low-bids/
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WHAT were the C-suiters at AT&T thinking? I mean, seriously, in 2015 the writing was clearly on the wall for personal satellite delivered TV. OTT media (streaming) was already gaining steam. The issues of satellite were well known (rain fade, maintenance, unacceptable site profiles, etc.) Broadband service limited by a number of factors, primarily the uplink. 5G and continuous improvement in all forms wireless was happening already.

Maybe the C-suit thought they could expand the customer base and eventually transfer them to 5G or something?

That's not the way it played out for me. I was a U-verse customer, and right after they bought DTV, they tried to *convert* me to DTV. Are you serious? When calling to negotiate my U-verse rate, they at first would only offer DTV deals. I had to go nuclear and threaten an all-out cancellation before negotiating U-verse. Just madness.
 
Anyone with a casual interest knew when AT&T bought DirecTV that satellite and cable TV weren’t growth businesses. Some mature industries have very old school board members who’re surprisingly change averse and/or technically ignorant. I’ll bet you can all remember board and C-level peeps like that - I sure can. When I retired some were till fumbling with email, didn’t grasp online search, and couldn’t do much with a PC for cripes sake. I played golf yesterday with a couple guys said their RoloDex wasn’t worth as much these day. RoloDex - really? :crazy: Who says dinosaurs aren’t still roaming the earth (in offices)...
 
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What's idiotic is that they've stopped building out fiber to the home (FTTH) connections citing capital costs.

How many homes could they have wired up for $50 billion?

And once people get fiber they're not going to drop the service unless they are bankrupt.
 
Midpack said:
Anyone with a casual interest knew when AT&T bought DirecTV that satellite and cable TV weren’t growth businesses. Some mature industries have very old school board members who’re surprisingly change averse and/or technically ignorant. I’ll bet you can all remember board and C-level peeps like that - I sure can. When I retired some were till fumbling with email, didn’t grasp online search, and couldn’t do much with a PC for cripes sake. I played golf yesterday with a couple guys said their RoloDex wasn’t worth as much these day. RoloDex - really? :crazy: Who says dinosaurs aren’t still roaming the earth (in offices)...
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In 2015, cord cutting was already a thing.

DirecTV let them get like 20-25 million subscribers but they had challenges keeping them, since they didn't have an Internet product.

AT&T thought that they would offer their subpar Uverse Internet along with DirecTV but long-term, DirecTV couldn't keep launching satellites to support things like 4K

So they were going to migrate towards streaming and DirecTV Now was cheap in the first year but then they started raising prices and bleeding customers.

They still are not competitive in home broadband. They installed FTTH in a small percentage of homes in their markets and reneged on promises to do more when their acquisition was approved by the feds.

Then they got drawn to the next shiny thing, which was buying Time-Warner, which includes HBO.

Now they're trying to push HBO Max but they're doing worse than the competition as far as things like 4K HDR content. That means they're designed to lose out to Disney +, fall further behind Netflix, etc.
 
explanade said:
What's idiotic is that they've stopped building out fiber to the home (FTTH) connections citing capital costs.

How many homes could they have wired up for $50 billion?

And once people get fiber they're not going to drop the service unless they are bankrupt.
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We have AT&T fiber at our house.

The good news is it's competitive after discounts - we have 1000 mbps for $50/month. Spectrum is less, so discounts have been easy to come by.

The bad news is we don't get anywhere near 1000 mbps no matter what time of day. Just did a speed test and got 710 down/740 up - and that's about as high as I've ever seen. On WiFi we get less than 100 mbps up/down - which is perfectly adequate for our needs. We'd complain if we needed anything like that speed, but we don't, and we only took 1000 mbps because it was the cheapest when our 1 year discount on AT&T 300 mbps ran out.

The "free" router/gateway AT&T provides is absolute junk - they should be ashamed of themselves, I use my own NetGear router with the gateway router disabled.
 
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Interesting. We have DSL (at 50mbps) because that is our only choice. We live in a major city (Denver) and was offered an upgrade to 150mbps at a reduction to what I am currently paying.

The technician came out to install the service. He discovered that the access to our house -- and several hundred others on the same circuit -- cannot be upgraded because the infrastructure is already at max capacity. To update the "wiring" (it is over 30 years old) would require laying snake-like over several miles of underground cable (assumedly fiber) in a well-established urban area. I am not holding my breath. We do live in interesting times.

FWIW, I am completely satisfied with the 50mbps... for now.
 
Midpack said:
We have AT&T fiber at our house.
.
.
.
The bad news is we don't get anywhere near 1000 mbps no matter what time of day. Just did a speed test and got 710 down/740 up - and that's about as high as I've ever seen.
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Interesting. I just did a speed test, ~4:40pm here, and I'm seeing 910 Mbps download right now on AT&T fiber. Late at night, it will get into the 930s. I've seen reported limits on various 1GB service to be around 940 Mbps, so I think we're close to maximum.
 
Dreamer said:
I paused YTTV for 2 months, but will probably stop it. I signed up yesterday for a free month of CBS All Access. I like reality based tv shows and other programs, such as 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, Sunday Morning and some of the comedy shows we watch are all on CBS. It is normally $5.99 per month with commercials. If we like it, we will pay for the annual amount, which is $4.99 per month. We will keep Amazon Prime, which we have had for years and Netflix. Plenty of tv for me. It looks like YTTV rate increase, will end up being cheaper for us.
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This did not work out all that well for us. We missed some shows on other stations. My DH asked me if we got Fox, because he was interested in watching the Steeler game today.

I immediately signed us up for Hulu Live TV and we watched the game. It is nice having access to all the different channels again.

I hope that we like Hulu Live TV, because if we don't, then I will probably go back to YouTube Live TV. Right now, with staying home due to the pandemic, TV and reading are our main sources of entertainment.
 
Midpack said:
We have AT&T fiber at our house.

The good news is it's competitive after discounts - we have 1000 mbps for $50/month. Spectrum is less, so discounts have been easy to come by.

The bad news is we don't get anywhere near 1000 mbps no matter what time of day. Just did a speed test and got 710 down/740 up - and that's about as high as I've ever seen. On WiFi we get less than 100 mbps up/down - which is perfectly adequate for our needs. We'd complain if we needed anything like that speed, but we don't, and we only took 1000 mbps because it was the cheapest when our 1 year discount on AT&T 300 mbps ran out.

The "free" router/gateway AT&T provides is absolute junk - they should be ashamed of themselves, I use my own NetGear router with the gateway router disabled.
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I just upgraded our FiOS service from 50/50 to 1000/1000. I've been running lots of speed tests last few days. The specs on our mesh system say that max data rate on 2.4 GHz is 300Mbps; and 867 Mbps on the 5GHz side. Most mobile devices are seeing ~100/100, with some of the newer laptops getting roughly twice that, but not consistently. It's about the same using the new router that FiOS provided but the coverage is horrible compared to our mesh network.

Oddly, my hardwired desktop is getting 250/750 very consistently. I'm not liking the download side. It's a pretty old PC with an on-board NIC of unknown specs. I ordered a standalone gigabit network card on Amazon, which hasn't arrived yet. Hopefully that helps. Our Fire TV Cube is also hardwired and it's only getting 100/100, but that's probably a device constraint.
 
Cobra9777 said:
...Oddly, my hardwired desktop is getting 250/750 very consistently. I'm not liking the download side. It's a pretty old PC with an on-board NIC of unknown specs. I ordered a standalone gigabit network card on Amazon, which hasn't arrived yet. Hopefully that helps...
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Quick update. I installed the new gigabit NIC today on my ancient desktop. I'm now getting 600/750 pretty consistently on FiOS gigabit service.

DS was here yesterday. He has a brand new MS Surface. With Cat6 to the router, he was getting ~800/950. And that was using a cheap USB-to-ethernet adapter since his laptop doesn't have an ethernet port.

Most WiFi devices still get less than 100/100 most of the time.
 
Chromecast with Google TV first thoughts

So I've been living with my Chromecast with Google TV (CCwGT) for about a week now.

Overall, I like it.

I figured I couldn't go wrong by getting in on the Netflix bundle. The end result was the device cost about $13 with tax. The actual process of getting my Netflix credit of $77 was completely painless and worked very well, once I activated my device.

Getting my device working wasn't painless. For whatever reason, it had a bunch of issues with my WiFi connectivity on the initial install. I had to reboot the device a few times during the process to get it fully configured and operational. Once operational, the network has been solid. Weird. There are also some deep sound settings I had to change to get HBOMax (only HBOMax, strange) to work with my ancient plasma TV. I got some tips via Reddit and donated a few tips back. Overall people are happy, with a few having to manipulate sound or display issues like me.

On most apps, I'm liking the Android TV UI a little better than the Roku UI. Overall though, it doesn't matter too much. They both work. My Roku Premier is about the same speed as CCwGT too.

The key is CCwGT supports HBOMax. Roku doesn't since they are at war with AT&T. What a shame. Other app support is good, although I hear that Frndly isn't on CCwGT yet. Apparently they are just slow on developing the app. Tablo, Philo, Hulu, Netflix, Sling, Fubo, Pluto are all there. No problems.

The remote is small. I prefer the Roku remote and chunkier feel. The "kids" on Reddit seem to love it. It's nice to be pre-arthritis, I guess. CCwGT's remote does not have FF, Play, or RW buttons. Doesn't matter. I rarely use them on Roku. You just use the main set of buttons for this, as you can on Roku too. CCwGT's remote has an input button which is very handy to switch to OTA and back when necessary. A nice cord-cutter feature.

The UI has an integrated home screen showing you suggested content from various services you have. It also throws in stuff it would like you to watch, which may cost you money. Ah-ha, a kickback. People in general love this. I could care less. It does have a google assistant voice feature which works decently.

So that's it for now. I was somewhat reluctant to feed the Alphabet machine, but damn it Roku, if only you would fix your feuds already!
 
Breaking news Hulu has just announced that as of tomorrow they have dropped all Fox Regional Networks..as always no reduction in price to go with that :mad:
 
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