I just cancelled the cable Saturday and kept the internet with Breezeline. It’s saving me $237 a month. I talked my husband into it for at least the summer months because he’s only home 6 to 8 days a month during the summer. (He stays at our camper where we have DirecTV.) All he ever watches is Westerns and there’s plenty of that on OTA. We just need to find a way to record some shows. I told him if he misses INSP too much, we could always go to Spectrum in the fall. We have MAX because it’s free with DirecTV but that’s only a seasonal account and will go away in October when we put the camper to bed for the winter. Such first world problems we have!
We pay the $12/month to Verizon for basic cable, which gives us a clear view of all the antenna channels (plus some Spanish channels, which I use to watch soccer), and we subscribe to HBO, so between those there’s a little bit of scrolling.
We also have a new fire stick from Amazon, which, as you scroll across each of your streaming services, gives you a list of possible things to watch, and things you were in the middle of watching.
So it’s a little bit like scrolling through the old TV. But not much.
Help me understand why scrolling through a list of channels to “see what’s on” is superior to scrolling through a list of shows on Netflix to “see what’s available”?
I won’t argue that one is better but they are different. The obvious difference is that much of what you’ll see on the channel guide isn’t available on Netflix. Less obvious is that everything you see Netflix present to you has been algorithmically chosen to encourage engagement based on what it knows about you. The channel guide hadn’t been specifically created with you in mind so there more chance of you landing on something odd or outside of your usual viewing.
One thing I sincerely miss about cable, and it’s made me consider going back, is the lack of channel surfing ability. Just mindlessly hitting Ch Up, Ch Up, Ch Up until it finally loops around is a lot easier than spinning up HBO, browsing around, exiting, pulling up Peacock, figure out how to look though a list of shows there because every app works differently than every other one, then exiting that and loading up Netflix or Hulu or whatever.
While I still have reasons that I prefer(red) cable over pure streaming, it was nice when I found out that Roku does have something similar. It might not be the best programming, but at least I can go back to mindlessly flipping though channels.
I started a thread about my issues with that a while ago. For every streaming service I have, it has it’s own app, that works differently than all the other apps, I have no idea what show is on what app and when a new episode is on so I often end up missing a show for weeks on end because I forgot about it (not for lack of interest, just out of sight/out of mind) etc.
This is why I loved my Tivo so much. It essentially combined all those services into one device. I could search for a show and it would not only tell me when/if it was going to air, but it would also go and check all my connected streaming services and present me with a list of options to choose from. Plus, I could save that show and every time a new episode was out, the Tivo would let me know.
It was essentially a device that combined OTA/Cable with multiple streaming services and gave me easy access to the shows I want to watch as soon as their available.
I’m still surprised the Roku doesn’t do something similar.
And, when it’s all said and done, with access to thousands or tens of thousands of movies and shows, it gets so overwhelming I end up watching something I’ve seen multiple times. I’ve watched The Good Place and Superstore multiple times each. They seem to be my current ‘go to’ shows.
Roku may not, but Apple TV and Chromecast with Google TV (and maybe the Nvidia Shield) both do. The only downside is that it requires apps to ‘opt in’, and Netflix, famously, does not. Everyone else seems to participate though.
I probably watch more YouTube than anything else but I do have almost every single channel I can get on the hardware I have. The IPTV service does not offer adult content yet and there are some premium sports channels (BeIN, WWE Network, etc) that I don’t feel the need to pay extra for.
I work at the cable company.