Our household canceled our cable subscription long before it was cool. We didn’t replace it with streaming stuff, we just stopped watching TV shows. And we don’t miss it. Interactive entertainment is far superior.
Cordcutters - what do you miss?
We have not cut the cord yet but I’m not sure what we are keeping it for. My wife likes some PBS shows but we should be able to get them through a roku app. We have all of Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime. What will we be giving up if we cut? What will we need to pay separately and additionally for?
5 things keeping me “hooked” on the “drug” that is Direct Tv
- Pro Wrestling is my true passion. Crazy as it sounds I love it and I also co-host a podcast and do commentary for our local promotions. I watch this pretty much each and every day.
- College Football (I will watch 14+ hours on any given Saturday)
- The Yankees. I watch some of pretty much every game on YES and many on ESPN.
- Local news. I’ve found I can get this online but it’s just not as easy as turning on the television. Also…
- We can’t get high speed internet out here. No cable just satellite. All my internet comes through my cell phone. Even with my unlimited data plan from Straight Talk how long before they start throttling?
Thing is I’m really tired of paying $200+ a month…
Some of the better-quality “background noise” TV. TCM was great for this: I could turn to TCM and have some semi-obscure 1930s melodrama or 1950s horse opera or something playing in the background while I surfed the Web or just pottered around. It wasn’t obnoxious, the volume never changed, and I could watch little bits and pieces when my attention drifted that way. PBS Create, the digital subchannel PBS uses to run cooking shows and arts-and-crafts shows and so on, comes close, but it doesn’t have long shows so it tends to run repetitive station IDs and promos too often.
The Roku has a few answers to this. Soma FM is a good streaming music service, and B-Movie TV is pretty good zone-out mindless TV/movie channel if you don’t mind R-rated stuff and general weird crap.
This is a legitimate question and it’ll be interesting to see how things end up. Because you’re right, if I had to pay 8 different services $15 a month I wouldn’t be saving much money. My personal threshold seems to be three (and a half?): Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix DVDs for specific (and something obscure) movie watching.
That said, cable versus these streaming services isn’t exactly a drop-in replacement, so I wouldn’t make the claim that cutting the cord is a good deal for everyone. For me, it is an obvious good deal. Most cable and broadcast channels, with their advertisements and three camera laugh track sitcoms and melodramas, seem like archaic relics from a time gone by. Not quite vaudeville and jesters just yet, but rapidly surpassed by the long arc drama series and anthology series and more creative offerings found elsewhere (not a moral judgement, just a matter of taste). For me, if I had both cable and these streaming services because someone else was paying for them, I’d probably be using the streaming services over cable 99% of the time.
We pay Playstation Vue and Hulu and Amazon Prime and basic basic cable (only to have internet). I get RedZone from Sept-Dec Other family allows us access to Netflix and HBONow. Don’t miss much from cable, we have access to almost everything we want and save about 40-50 bucks per month. Everybody very happy. We’ve had this setup for more than a year.
Same way I feel for now. My internet package is a large portion of my cable bill and has been since around 2001. Yeah, you pay for channels you don’t watch but it’s not like you pay for each channel directly. Now that my kids are older at least I can go down a tier or 2 since the kids channels were always on the higher end packages. Unfortunately my wife watches some of the upper-tier stuff 24/7.
I have friends who tell me all about how they cut cable and then spend $40-60 per month in subscription services and that just seems to me like trading 1 expense for multiple patchwork subscriptions that still might not cover everything you want, without saving that much money. I’d rather just call and threaten to cancel and get a better deal.
Our cable bill (mine and Digger^) was over $160. Got it down to $65 for good internet and the most basic cable. Still too high, but don’t have a choice there. $35 for Vue live TV and about $10 for Hulu, so I still save about $50 a month and I watch a lot less mindless background crap now. It does help to share passwords among family for the rest. I know not everyone has that but it’s nice.
A lot of people would be surprised how many channels are available on the various live TV streaming services.
We are paying for Netflix and Hulu anyway (and Amazon Prime gotten with the Prime account). The question is what does our continued cable contract get us above and beyond that.
Not big sports fans, not big local news watchers. I am not sure which channels are not available on the various streaming services, which require an extra fee to stream, and so on.
Would I lose watching newly broadcast Doctor Who? The Expanse, Legion? American Gods’ next season? Okay not caring too much but Big Bang Theory? These are ones I currently record to watch.
I do all my TV watching via antenna and Roku (youtube and SlingTV primarily, Hulu occasionally)
I felt like I was missing out on a lot before I got SlingTV. Like, when I had cable my go to for background noise was CNN and MSNBC, so I felt a certain emptiness when I didn’t have them anymore (especially around election season). People would be talking about TV shows like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and I couldn’t participate in the conversations. Hulu and Youtube are entertaining, but they weren’t not sufficient for me.
So I got SlingTV and now I feel complete. Really, there are only a couple of SlingTV channels that I watch on a daily basis (CNN and maybe the Comedy Channel), but on the weekends, it’s nice being able to catch a good movie on HBO or just flip through channels.
PBS is one thing I haven’t figured out yet. We don’t have a local PBS channel to watch live, and I can only get a pay-to-play PBS app on my roku, so still no Great British Baking Show. If anyone has any ideas for this let me know too!
I have a PBS app. You have to have Passport to play some shows (like I was only able to watch some of the Vietnam War episodes because you have to have Passport to see the others). But most of the programs that I watch (Independent Lens, American Reframed, American Experience) are completely free.
I expect that viewing patterns have changed enough that people will subscribe to various different services, but not all the time.
My house subscribes to HBO, but just for the one month a year that we plan to watch Game of Thrones.
And we subscribe to Hulu, but just for one month to watch The Handmaid’s Tale.
And so on. We just look for the next show we’re going to watch, figure out what subscription to buy, and buy it for the month.
Paying a subscription all year to watch the one show we care about seems like big waste.
My current Comcast bill is $140/month. I’ve got superfast internet that only fiber can surpass (and there’s not any in my area right now), the HD tier for TV (including NFL Network, which is important to my sons and I as we all love football) and unlimited landline phone. I know the landline thing is outdated and overrated, but it never drops calls and it’s nice to have a backup, plus cutting that cord doesn’t save me any money as it “unbundles” the other services.
The only thing that sucks is that when the internet is down (very infrequent), everything else crashes down with it.
With folks dropping cable in droves, one would think that the cable companies would respond by either lowering their prices or improving their service. They don’t appear to be doing anything, perhaps because they have a higher profit providing internet than TV.
Not sure about Sling, but our Playstation Vue package includes NFL and Redzone (and some other sports channels) for an extra $10 per month, which we cancelled as soon as the regular season ended and can pick up next season. I love being able to tell Comcast to suck it, even if I still need them for internet.
If someone was able to provide a la carte cable at a good price, I suspect the cord cutters would flock to it. We didn’t want all the channels, just a few. It wasn’t worth paying for MTV, VH1, BET, E!, news channels, and countless others for just 10 channels.