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Has Achieved Nirvana |
Our promotional discount for Xfinity was scheduled to expire yesterday and the bill was going to make a huge jump. Time to look at what's out there. Last week I got a 10 day free trial of YouTube TV and we checked it out. YouTube TV has all of our local stations, including WGN and three PBS stations (Chicago, Gary, Milwaukee). It also has TCM, which I lost years ago when Xfinity moved it to a separate add-on package that I refused to pay for. Definitely a plus. Not cheap, but we got the first three months at a discounted rate. Mr wtg hates change, but he got used to the new routine using the Roku and YouTube TV pretty quickly. We are also watching PlutoTV and the Roku Channel. We decided to cancel our Xfinity cable service. Their crazy fees (Broadcast TV Fee of $21.50? Regional Sports Fee of $18.35?) and cost to rent their boxes made the monthly cost absurdly high. I bought a couple of Roku streaming sticks; lots of Black Friday discounts right now, so they were pretty cheap. I also managed to negotiate a really good rate on our internet service. Did everything in the Xfinity/Comcast subreddit using private messaging. I liked the asynchronous communication. The Comcast people offered some alternatives that I wasn't familiar with and I could wander off and look stuff up online and then respond. They were actually pretty helpful. I'm a happy camper.
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
Got an email today from Netflix showing the new movies available. One looks good, the rest are sorry carp. A damaged 8 year old must be choosing them.
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| Foregoing Practicing to Post Minor Deity  |
Swearing we’ll get rid of our landline phone. It’s over $100 a month, separate from cable/internet because we had it before cable/internet existed. Looking into VoIP. The cable vs. streaming thing is a battle for another day…but I see it on the horizon.
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
We’ve settled on the cable internet/mesh router/Roku setup everywhere. Cable internet is $50/month through Spectrum, which I think is the same as Comcast. I pay only for the slowest data speeds and have had no complaints even in a house with 7 TVs. Unless you’re playing games you don’t need more than that. For local and network channels I use the Spectrum TV app and am able to use one subscription at all three houses. It’s also $50/month and built in to Roku. I don’t know if Comcast offers a similar app but in my case it’s cheaper that YouTube TV. Crews right now are busy trenching streets and tearing up yards to install fiber in the Huron House neighborhood. Very messy, very disruptive ( they’ve hit my cable twice), and no doubt expensive. A complete waste of time in my view, and the only way they’ll get enough subscribers to pay for it is if the City refuses to allow T-Mobile to offer 5G internet service in town. They might do that, and in fact likely did so as an inducement to bring in fiber. My friend in Tucson uses the 5G wireless service and is very happy with it. No wires, $35/month and very fast. This is the way of the future IMO, and I’m watching for it to be introduced here.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Many cell phone contracts offer a second line free for family/friends. If yours does that I’d buy a cheap burner phone and have your landline number ported over to it.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
As for streaming services, we had a bunch of them we never used and kept talking about cancelling them. That problem solved itself when our credit card got hacked and we had to get a new one. We only switched a couple of services to the new card - which is by far the easiest way to cancel the ones we no longer wanted.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Don't think Comcast has anything like that package, at least not here. They have something called NOW TV, which is a stripped down streaming service that doesn't have local channels and is missing a lot of the channels we like to watch. It's $20 a month. It's comparable to Philo, which has more channels (I think) and is $25 a month, but still no locals and missing other faves. NOW doesn't run on the Roku platform (yet), so they also have a free (for now - they start giving you hardware for free but eventually start charging for it) streaming box called Flex TV, which is Comcast's version of Roku hardware. It's no competition for Roku. Non-starter for us. Thought about OTA to get local channels and I did briefly look into Tablo, which from what I gather, connects to an antenna and wirelessly connects to TVs in the house. It also has 50 hours of DVR space available. I think the current model allows two simultaneous streams; next year they're rolling out a four tuner model. There are Black Friday deals for good antennas and for Tablo devices, but I didn't feel like messing with more equipment. Plus OTA reception is inconsistent around here. Steve, what is the slowest speed for internet via Spectrum? For Comcast it's 75 Mbps. We had 400 service previously, which I knew was overkill but was part of our previous discounted package. I downgraded to 200 but considered the 75. I could have gotten that for $20 a month; the 200 bumped me up to $35 a month. We also have our mobile service via Comcast; you have to have internet through them to get it. We have two phones sharing a gig of data which is plenty for us, and that's super cheap at less than $18 for both phones. That's total, not each. 5G wireless for internet is available from several carriers, but as I've mentioned before, cellular service at our house is abysmal and we have to do wifi calling at home, so until they turn on the antenna that I can see from my living room, wireless internet service isn't an option.
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Minor Deity |
Try Tablo. It’s almost as good as YouTube, but no monthly fee. Buy it once, set it up and it wifis the signal to your streaming devices. We get 94 OTA channels, and the picture on network tv is better than cable because OTA doesn’t compress the signal.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
I definitely considered it, but based on the experiences of a couple of neighbors who have gone the rooftop antenna route, the reception can be inconsistent in our neighborhood. That and the fact that we do watch a lot of stations that aren't available OTA. And we don't do Netflix or other similar services. I'm already dragging my spouse through dropping cable, so I didn't want to introduce new variables that would jeopardize the transition.  Sounds like you have one...tell me more...I always like to hear from folks who have actually tried some of these gizmos...
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Beatification Candidate |
tablo sounds interesting - if only for the DVR... We cut the cord a while ago and probably pay for too many streaming services already. Dropped Xfinity last year when our building bought into everywhere wireless. I realized that the speed that Xfinity touts isn't really the important thing - it's the stability and consistency that made the difference for us. We have less problems with the slower speed. (around 120MBs)
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
100 MBPS. $35/month sounds like a screaming deal to me! Spectrum is also pushing something called a Flex Box that sounds a lot like NOW. I can't think of a reason to want one. If your Roku is like mine, there will be a Spectrum app built in. You may have to search through the available apps to find it (you can move it later) but it should be there. I don't think you have to have Spectrum cable service to use it - maybe start signing up for it and see if it's available and how much they want.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
(cross-posted with your edit; will look into Spectrum stuff when I have a chance. Thanks for the tip.) The 75 is usually $62 a month, but they had a $32 promotional discount and another $10 discount for paperless billing and autopay, which brought it down to $20. The 200 is $82, less $37 promotion and the $10 for paperless/autopay, or $35 a month. Good for a year, and then the discounts drop down by $15 for year 2. I think it's a no term agreement, so I should be able to cancel at any time, but I think it's a good deal so I don't mind locking in for the two years. I had looked up new customer pricing and knew this promotion was available; it was also being advertised on local radio. I mentioned it to the Comcast person on reddit pretty early on in our conversation, and he said new customer pricing was locked to them. A few messages later, I told him I was cancelling the TV and asked what the pricing was on the 75. He said "I have $20 a month plan or a $35 a month plan...". I chuckled to myself and responded that I would go with the 200 service for $35 a month. Like I said, the Reddit Comcasters were pretty good. I saw somewhere that they have access to better deals than the local stores or the phone people, probably on a par with the retentions folks. And a neighbor said he cancelled all his Comcast services for a future date via a phone agent. He told them to cancel it two weeks out when he couldn't get a good promotional deal on what he wanted. He said within 48 hours the retentions people called him and gave him a great deal. Pays to be patient, and to be willing to walk away. Kinda like buying a car.
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| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Tablo is on sale at Best Buy for $79.99, a twenty dollar savings. Your building has an antenna and you can connect, to it, yes?
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| Beatification Candidate |
I think it is set up for one of those flat antennas - I have one hooked up to our TV but we never use that. Pretty much ROKU all of the time. Every so often I will hunt down how to find live TV for a game... I don't think we have a larger antenna on the building to connect - but the flat ones work pretty well here.
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| Beatification Candidate |
I'm actually thinking of Tablo for my mom out in the suburbs. She just watches TV through an antenna. At one time she had a rewritable DVD recorder that she used for her shows. I don't even know if it still works. If Tablo has a decent interface, that could work for her 2 tvs and be able to record and playback on either. Not sure if her 2nd TV is a smart one - I'll have to check that on Thanksgiving!
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