Have you dropped cable TV? If so, how has it worked for you?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Background: We have Uverse for TV, landlines (I’m not willing to move to cell-only – please start a separate thread if you want to discuss) and internet. We have an HD antenna we installed a while back. We are considering getting a Tivo unit so that we’d have a DVR for antenna TV and dropping Uverse. We would also pick up Netflix and (probably) Hulu – we already have Amazon Prime. I’m thinking that between the antenna and the streaming services and online streaming for such shows as The Flash, we won’t miss a lot of what we enjoy on TV.

Except for sports. My husband enjoys watching sports, primarily NFL and college football. (Or as he puts it, he likes to watch football; he also likes to watch the Bears.)

  1. If you don’t have cable and you want to watch sporting events, how do you manage it? I know there’s a lot of football on broadcast TV, which we should get on the antenna. But what about other games? Do you have a service like the streaming ESPN option? If so, do you get all the games you’d like? Do you get them live or are they delayed? How much do you pay for your sports streaming option?

  2. Can you use a DVR in conjunction with streaming services? This is especially important to Mr. Middon for sports – he likes to start watching an hour or so into the game so he can fast-forward through a lot of the commercials and boring stuff. But given that we now have about 3 seasons of Masters of Sex on our DVR, it would be helpful to record an entire season of, say, Longmire and binge-watch it a couple of years later. I’m thinking the shows on Netflix may not be available that long. Indeed, while we much enjoyed Longmire when it was on A&E, we haven’t had Netflix after it went there. Would the episodes we’ve missed be still available?

  3. What do you do for internet service? Are you happy with your service? Do you think what you’re paying is a fair amount? If we drop Uverse for TV, we’ll lose whatever pricing benefit we get from bundling services. I’m thinking we could easily switch our landlines to traditional phone service, but I’m uncertain what we’d do for internet.

2

I just got off a 12hr shift. I’m too tired to address all your questions.
But for a lot of us, “Cutting the cable” doesn’t literally mean ditching your cable company. It just means, getting rid of your cable box, and all those over priced channels that go with it.

I still have Time Warner. But I only subscribe to their internet service. My cable bill went from $200 to $53 a month.

Even though I’m still a TW customer, I still consider myself a “cable cutter”. As I’m sure a lot of people do.

3

In general, you cannot record the streams on your DVR for later viewing or timeshifting. Any sort of FF/REW functionality will be built-in to the stream. If you’re watching a live stream (like sports), you may or may not be able to FF/REW/Pause the stream.

For example, the CNN live stream has 6 hours in the buffer and you can REW/FF/Pause around the buffer. The CBS News live stream does not allow any control at all–it’s a live stream with no buffer.

I don’t have any sport streaming channels, so I’m not sure what they offer. But there won’t be any one answer for all channels. ESPN might allow one set of controls, NBA might allow another, NFL might allow another, etc.

4

The answer to how long shows are available and how many back episodes you can watch is typically “it depends”. Shows often come and go from the various streaming services. Sometimes you can get the whole series, other times it may be just the latest season, or just the latest few shows of the current season. Longmire may stay on Netflix forever, or it may move to Amazon or Hulu if those services offer A&E a better license fee.

The more flexible you are in your viewing preferences, the happier you’ll be with streaming. Even if Longmire isn’t available on your subscribed services, there will typically be many other quality shows you’ll have access to. If you want to watch something good, you’ll be able to find content. If you want to watch “Longmire” and only that show, you’ll find streaming more frustrating.

Your library may be a good alternative place for content. They will typically have a large DVD catalog of movies TV shows.

5

I cut my cable TV 15 years ago! They kept raising and raising the price. And forced me to pay for channels I never watched. So I said Bye Bye!

Have not missed it one bit.

For many years, I just watched VHS movies and got my news on the internet. I just recently bought an Android TV box (Minix U1) for $119.00 and totally love it!

It basically places a smart cell phone (without the calling part) on your TV. You can do ANYTHING on this you can on your smart Android cell phone - YouTube, games, email, Facebook, etc.

Although for YouTube, it is on the big TV instead of the tiny cell phone - cool! You can also connect a USB keyboard and USB mouse - get a remote with a small keyboard on the back.

P.S. I have been watching Canadian news programs on YouTube lately, they JUST got cable à la carte there. I don’t know why we can’t get this in the US? Anyway when enough people cut their cords, cable TV will suddenly offer this (it will be too late then!)

6

I cut the cable maybe four years ago. A few months ago, I offered to give a community talk on how to do it, aimed at the nontechnical crowd who wanted an easy “cable replacement” and not a computer-based Kodi/hacker solution.

Two full-houses with a waiting list each time later, I am taking the show on the road in January and have a dozen sessions scheduled, literally all over the state*, with more coming in each week. It’s very much the topic du jour in the entertainment world…

  • Okay, it’s a small state. But.
7

The only thing I missed from subscription TV is sports, and I got the NBA league pass this year (cost: about two months’ cable bill), so I’m in good shape there.

Unfortunately, this won’t work for baseball, because my team, the Cardinals, is blacked out for most games because I live in the cable broadcast area. But since there is no St. Louis NBA team, I can watch all NBA games except for those that are nationally broadcast.

But antenna TV still works. And then there’s Netflix, Hulu, Amazon (and my friend’s HBO Go account for Game of Thrones), all of which together costs only a small fraction of my cable bill and gives me far more to watch than I ever can. Also, it’s on demand, so I don’t have to schedule my life around television (not that I ever did, but now I don’t miss things because life got in the way).

8

I don’t know about you guys, but my cable company is offering Rokus and a SlingTV subscription for cord cutters who want to go back to handing their money to Charter. So as far as I can tell, this is the death throes of the “600 channels for one low price!!” mentality. Pretty soon we’ll be picking channels a la carte from the internet, and the cable company will just facilitate billing and payment.

9

Unfortunately, Sling TV and the cable model are moving to streaming, not the other way around. Sling is modeled exactly on the “choose one really big package and then all the little ones you want” plan of cable. It’s not a la carte in any sense.

10

Further thoughts: the only reason the cable companies are getting into this (with cable boxes that will stream Netflix etc., and by adding Sling as an option) is because they realize the profit-laden cable model is dead. There’s nothing they fear more than people figuring out just how consumer-hostile their model is; they are moving fast to port the model to a new (even less regulated) platform, so that they can maintain their profit levels and overall control of how the services are packaged and presented. Letting everyone with a $30 box pick and choose channels, and pay directly for some of them, is an Armageddon-sized disaster for Comcast et al.

11

I watch mostly sports, and there are plenty of internet sites that live-stream games. I just VGA the picture to my TV screen, and listen to the audio on my computer speakers. Some of the movie channels like that, too, but they’re hit and miss.

I dropped cable two years ago, and have saved $2000, which has paid for a couple of round the world plane tickets. My local stations come in fine on a coax with a paper clip on the end, nailed up in a window sill.

12

Yes, dropped it about 4 years ago. Around Tour de France season, I start getting wistful for some live coverage, but then I remember they wanted to charge me $35/month just for the one channel that carried it. Other than that, I don’t miss it at all, and neither does the rest of the family.

Our condo has a separate contract for internet (FTTH, baby!) to the whole building complex, so that wasn’t affected.

13

I just signed up for a week’s trial of DirecTV Now, which gives you 100+ channels over your internet connection for 35 bucks a month. That’s a lot cheaper than my cable company, and it worked OK for the Golf Channel, but some other channels I tried had really bad freezing problems. Also, the price nearly doubles if you don’t sign up during the promo period, or if you ever change packages, which puts it about on a par with my cable. And the cable doesn’t freeze, and is easier to TIVO and stuff, so I guess I’m going to cancel before I get charged.

But I fully expect that I’ll be streaming everything within a couple of years.

14

I’m content. I’ve got over the air TV, various online sites, and the local library (and redbox if I need it) for DVDs.

My only regret is I miss MSNBC.

15

I am just a hybrid cord-cutter. I only use my cable company (Comcast) for very fast internet access (50 mb/s) but they throw in some free online channels as well including HBO I think but I have never watched it. I don’t watch broadcast TV either except for a few minutes of NFL football every couple of weeks. Everything else is on demand through Netflix or Hulu.

It does save money but not that much for me. Internet+some cableTV+Netflix+Hulu is still a little less than $100 a month but that is all I want. I am a hellion when it comes to cable and internet contracts. There are two competing companies here, Comcast and Verizon, and they will rape your wallet and make you sign over your first born if you let them.

I don’t let them do that. I just find the best rate that I can every two years between the two of them and make them guarantee it for at least two years or I will switch companies. I currently have Comcast and they have always matched so far but I am serious that I will not pay more than $70 for high-speed internet access with whatever other freebies they want to throw in including online cable channels and HBO GO. I will cancel in a heartbeat if they refuse to do it because Verizon has even better packages. I just tell them the only reason I am sticking with them is because I don’t want any of us to go through a re-installation even if it is free and they always take it.

16

TV was crap back when I lived with my parents. When I moved out, I never bothered to get it. I was never into sports. I would just go to the video rental every once in a while and grab shows and movies that were rated well. I picked up iTunes when it came out and watched Hulu when it was free to decide shows to buy on iTunes.

So far as I’m aware, sports aren’t widely available via the Internet. On the other hand, you could just as easily get into watching video games on Twitch or some other competitive activity which is on the Internet. But certainly, as people continue to migrate off of channel-based TV, sports will be forced to follow, whether they want to or not. In another year or two, it will come. It sounds like, from some previous posts, the chinks are already starting to develop.

17

I bought NFL Replay this year, mostly to follow Mariota and the Titans since they are rarely if ever shown in my region, and I’m very happy with it. You can watch the games as soon as they are over, plus any game from the past several years, including Super Bowls.

18

I know the thread’s a couple of weeks old now, but i wanted to reply to this.

If you want to watch the Cardinals over the internet, get yourself a subscription to a location masking service like Unlocator. It’s not a proxy server, so you don’t get the bandwidth slowdowns that often come with using proxies; it just hides your location. I’ve been with Unlocator for a few years now.

It’s $5 a month, or $50 a year if you pay annually. I subscribe to MLB.tv, and i can watch all blacked-out baseball games, including the local Padres games, national broadcasts like Saturday afternoon and Sunday nights, as well as every playoff game.

Not only that, but it also allows me to watch overseas stuff that i normally couldn’t get from the US, like the BBC’s iPlayer, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s iView, and a whole range of other great stuff.

You can set it up on individual machines, such as computers or tablets or Roku or whatever. Or, if you want to apply it to your whole house, you can just set it up on your router. All the set-up requires is a simple change of your device’s DNS settings.

The streaming services that i use, including MLB.tv, could, if they wanted, block users like me quite easily by blocking the DNS locations that Unlocator uses, but so far they’ve shown no real inclination to do so. The only trouble i’ve had is that Netflix does seem very intent on disallowing these services, so if i have Unlocator set up on my computer, i can’t watch Netflix. But that’s OK, because i can just go downstairs to my smart TV and watch Netflix there. Turning the Unlocator service on and off is also very straightforward, although on Windows computers it does require a restart.

19

Do you have cellphones-Verizon has an app called go90 and my plan includes NBA league pass and NFL games. It’s supposed to have primetime TV as well , but I haven’t actually tried to watch that. The app is available to everyone, but I think the free stream pass is only for Verizon customers.