Dumping Cable

Had cable (mostly Dish) growing up and then when I moved out I got Dish myself. 2 years ago I called them to cancel and told them I was going to YouTube for $80 a month. They put me on hold and gave me Dish for $80 a month. Price was almost cut in half. Hasn’t gone up since. I would make the same call again if I had to or switch to a streaming service if they won’t match the price

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We have Hulu+ Live with the Disney/ESPN+ bundle. Only complaint is that the sound gets out of sync and sometimes will crash, requiring us to re-download everything. I think that’s because the Firestick sucks rather than a problem with Hulu. Everything works fine on the Roku tv in our bedroom.

Yeah get yourself a smart TV and trash the firestick

You can get a 60 incher for like $300 at target or Costco

I hung onto my fire stick and old plasma TV for far too long. TVs are like shoes now. Cop a new pair every year

I’ve been in camp YoutubeTV for years, having moved when PlayStation Vue shut down. Before that I had DirectTV. Our viewing habits have changed such that I think we could move away from YouTube TV and rely just on whichever streaming service is carrying the content we’re interested in this month…but my wife isn’t ready to make that change.

If you’re uncertain about which cable-replacement TV service to go with, remember that they are currently no-commitment models. I haven’t paid attention to what the current availability of free test drives are, but worst case you sign up for a couple for a month, keeping the one that you like and ditching the other(s).

A couple of comments about your choice of internet, however:

  1. Consider whether there is a data cap, and if so the potential cost of removing it. My/my wife’s streaming habits, and my WFH tends to drive our data use up to the cap that Comcast keeps threatening to impose on us. I’d pay the surcharge to avoid it, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.

  2. Regarding the 1Gbs speed – most people who sign up for that speed don’t actually need it. For me, the only time I notice the difference between 300Mbs and 1Gbs is when I’m moving some big files for work (which rarely happens anymore, since most of my real work occurs on virtual machines). If there’s a cost difference, consider signing up for a lower speed connection and then upgrade if you discern a need for greater speed.

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We dropped cable several years ago in favor of streaming services. We probably pay as much for those as we did for cable, but we would get many of the streaming services regardless. We rarely watched cable.

We get Netflix, Hulu, Showtime and Paramount+, Max, Prime, Peacock, and Apple TV. Might be forgetting one in there, not sure. Used to have Disney, but dropped it about a year ago because our kids lost interest. We watch all of the services we have pretty regularly. Apple TV is probably my favorite of all of them, excellent quality stuff. Netflix I probably watch the least of all.

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Still have cable for sports. All the sports. As soon as there is a good alternative I would have no problem switching. Problem nowadays is there are too many contracts with too many different providers that put stuff on too many different platforms.

Well, not all the sports.
NFL Football League has Thursday and Saturday night games on Prime only, and shows less than half of the games per week.
I won’t mention all the soccer not available. Heck, even most of the MLS is available only on AppleTV+, with an additional subscription.
And Peacock will show a lot of the Olympics this summer that won’t be on NBC or USA.

That’s really annoying (not saying the others aren’t), and I seem to remember something similar for the most recent winter games. I’m traveling for one of the two weeks, so I might see about a free trial for the other week.

True. College athletics hasn’t broken down into the chaos of the professional subscriptions just yet, at least not here. Probably soon though.

But how do you dispose of the old one? Seems half the pain of getting a new one aside the cost is moving them and disposing of the old.

There are places to take old TVs. If it works, there might also be places to take them for reuse.
Now, if you don’t have a car that will fit them (I do), then that is a problem. Our city’s trash people will pick up large items twice a year, three pieces per pickup.

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Just leave it on the curb if you’re in a city

Otherwise leave it on top of your trash can and the garbage men know the drill

Schools and apartment complexes also usually have unattended dumpsters too

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Can’t you sell working TVs for small amounts of money on FB marketplace? Like just leave it on your porch and if you get $10 or not, you really dont care, as long as the person picks it up and takes it away?

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Yes

But having dealt with some of the creatures that trawl fb marketplace I’d rather just throw it in the trash than expend that type of energy again

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We have a new website called “Buy Nothing.” Wife has gotten rid of a lot of stuff since our remodel. She limits the area of the pickup people. Still working on her car’s area of the garage, so she can drive in.

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We still have cable. Like Wayne and Garth, we fear change.

Tour de France will only be on Peacock. Sucks!

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OK guess this could go in annoyed thoughts but our cable company was changing stuff so we took the opportunity to dump cable and landline which were bundled. I feel sorry for whoever gets assigned our old number as we had it for over 30 years so they may get some strange marketing calls for a while but I digress.

So I figured hey I’ll just get ESPN+ and MLBTV will cover most of what I want to watch in sports only to find you need a #%$&ing cable provider to stream the live sports games you might actually you want to watch.

So trying to figure out what low(er) cost service will allow me to buy the MBL.TV package to stream out of market games which is currently having a Father’s day sale $59.99 for the rest of the year. They have a list of actual cable providers but I’m trying to figure out if SlingTV, YoutubeTV and or FuboTV will allow me to purchase the out of market package and stream all non-A’s/Giant’s games.

It looks like Sling TV might be able to do that if buy the Orange & Blue package plus the sports bundle but honestly I’m sure if that only covers the broadcasts on the MLB channel or if you can steam all out of market games if you buy the MLB package.

Anyway, it’s starting to look like the god damn thing might wind up costing as much as we were paying for cable by the time to figure out what level of service you have to buy to make it work.

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Can you get YES Network somehow? Or will that be subject to antiquated local blackout policies?

Tomorrow start the YouTube at the new house as the cable will be turned off at the old rental. On to the future.

A few days ago signed up for 12 months of Peacock for $19.99 (normally $59.99). Not sure when the offer ends. Signed up for French Open tennis, upcoming Tour de France (hopefully Vuelta?) and Olympics.

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