Everyone Seems To Pay More $$$ For Cable/Streaming

Currently, I have a subscription to HBO Max, Paramount Plus (which I actually have a free subscription to because of where I work), Hulu, and Peacock (which I use to watch wrestling).

Sometimes, if Disney+ or something else adds something I like, I will add a subscription to it and then cancel when I've had my fill (sometimes they give me free subscriptions for that month as a result - that's a small money saving tip for people, if you have a subscription to Peacock, Paramount, or something else, and, even if you're happy with it, go to cancel it, they might offer you a free subscription as an incentive).

Compared to what Spectrum will offer me and what I actually *get and use* from it, I'd say we still haven't crossed the threshold of streaming being "as bad as cable".

Cut out cable awhile ago and the biggest thing I miss is sports stuff, mostly football.
A digital antennae will get me a few games and local live news, so other than initial setup that is free. I get Netflix free with my T-mobile, so that helps. I pay for the Disney/Hulu bundle and my wife has Prime. If there is a show I really want to watch on HBO I will pay for a month and binge or DVR it to watch whenever and then I cancel so maybe 2 or 3 times a year I pay for that. I watch a lot of You tube as well as Paramount and Peacock. Yeah there are advertisements but overall my monthly savings after cutting cable is about $125. I tried Live Sling for awhile and although I cannot complain about the service I found myself rarely watching it so I cut that out.

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

The thing that really gets you after you've cut the cable is that whenever you visit another person's home or click on a TV in hotel room is just how much of an hour of TV is nothing but advertisements. It's insane, but I know I used to dutifully sit there and consume my adverts to earn my next slice of programming. Paying through the nose for cable only to be stuck with ad-city is bonkers.

I've never had cable BUT just the other day I was at someone's house waiting for them and so I 'watched' cable for like 30 minutes...there was so many channels of junk stuff that when the show I was watching was having a LONG commercial break I started flipping through the channels only to find out that there's so many channels that it took forever to find the show I had been watching. Cable=ugh! (at least for me).

I think if you have Disney streaming you can get ESPN as part of it. For a small fee. Mwuahaha!

Yeah there's a Disney-ESPN-Hulu bundle thingy, though IIRC you have to get the ads version of Hulu with it. Something like that. #synergy

Update on my earlier posts: I've been happy I ditched cable. Once or twice I'd been very slightly annoyed I couldn't just toss something on, but it's been quite rare. I purchased Hulu's Live TV add-on for a single month to cover the NFL playoffs, which seems a reasonable concession maybe a couple of times a year.

I think whether you save money using streaming or paying for cable depends on how many TVs you have. This was my experience. For me, I had one cable box. I cancelled cable and tried youtube tv, and I ended up not saving much money. Also, if I had to actually pay for all of the streaming services that I currently have, it would actually exceed what I paid when I was paying for cable. So, I'm sometimes kind of not understanding why cord cutting is so popular, and there are so many articles of how cord cutting saves money, since for me, it was a negligible amount of savings between Youtube TV and a cable subscription. The people saving money must have 3 TVs and be paying for cable boxes for each one, or have an expensive plan with a ton of channels that cost $200 a month. Also, if you have a nice TV, generally, the quality of things like Youtube TV is worse than cable, since cable is a direct connection that is hard wired, and things like youtube tv are largely wireless. Also, many channels streaming are only 720p rather than 1080p. I found the hard line of a cable connection had a significantly better picture on my TV, and this is also true of the company aps on Apple TV like Fox, ABC, NBC, etc. Additionally, when you try to only pay for Internet, the cable companies downgrade the quality of your Internet, which negatively impacts the picture you receive, and also, a disproportionate share of the costs are for the Internet. When you bundle Internet and TV, you usually pay less than if you paid for either of them separately.The strategy people are talking about in this thread which involves signing up and cancelling different streaming services depending on what you want to watch and when, and cycling through that way, would obviously save money. Would be interested if any people with only one TV ended up saving a substantial amount of money by going Internet only with their cable company.

Just curious but was there a measure between hulu live and youtube tv? I'm considering YTtv for a short 3-month block.

If there was I didn't see it. But I didn't look crazy hard either. I think you can get some channels, with ads, on Tubi, but I'm not sure how extensive that is.

I will say I was a little surprised that 5-10 minutes of poking around didn't yield a better deal, IE: I figured I'd find something where I could pay $20-30 and get a month of the basic networks (maybe ESPN, maybe not) just to watch football on. Maybe that exists but I didn't find it, so I ended up paying about twice that for the Hulu thing. I'll probably spend more time on this next time.

That said, the Hulu thing is nice because, well, I already have Hulu, and it worked extremely well and all that. It's one of the more reliable streaming services, in my experience, just in terms of basic stream quality/speed/lack of interruptions.

Ever looked into Sling TV?

I remember hearing about it a long time ago but hadn't heard much since, made me think it was just one of those early-days things that had been replaced or superseded. I also remember thinking it was just a way to stream things you already had, but maybe that's not true (or has changed).

I think this is due to multiple platforms having multiple rights on movies and hence the consumer needs to buy a subscription in order to have the options to him/her. There are various advantages as well where for a minimal price you can have plethora of options

I'm perfectly happy with a cheap Roku device and watching free Tubi. I pay $0 to watch a ton of stuff. Tubi has commercial breaks but not as bad as the cable stations I've watched in the past.

I'm canceling the Hulu thing now that the Super Bowl's over, but I'll look into the Tubi option next time. I have Tubi and I use it, but I hadn't really explored its options for network TV. If I can use that for sports and endure some ads, awesome.

I picked up YouTube TV yesterday for the super bowl. I'm NOT sure I'm going to keep it as I haven't had basic cable now for years, but seeing SYFY (yick, I have haTe that name change), Cartoon Network, and Comedy Central in a lineup again is kind of exciting. SEC football is also listed, at least for my region, so that might be a good pickup to follow Auburn. Iderno. I'll very likely drop the Disney+ package as the only thing I remember watching was Andor. I think I touched Hulu for ONE movie and will never touch ESPN though it's part of that package. That might help sway me to keep YTtv going forward.

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

You have a name change? 👀
This is news.

ha. typing skills are the.... twelfth to go??

most cord cutters don't save money because they end up subscribing to multiple services to replace what they lost. i'm not in favor of a lateral feudalism swap. currently i am without a single streaming service, but i still have internet. seems kinda pointless to keep something i am not using heavily, but how else will i know how bad the world is burning without reddit?

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza