Our area finally got Fiber Optics!!! Hurray!!! We got it in December. We dropped cable that was running about $250 a month for internet, phone and TV. Now we have Hulu that has Disney+ and ESPN+. We have Prime and use our DD3’s Netflix. I am going to watch for deals with Britbox and Acorn. My DH and I tend to binge watch, so if there is something on other services we will join for a month, watch what we want and then drop it. Our internet is $80 a month with an additional $20 a month for phone, as I wish to continue having a land line.
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I just checked out YouTubeTV. It’s about 1/2 cost of cable. I am going to look into making the switch.
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We tried everything after we quit cable, Sling, YoutubeTV, finally my husband decided to put an antenna up in our attic.
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We cut the cord about 9 years ago. Most the shows we were recording were from the local stations, and were streaming on Hulu the next day. It was a no-brainer for us. Lately, I noticed that the once mighty networks and all their high dollar programming have been diminishing in quality…meaning falling off a cliff, while ratings have gone through the floor. So we stopped watching them too. All the good creative script writers must’ve found jobs at Apple TV.
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Agree about some of the programming on the networks, especially all of the competition, reality and game shows, but I do enjoy the Dick Wolf dramas!
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I’m happy to report that it appears that I can watch from the beginning a baseball game that is recording on Directv Stream. So that’s good. Next problem is I can’t seem to set it up to record just my team’s games automatically. If I say Record Series it records every baseball game on Directv Stream. I just want to watch my home team but it won’t allow me to specify a channel. Clunky. Boy do I miss Google Fiber TV.
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One thing to note is that media companies, for the most part, no longer care about ordinary cable subscribers. That’s why some of you have struggled to get discounts when threatening to leave. Wall Street now values companies like Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) on their broadband internet customers, ignoring the steady decline of traditional cable customers.
My wife and I have a robust package of traditional cable (Xfinity) with the highest-speed broadband, with HBO Max, Peacock and Showtime rolled into that, plus an array of streaming services: Netflix, ad-free Hulu, ad-free Paramount+, Disney+, Amazon (through Prime) and Apple TV+. We’re moving to another city soon (non-Xfinity) and weighing whether to cut the cord, but I’m not sure. I need the Big Ten Network (available on YouTube TV) and Tennis Channel (available on FuboTV). If we’d have to get multiple streaming providers anyway, it might be a wash. We’ll see.
We have an antenna in our attic. Brings in the local major networks and a couple of public TV channels way better than cable did. Much better reception.
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I think we’re about to switch (probably to YTTV, but I can’t figure out if programs are all on eastern time or local time) but for starters my mother has cancelled the newspaper! I don’t think she’s ever been without a daily paper (for most of my life we had 2 and sometimes even 3 daily papers). My mother called to cancel and they gave her the runaround (like they did 4 months or so ago) but she stood firm this time. I bet by the end of the month they’ll call and offer it for $20/mo rather than $50.
My dad was paying $2,000/year to have 2 newspapers delivered (each 3-4 days a week – available electronically 7 days/week each but he never would be able to do that). Was crazy to spend that much and each one had gotten smaller and smaller over the years. But he always had them. Now in AL it was one of the first things I canceled. We get offers close to daily for $1/month for the papers. Not sure if I would be more likely to go back to cable or newspapers. Neither one seems like at this point.
We had YouTube tv until they started adding channels we don’t watch, and raising the price. The user interface and unlimited dvr are awesome. But the biggest thing we miss is the streaming quality, particularly with sports. Some of the cheaper streaming services we have now only stream at 30 frames per second, but YouTube tv streams at 60fps. It makes a big difference for sports.
After more than two decades we finally cancelled our local newspaper delivery. As pointed out by others, the prices kept going up while the articles and quality kept going down. I tried to cancel once before but they reduced the price substantially after taking advantage of us for so many years. Even at the reduced price the content no longer warranted the expense, especially with online news being more timely. Again the inability to cancel online is their trickery to prevent cancellations as they make you wait on hold for a long, frustrating time, then battle to keep you with lowered pricing and various scare tactics like you’d be in dark. So happy to have that behind us now.
We paid to have WSJ delivery, but one year they had trouble with delivery, so now I just have the electronic version, much cheaper, and I rarely read them like I used to do, I just glance through the headlines.
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As we got pulled further into the Apple ecosystem (music, TV, storage, etc) we ended up with an Apple Family plan. Apple Family is a small leap from the individual. It’s a good deal if you use their services. That said, once we started sharing cloud storage as a group we blew through capacity and it made sense to step up to the expensive Apple Family Premier - $30 per month ouch. The only silver lining was the premier addition of Apple News+ for this news junkie. Surprisingly, WSJ puts their content on Apple News+. They don’t make it easy to navigate nor do they let you go into the archives but for current (3 days rolling I think) articles it’s great.
If you’ve read this far about using the paid Apple News for your WSJ access here’s the pro tip. You use the ease of the WSJ website to find the articles (behind paywall) you want then select the Apple share icon and choose to open with your Apple News app to read.
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I have yet to pay anything to Apple, I don’t pay for storage either, call me cheap, but I’m of these companies making money out of me. I do have Google Fiber and that’s it. Half of these news can be found on other website, I do like reading the opinion section, particularly of Peggy Noonan on WSJ.
The only thing I will miss from the daily paper is the puzzle page. I do like to do the puzzles, and won’t do them online.
DU won the Frozen Four on Saturday night. Game was in Boston so it was over about 9 pm local time. DIDN’T EVEN HAVE THE SCORE IN THE SUNDAY PAPER! No paragraph coverage of the first period, or the second…NOT EVEN THE SCORE on the top banner. They used to print an early edition (to distribute to the mountain communities) but they’d report most scores that were in before 10 pm, especially something big like a national championship won by a local school.
I was happily getting two newspapers delivered to the house every day. Now that is disappearing along with the Google Fiber TV I was happy to pay for. Since the first of the year I’ve gotten the paper maybe 30% of the time. The other days, nothing. It comes just often enough to make me think the problem is solved. I guess I should switch to digital subscriptions but it is just not the same. I think it’s so important to support local journalism but they make it hard.
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But so much of it isn’t local. There was a 60 Minutes piece about it recently, how investor firms keep buying up the papers, getting rid of the reports, and just run articles from their other papers (NYT, WSJ, Wash POst).
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We still get local news in the local paper here, although much less than ten years ago. And it’s more than a day late since it’s printed in another state and the papers are trucked in. My metro area spans two states and both states now have nonprofit news orgaizations covering statehouse business and that is printed in the paper. I’ll hang in there as long as the paper does but, as I said, it’s hard when they can’t get anyone to deliver it and I have to read it online.
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Rereading all the info above was helpful. CC parent cafe has become my research site 
In an effort to reduce our monthly spending, we are looking at our Comcast/Xfinity (TV cable - $126/mo) and Century Link (phone home line - $66/mo). Since I can’t yet convince hubby to dump Comcast, we considering combining TV/phone at Comcast. (We have cheap high speed local internet we adore, $50/month early adopter fee… tops for speed and reliability. So not considering triple play, at least not via Comcast.)
Til now, I’ve been adamant about keeping the old landline (somewhat for emergencies but more because my 95 year old father well knows the number, has decent audio connection there). Then when looking at complexities of adding another modem and new phones, I get tempted to just ditch the landline. Election season would be more peaceful!!