I really want to cut the cable cord but have been hesitant because I wasn’t sure how to go about it and I didn’t want to have to get an antenna for ABC, NBC, CBS. We’re going to be getting a new TV shortly. We have a smart TV but it was considered smart in 2012. I’ve been looking at You Tube TV and see that their channel lineup includes all of our cable stations, regular network stations and a DVR. We’re paying over $200/month for cable. You Tube is around $74/month. Does anyone know if you have multiple TVs in the house, do you have to pay for each TV? Does anyone here have You Tube TV? Is there something else better?
I have Youtube TV. Just the one subscription, flat rate, and use it on all three of my TVs in the house and occasionally mobile devices. Never had a problem with probably three different copes of the application running. I imagine there’s some upper limit, but my wife and I have never hit it with normal day-to-day usage.
YouTubeTV is one of the better services. It has an online DVR that’s pretty good. The good thing about streaming TV packages is that you can switch any time you like. You typically just pay month-to-month. If you don’t like YouTubeTV, you can easily switch to something else.
I wouldn’t recommend using your 2012 TV for streaming. Although it can do streaming, it will likely have inferior hardware and the streaming experience will have lots of hangs, crashes, and slowdowns. If you use it once in a while it’s probably okay, but not for your main TV viewing. Your new TV should be better. What you can do if your TV isn’t good at streaming is get an external streaming device like Roku and plug that into the TV. The external device will work fine with your 2012 TV.
Minor supplement based on my M and FiL’s experience. A problem with a lot of SmartTVs is that the brand or model in question can go out of support relatively rapidly, which makes it difficult or impossible to update the smart apps as the streaming providers change and update their services. Sure the same thing can happen to old streaming devices, but those tend to be less expensive to replace than an entire TV, or god forbid, several TVs.
Yeah, good point. One thing you can do is make sure the streaming platform in your TV is one of the major ones, which are: Roku, FireTV, or GoogleTV. Some TV’s cheap out on the streaming platform and use an oddball one which doesn’t have as much app support or may lose support all together.
Interesting info about YouTube TV; I will have to look into that. But even though they may have national version of network stations, I don’t think they would have your local affiliates, would they? So you wouldn’t have local news, I wouldn’t think.
Adding an antenna isn’t that big of a hassle, especially if you’re relatively close to the broadcast stations. We were fairly far away, so I put a pretty high-powered antenna in the attic; then I connected all the cables from the house TVs from before we cut our cable to it, using a signal booster to help improve the picture that was split between several TVs.
Yep, what we use is Firesticks on our TVs, which work great and have a nice interface when they are working, but I find that they seem to burn out and die like Bic lighters after a certain amount of time. I’ve replaced several Firesticks that bricked out on me. Rokus may be more reliable, I don’t know.
Entirely anecdotal of course, but I find that the Roku systems are more reliable for me. BUT - I use the full sized units historically, and I’ve seen and experienced that all of the stick options (Fire or Roku) seem to be more prone to failure, perhaps due to small size and lack of airflow. They certainly seem to run a LOT hotter than the full sized options.
They do have local affiliates, based on your geographic location.
QFT. We use a low-power cheapie digital antenna mounted in my garage and facing toward the city - we get every local station for free that way. Also, I connected the digital antenna to the house’s coax network, the one that used to be used for actual cable back in the day - now every one of those coax outlets can connect to the antenna.
I have YouTube TV and it gets local (Sacramento) newscasts. It comes up automatically on my “smart” TV. For the two older non-smart TVs, I bought Google Chromecast with Google TV units that were about $40 apiece and have worked very well.
For YoutubeTV local channels, you put in your zipcode and it automatically populates your local channels into the line-up. I guess you could put in a different zip code and it would populate with those local channels. I don’t know that for sure…maybe I’ll try it.
What is it that you want to watch on ABC, NBC, and CBS? If it’s just prime time programming, those shows are pretty much all available to watch on Hulu/Peacock/Paramount+, typically a day after they air on TV. And I think CBS still makes some of their programming available for free on their website. You only really need access to your local affiliates to watch the local news and maybe sports.
Why not? How far away are you from the local stations that carry those stations? A decent but cheap antenna will bring in a clear, crisp and uncompressed signal that might be better than anything you will get over the internet.
[Moderating]
There’s a little bit of factual in these questions, but this seems to be mostly seeking advice and experiences, so IMHO is a better fit. Moving.
If you use an antenna, one disadvantage is that you could only watch it live unless you had some sort of DVR that has antenna support. There are many such DVRs out there, but unless you have one lying around (like an old Tivo), you’d have to get a separate DVR to record the antenna TV shows. It might be worth hooking up an antenna since it’s basically free, but it may still be worth getting the networks from streaming TV since you could use their DVR.
I never really compared the two that closely but I have DirecTV Stream which is similar to YouTubeTV. It pulls in all the local affiliates as well as the local sports cable affiliate (Bally Sports North) in my area. One monthly subscription and I run it on two tvs, an ipad, and an iphone. If I travel it pulls in the local affiliates of whatever city I’m in.
The interface is the same as having DirectTV via a dish (same channel guide) and has unlimited DVR space. On my TVs I run it through a ROKU device. They run about $30? and do not require a monthly fee.
Piggybacking on this question. I know it’s a first world problem, but I have two residences, spending 4 to 8 weeks at a time in each. My current provider has something called “TV Anywhere” and I can get most of my current channels at both places, but I don’t have access to my DVR, as it’s not cloud based.
Does anyone know if the YouTube TV is accessible from anywhere, or is it limited to one location?
It’s accessible from anywhere and I often catch up shows on vacation. It’s entirely cloud based.
Thanks, that makes a decision I’ve been putting off easy.
This is a very basic set of questions, because I really don’t understand a lot about this.
I have cable, with TV (using what I call cable boxes) and telephone (which I don’t use, but have because they swore it was cheaper than without it). My computer that I use to access the internet is directly connected to the cable outlet in the wall. The TV cable boxes act as intermediary for the cable TV signal, remote control, and everything associated with TV. Our TV can also show YouTube and other (what I think of as) non-TV products, but we don’t have any subscriptions there.
So if I decide to remove TV (and telephone) from my package and just have internet, does that mean that I would no longer have cable boxes and the TV would also be connected directly to the cable outlet in the wall? I guess that means I will have to find the TV-only remote, because the only remote we use is the cable remote that works with the cable box.
I worry how to navigate stuff on a cable-connected TV with just a remote, and no keyboard. I hate trying to use virtual digital keyboards, I’m just no good at it. How does that even work?
What I really need is a 101-level course in this stuff, there’s just too much I don’t understand (and I don’t know anyone who would be willing to take the time to teach me). Is there a good video about all this on YouTube somewhere?