I've (un)cut the cord

Cafe Society
1

TLDR: I’m destreaming.

Sometime last year I decided to review how I used my streaming services and was not surprised at what I found:

Disney, Hulu, Pluto, Prime, and those not listed below - not used at all.
Netflix: 5%
Peacock: 7% (Or whatever Yellowstone was on)
HBO: 30%
YouTube: the rest.

So I canceled Disney, Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, all of which I was paying for, and left HBO and YouTube as my two streaming apps.

But this didn’t solve the initial problem which was this: I no longer want to decide what’s on my TV. I want to see what’s on TV and watch that.

… wait here, please, while I yell at these kids… thanks… OK, I’m back!

I mean, I really don’t need access to everything all the time and the multiplicity of choices oddly led me to avoiding making a decision at all. I don’t really want to think about TV all that much, and I’m no longer interested in what’s on Apple+, Peacock, Netflix, etc, because having to keep all that shit straight is annoying as fuck… and expensive.

Ok, so long story short, I decided to get cable TV again, using Spectrum. I changed to their internet, got a landline, and a 2 year price guarantee. And I love it. I am watching BTTF right now, a movie I would have never selected in the streaming space, and all I have to do is suffer some commercial breaks, time which I can use to go to the kitchen. Or bathroom. Or both.

I don’t have to decide what to watch, I just scroll a list and choose that. I don’t have to figure out which app to open, because it’s just cable tv. I don’t have to update the cable TV. The cable TV isn’t openly using algorithms to give me their options on what to view next, there’s just a list of channels and if I want to fill my head with crime shows and movies, well, there are channels for crime shows and movies. I don’t have to wait for a machine to figure me out.

(I still have Max because of the quality of their library.)

Anyway, I’m destreaming. Anyone else?

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Wow, it’s like traveling back in time! No wonder you were watching BTTF…
Next thread: JohnT goes back to AM radio and a handful of 8-tracks in his car.

But seriously, we’re happy that you’re happy! I’m glad you explained the stress of finding a show on streaming… it’s a real effect of this modern world.

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Hmmm… wouldn’t just antenna channels be even more simple?

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Eh, the lack of quality English programming here in San Antonio kind of warrants against that. Now, quality Spanish programming can be found… but I don’t speak Spanish.

ETA: I still have Spotify. I’d get rid of HBO before I got rid of Spotify.

4

Consumer Reports said this could be a good idea- especially if you streamed several channels.

We still do Spectrum cable, and Amazon prime… because of the free shipping mostly, but there are some cool shows.

5

I miss the cord and watch less often now than before cutting. I do miss just channel flipping to see what is on. They do have internet services that work like cable TV instead of on demand and I will occasionally sign up but they are also prices higher then most streaming services.

6

I was an early cord cutter and I still don’t regret it. But I will agree that the fragmentation of streaming has made it a lot less attractive. I only have Netflix and Prime, and the Netflix sub is about 70% paid by T-Mobile as a perk, so my streaming costs are minimal compared to most.

And I mostly use the Prime for the shipping and Music (not unlimited, as the Prime Music is plenty for me) - if I had prime for the video services, I’d probably drop it. Ditto for Netflix, as a lot of the shows I love have since been cancelled or moved away.

But there are so many free(ish) streaming options (Pluto being the one I use the most) I can’t see the point of having the cord again, EXCEPT for the one JohnT explicitly mentioned - the “Oh, […] is on, I haven’t seen that in years, I should watch…”

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It seems to me that there’s a market for an app, here, that tracks whatever streaming services you have, and randomly picks a selection of things that are available on them for you.

8

We used to have C-band satellite subs (plus the wild feeds) until it just kind of withered away. Then I got a good antenna and started pulling in OTA from the city, 30 miles away. We get about 7 transponder signals most of the time, 2 or 3 some of the time, which gives us about 40 channels, a dozen of which are utter garbage, the rest just mundane garbage. But it costs a lot less than cable, for about the same content. When the signal is stable, the picture is as beautiful as cable.

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I’m currently paying for Netflix and prime (mostly for the shipping) and also watching the free tier of YouTube and the Roku channel. Roku has the first few years of the great British bake off, which I’ve never seen before. It also has ads. Sometimes as much as 2 minutes of ads, which I’m finding incredibly annoying. I’ve gotten used to You Tube’s 5-10 seconds of ads, and Netflix’s blanket ad-free shows.

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Landline, many robo calls yet?

Cancelled Netflix almost a year ago. MAX is included with my cell phone plan, it replaced HBO and kept my favorites like TCM and Miyazaki movies but it now includes reality tv channels which is just no for me.

My internet provider at home included free streaming box and that has cable news weather and other premium channels and I can watch MAX YouTube peacock. I m not sure about Sirius xm if I can stream their channels. So watching thwe big screen tv again. Blazing through favorite episodes of Top Chef and ProjectvRunway. So strange to watch unlimited tv for less than when I first cut the cord.

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Wouldn’t something like Tubi or Pluto be cheaper? Unless you want a specific channel.

Generally we rotate our streaming services, so don’t really pay a ton.

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We have some sort of internet able tv, and flicking it on am presented with our choices of Prime, Netflix, Youtube and casting off my laptop if I really get frisky and want to play a game on a much larger screen.

Would I like to have all the cable channels again, it would be nice, but it is money that is mainly wasted, one can only watch one channel at a time and the absolute VAST majority of channels are a waste of time and money, never watch sports, shopping, spanish, reality tv, talk shows and Ghu only knows what I am not remembering. What we do watch is ponied along in Prime, we pay for Acorn and Britbox. Once and a while we will add a month of HBO or whatever to pick something up, we think of it as doing a pay per view because we will binge the heck out of it for the month then drop it until something else drops we want an entire season of at a time. I did watch something on my laptop that was a stream with commercials that I got a link to through looking for whatever it was we watched on tube or some channel name like that.

13

This reminded me to cancel Netflix, so thank you. We hadn’t had it for nearly two years when I started it back up two months ago for a couple of shows. Now that we finished those we can cancel again. But Netflix’s insistence of pushing previews with no way to turn them off, and of shows starting on me when I simply click on the more details tab doesn’t make it any more attractive for me to purchase it until the next seasons of the aforementioned shows.

Of course, I’ll keep other streamers that behave the same, but they’re included with other services or discounted.

I’ve, too, thought about recording, for many of the same reasons the OP has cited. I don’t particularly enjoy scrolling through pages and pages of crappy tv shows to find something to watch; scrolling through pages of crappy tv channels appeals to me more. I don’t, however, want to re-engage with Comcast, our only option in this location, and go through that horror again.

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We got rid of the cable box in our bedroom and I do miss the ability to just flip channels until something catches my eye. We can still find whatever we want to watch (most of the networks etc. have a streaming tool available via Roku). There’s less spontaneity and ability to find new stuff by accident. Though 90% of the channels were ones we had absolutely ZERO interest in, and when Verizon offered the chance to pick your own, it still involved bundles that included 1 or 2 channels of interest, and all the rest were crap. I also just got sick of paying 10 bucks a month for cable box rental, since we can’t really buy our own like we can with the router. We do still have a box in the family room.

We still have Amazon Prime (for the shipping), and Netflix; we aren’t paying for any other streaming services right now since Hulu+ and Disney+ were included when I changed our cell plans a year back.

We’ve kept our landline all along - we’ve had the number for 34 years. If we ever do get rid of it, we’ll likely do what I did when we closed out the in-laws’ place in Florida: port it to a cell phone (ultimate plan for that is to transfer it to Google Voice so we no longer have to pay TracFone!). We don’t actually have a phone plugged into the landline (well, we do - but its ringer is turned off). Any legit calls will leave a voicemail.

15

I could never go back to commercials and channel hopping. Streaming is also my insulation from reality TV, local news, and infomercials. I didn’t cut the cord to save money; I did it to force myself to be more discriminating in what I watch.

16

Public service announcement:

Cable subscribers pay Fox News about $20 per year even if they never watch Fox News. I understand that Fox’s cable receipts exceed their advertising revenue. Fox has an interesting business model, both ironically but also not ironically.

Sling TV Orange has CNN but not Fox News (or MSNBC). Sling Orange - Package Details, Channels, & Information | Sling TV

Article on 7 streaming services to avoid Fox (though only Sling Orange and Pluto have CNN). 7 Best Streaming Services Without Fox News | agoodmovietowatch

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Thanks for the reminder. Cable news! Since cutting the cord, I don’t have to worry about getting sucked into some “news” coverage with fabricated urgency (let alone unwittingly paying for the propaganda wing of the GOP.)

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I was relatively late to cord-cutting; I only did it earlier this year, and I really wish I’d done it sooner. I have no regrets.

I think the difference between me and the OP is even before streaming I never really did the channel surfing thing. I usually already knew knew what I wanted to watch when I turned on the TV. I pretty much had a schedule – Thursday nights I watched Friends and Seinfeld, Sunday night I watched The Simpsons, etc. Now that switched to streaming I still have a schedule, I just receive the shows a different way. Monday I watch an episode of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Tuesday I watch an episode of Ted Lasso, Wednesday, an episode or two of Reservation Dogs. When I finish a show I move on to whatever’s next in my queue (although there is an element of “what am I in the mood for?” as well), and when I hear about a new show I think I’d be interested in watching I add it to my queue, but don’t watch it until I’ve watched the shows ahead of it.

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These are all default settings that can be changed. You can’t change them directly on the TV, you need to log into your Netflix account in a browser. Then in settings or something you can change them. That stuff used to drive me nuts, but it hasn’t for years.

Of course, now I’m having similar issues with the Roku channel and YouTube. Hmm, i wonder if i can change those settings, too…

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Good to know!