Cable Cutters - Whatcha Go With?

MikE

MikE

Color Me Gone
Really want to ditch our cable provider, just looking / waiting for a suitable alternative. Verizon FIOS looks sweet, unfortunately it's not available in our state [yet].

I'd love to cherry-pick channels but I don't think anyone is offering that service in our area. Looking at the usual suspects it seems PlayStation Vue has all of the stations I need and the price is right. I would matrix this with Amazon Fire TV. Anyone familiar with either of these services / products?

Anyone using this combo? Other than cost and channel availability my main requirement is stable video with HD quality to take advantage of our HT system.
 
We cut our cable 6 years ago.
Our matrix consists of:
1. antennae in the attic = about 30 decent local channels which included 6 PBS channels which is mostly what we watch.
2. netflix = $20 mo
3. hulu = $12 mo
4. Amazon prime = $100 year
5. streaming from internet = $40 mo

So for about $82 a month, we get just about the same amount of non-watched shows as we did with cable. BUT, the new shows available on hulu-amazon-netflix are some of the best quality shows I've seen in my life.

I do miss the Discovery channel though....
 
It's great to see what features the chord cutting systems have available. Still looking for more news and documentary stuff and most are not available now.
MSNBC, ID, and a few others seem to not want to bite for now.
"Getting better all the time."
 
Mohu Sky antenna on the roof pulls in 30+ local channels. Netflix and Firestik/Kodi for the rest. Good enough for us - listen to more music now. :thumbsup:
 
Attic antenna and occasionally rent a movie on Google play. Had Netflix, but it got to where there was nothing left I wanted to see and I don't care for those original shows.

My favorites list from memory

Cozy
Decades
Me
Movies
Heroes
Antenna
This
Comet
Get
Grit

Plus the local abc, nbc, etc

That's all I need..............and this
 
Android box with the latest kodi build on it .40.00 to 65.00 and its payed for . Load all the updates you need to watch whatever you want . FREE , but you will still need a internet provider
 
Sling, for Euro Soccer and some news. Netflix as well and Amazon Prime. And a PBS membership for all that stuff.

All paid for entertainment, no pirating.

Roku and Apple TV.

More than enough for me.

Eric
 
Thanks for sharing. Researching further it seems the services I'm interested in aren't playing nice at the moment - Vue + TiVo.

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It appears that you can now stream DirecTV through your internet service (no satellite dish) for a pretty decent price. I believe its available month-to-month without a contract also. $35 a month for 100 channels up to $70 a month for all of their channels.
 
My other half apparently has Netflix, and streams whatever might be on the network web sites. I do have a pair of antennas for the local channels (and a couple from Windsor ON). I don't watch TV, so it is a non-issue for me. The only thing I really miss is being able to watch the Red Wings (especially when they make the playoffs), and Wolverines football games. If they would offer these channels a la carte for $5/month, that would be plenty for me. The last time I ever paid for TV--I was a DirecTV early adopter, and I was grandfathered into a $29.95/month package that had everything except the premium movie channels. Once my ex moved out in 2003, it no longer was being used, so I dumped it.
 
Antenna for networks, Roku stick and Roku 2 for Sling tv, Netflix and Amazon. My kids are buying Amazon Sticks and jail breaking them. If you sign up for Sling you get Roku products for a discount.

A couple of the platforms (Apple Amazon) don't get along.
 
How do you guys still get an internet connection though? Both Comcast and Verizon, when you call and want to cancel your TV service, they manage to jack the price up so you pay the same anyway.

Lee.
 
Yup, what Lee said. Here in Des Moines, mediacom essentially has a monopoly, the only other option DirectTv doesn't have good market share as it's slower DSL.

So, I've tried HARD to get a decent straight-up internet connection with no TV, but there's only one and it's the slowest. So you end up paying for "basic cable TV" anyway which is amazingly horrible with both content and signal.

And there has NEVER been a data cap - until now. Mediacom instituted (how do they do that anyway, don't we have a "contract"?) data caps and so now you have to pay more for a high enough data cap to watch all that internet TV at 1080 resolution.

It's a damn scam, free market my azz. What free market?

EDIT: Side note, I actually sent a notice to my boss that I wouldn't be uploading\downloading gigs and gigs worth of databases from home anymore - I was bumping up against the data cap. I'm sure the company appreciates all that free data transfer service - not.
 
botrytis said:
240 + 144 + 100 + 480 = Still an huge amount of money.
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You're right... If I wore the only pair of pants in the family, we would only have the free antenna... But for $480 a year I get a preoccupied wife, while I'm in the garage with soldering iron in hand... or sitting in front of some speakers. $480 is only a tiny percentage of what I pay for marital "bliss". Maybe the key to a long-lasting marriage is distraction. ;)
 
leesonic said:
How do you guys still get an internet connection though? Both Comcast and Verizon, when you call and want to cancel your TV service, they manage to jack the price up so you pay the same anyway.

Lee.
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Where I live I have RCN cable and when I canceled the cable I kept internet for $50 or so.

Eric
 
leesonic said:
How do you guys still get an internet connection though? Both Comcast and Verizon, when you call and want to cancel your TV service, they manage to jack the price up so you pay the same anyway.
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Ours offers Internet-only pricing, and the cheapest cable TV option adds $20/month. Plus, once your term is up and you want to renegotiate, you go through the retention department and cut your deal there.

When I needed to dump AT&T three years ago (their ADSL can't keep up with cable speeds), I went through the ineptitude that was Comcast to attempt to get Xfinity Internet at the house. Five weeks later and those brain trusts still could not figure out that all they needed to do to get my service active was roll a truck out to the house to install a drop (from the utility pole to the house). That's it!! It was numerous long calls re-explaining the entire scenario, because their departments (located in different countries :rolleyes: ) do not communicate between themselves.

I went on WOW's site just to shop prices. I stuck in my address. Next day around noon on a Saturday, a WOW salesman strolls up the driveway, as I was working in the backyard. Told him the Cliff Notes version of my saga. I got the same price, a slightly faster Internet speed, and a tech came out first thing Monday morning and had me connected. And here I remain three years later, same monthly price but twice the speed I signed up for.

The real irony was going back to Comcast's site, and coming across a letter from one of their VPs who was in charge of "customer experience," and wanting to hear from us. He got the whole lengthy play-by-play, including the name of the competitor I went with. :D Dense as Comcast is, of course I get a reply back from one of his assistants, asking what they can do to "correct the situation." Apparently reading comprehension is low in their skill set.
 
Wildcat said:
Ours offers Internet-only pricing, and the cheapest cable TV option adds $20/month. Plus, once your term is up and you want to renegotiate, you go through the retention department and cut your deal there.

When I needed to dump AT&T three years ago (their ADSL can't keep up with cable speeds), I went through the ineptitude that was Comcast to attempt to get Xfinity Internet at the house. Five weeks later and those brain trusts still could not figure out that all they needed to do to get my service active was roll a truck out to the house to install a drop (from the utility pole to the house). That's it!! It was numerous long calls re-explaining the entire scenario, because their departments (located in different countries :rolleyes: ) do not communicate between themselves.
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When a car hit the utility pole across the street, it left all the phone and data cables lying on the ground (the electricity is on the pole on the same side of the road). I called Comcast, and told them they needed a bucket truck to get me working again. I could hear the open mouth breathing at the other end of the phone. Sure enough, when they dude showed up to get me working again, he looked at the wires hanging off the side of my building, and called for backup.

What makes me sad about cable TV, it was originally invented so you didn't have to watch commercials. You pay a premium = commercial free. Now they've got it set up so you can't even fast forward through the commercials. No wonder I haven't watched TV at all this year (excluding DVDs).

Lee.
 
That does not surprise me--I could tell from the lack of communication between departments that if you tell customer service there is a problem, then the tech support department only gets the notice that there is a problem. And sales does not communicate with either of those, as I'm sure the rolling techs on the road are in their own separate loop, as is billing. I could tell after a couple of calls that they had a complete disconnect between departments.

I will have to admit that with a couple of other companies I have had to call, they may not have had my entire story, but they knew enough of the details to at least be off and running. With Comcast, it is like having to tell your entire story to department A, so they can simply transfer you to department B, who in turn then has to send instructions to department C.

I had major issues with their service when I lived across town. I had first signed up with MediaOne, who was then purchased by Comcast. Then, Comcast decided we should be on their own "@Home" network, and that was a total disaster. We went weeks with a nearly dead connection, and they offered neither help nor compensation to anyone who complained. That took months to get sorted; hell, it took them weeks to acknowledge publicly that their failed proxy server system was the root cause, and completely unusable. It finally got back to a more normal state. But even there, I would lose service constantly. Turns out their DNS servers were crap. I switched to Genuity's DNS servers and that ended the daily issues, but we would still lose service for an hour or so at a time, with no explanation, about once a week. And maybe once a month, an outage that would last for a few hours.

So yeah, I should have known better than to attempt to trust them to run a simple wire from the pole to the house. :D
 
It has been around 7 years now.
Antenna on the side of the house for local (60 mile away) stations. A PC with 4 tuners to record up to 4 HD shows at a time. It can playback a recorded show while recording 4 if needed. Skip forward button jumps 30 seconds at a time for quickly bypassing commercials. Plus broadcast HD looks better than compressed cable or satellite HD.
The PC also works well for streaming any shows that are available without login online and it is a full time music server.

Roku for streaming Netflix and purchased shows on Amazon in HD. Most shows have seasons available on Amazon for between $10 and $30 so even purchasing the handful of shows each year I want that Netflix doesn't have doesn't come close to what the cable bill would be. Netflix seems to have at least 1 or 2 shows at a time that we like so every time we think we've run out we discover something new.
Netflix discs add movies to the list and fluctuate from 1-3 disks at a time depending on what time of year it is.

I will sometimes try to watch live TV; however I rarely make it through 2 commercial breaks before giving up. But we gave up on commercials over two decades ago; first with multiple VCRs and then with a RePlay TV DVR when they first came out. How do people sit through commercials?

I tried to stay with cable but they fought me every step of the way. When they first scrambled all the channels so we couldn't record them on the PC I called about getting a HD DVR with the basic cable and was told 'sure'. Took off work early and stood in line for 30 minutes and was told "nope". I was told online that I could pick up a cable card locally and install it myself. Another early leave from work and 30 minutes in line to be told "nope".

I added up what we were already paying every month for lousy TV over the last decade and felt sick.

Then I looked at what we'd be paying to get HD with HD DVR every month and there was no way I was going to do that.
 
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