- Its been about 18 months or so since I made
the biggest decision of my life.
Now that I'm almost 40.
Oh that's old!
I killed cable TV.
Okay cable TV still exists,
I just don't have it anymore.
So the simple idea more than a year ago
was just to see if what we were watching
was really worth what we were paying.
So 18 months later, where do we stand?
How's it working?
And more important how much money are we spending?
Let's go take a look.
(upbeat R&B music)
So first a caveat.
Okay all of this I'm about to say applies to me.
You might have more cable providers,
you might have different ISP's,
you might have more choices even when it comes
to streaming video.
But that's the point of all this,
you have to do the math for yourself.
So first actually a recap of what we were spending before.
So back in the fay it was something like $245 a month
on our cable bill and that was for TV and internet
and that's a lot!
It's close to $3,000 a year.
So we were paying all of this to the same cable company
and we killed the cable TV part of the equation
and now we're just paying them for internet.
It's about $80 a month.
And that number still stands today,
all those months later, sort of.
See my ISP now has a data cap, ugh, one terabyte a month.
And we actually didn't hit that cap for a long long time.
In fact it was just this past December when the kids
were out of school for a couple weeks for the holidays
that we finally went over it.
And we went about $40 over it.
I could pay another $30 a month for another 500 gigabytes
or I could pay another $50 a month for unlimited.
I kind of don't want to do that on principle though.
And yeah I need better choices here but I really
only have two and this is the lesser of two evils.
So that's what we're spending on the ISP.
Here's what we're looking like for
the actual streaming services.
Now I've tried just about everything I can.
Sling TV is pretty good.
The pricing is comparable.
But I tell ya the orange and blue plans thing
is confusing at best on a good day.
And their on screen menu system still just sucks.
DirecTV is pretty good if you're an AT&T customer
which I'm not anymore so that was kind of a non starter.
Hulu Live, we have Hulu, but Hulu Live just was lacking
a lot of the channels that we wanted to watch.
And YouTube TV still isn't available where I live
so that's out for now.
So that leaves us with PlayStation Vue.
Now it's not perfect but it's mostly pretty good.
The quality of the video you're actually watching
can very much depend on the source itself
but it does do sports in 60 frames per second
so that's pretty cool.
And in combination with everything else we use here,
Netflix, Hulu, YouTube itself,
it's fit right in really well.
And the really cool thing I like,
because I was doing the research about all of this,
was they make it really easy to see which channels
you get for which plans.
So our plan started at $65 a month when we first got
PlayStation Vue and it's actually gone up a little
bit since then.
I think they gave me an offer for Showtime for an extra
$5 a month okay.
And then the plan itself went up a little bit as well.
I wasn't crazy about that and I looked at changing it
but we ended up keeping it.
And that's kind of the point, again you have to do
the math yourself and keep an eye on it
and see if it's still worth it to you.
Speaking of price increases, Netflix went up a little
bit as well because I decided I wanted
the 4K stream of Netflix.
Let's do the math one more time.
So it's $80 for internet service itself,
another $100 for all the services we're using,
Netflix, Hulu, PlayStation Vue.
So that was all the services.
Let's talk hardware for a minute.
I've got links to everything I used down in the description.
Or just hit kit.com/moderndad for everything
in one place.
It's really simple.
Okay so here in the bedroom,
I'm still using an Apple TV and I'll tell you
I like it a lot.
I actually upgraded to the Apple TV 4K this year
because 4K but I'm still not really using it to do anything
other than watch TV, to watch shows right.
I'm not using any of the other just Apple-y apps on it.
I'm not playing ang games on it.
I'm just using it for PlayStation Vue and Netflix
and over the air TV and stuff like that.
But it works great and probably the most important
thing to me is that it's fast.
Android TV, Apple TV, very fast with things
like PlayStation Vue.
Roku and Amazon Fire TV, slow!
And here I'm using the Logitech Harmony companion remote.
And I tell you I love this thing.
It's easily the second most curvy thing in this bedroom,
alright third if you count me.
It really is just a beautiful remote.
And I tell you it's only about a 1,000 times better
than that POS that comes with Apple TV.
Please do not use that.
Get this please.
I got all this tied into that,
actually it's the same Vizio TV that I reviewed last year
and I think I kind of short changed it a bit.
I like it a lot more now.
It's not trying to do too much.
It has just enough smarts inside of it.
And I think what got me back then was they were trying
to get you to use this Android based tablet remote thing.
Get rid of it, you don't need it, use this instead.
So here in the living room I'm using an Android TV
that's actually built into that TV there.
But I'm not gonna talk about the set anymore
because the company itself has actually folded up shop here
in the US.
It's never going to get anymore updates
and you really just shouldn't buy it.
So most of the time I'm using an NVIDIA Shield TV with this.
And I tell ya Shield TV is still the only Android TV
box you should ever consider.
It's powerful as hell, it's great for games, it's fast
and yes it gets updates all the time.
One fun thing though is I'm stuck running Android TV
on top of Android TV.
It's a little inception and crazy and don't do that
if you can avoid it.
And out here I'm also using another Logitech remote.
It's the Harmony Elite.
Again back from that old video.
This thing is insane.
Yeah it's also very expensive, it's big
but it's got a touch screen.
How cool is that?
And it controls pretty much everything in the house.
Now for audio I'm using a relatively simple
Vizio sound bar, it's not top of the line or anything
I think I got it for a couple hundred bucks on sale.
And yes it's yet another Chromecast target out here
which I think gives me about 32 here in the living room.
The really cool thing about it is that the rear speakers
and subwoofer all tie back into the sound bar wirelessly
so I don't have cables running all over the living room.
Love that!
So I haven't mentioned over the air content
and let's do that now.
So we still get loads of sports on ESPN and Fox Sports
and all these other sports channels over PlayStation Vue.
But the big question I get all the time,
what about local sports Bill?
what about regional SCC stuff?
Where I live, super easy.
I used to use an indoor over the air antenna,
I got smart and now I'm using an outdoor antenna.
It's actually facing the right direction as well
that's a big deal.
I get a ridiculous number of channels on it.
And I tell you the compression is so much better
than anything you'll get streaming at this point.
So the antenna is still running into a HDHomeRun box
but I've updated that as well.
So I've gone from the HDHomeRun connect which has
two tuners in it to the HDHomeRun Quatro which
has four tuners in it and that means we could be
watching something over the air out here,
somebody else could be watching something in the bedroom,
at the same tine somebody could be watching something
on a tablet or on a third or fourth TV.
So being able to watch all that OTA stuff all over
the place was kind of important to us this year
because we ended up doing a lot of work out here
in the backyard.
And yeah I had to stick a TV out here.
So this one's from TCL and it's got Roku built into it
as the operating system so you don't have to have
any extra boxes or sticks or dongles or whatever.
It just works.
Now a couple things about that.
It's pretty slow okay.
Especially the PlayStation Vue app
is just monumentally slow.
It's to the point of not being good.
But it's not a main TV and we're not out here all the time
so I could put up with it.
But the other thing is that you don't have
a HDHomeRun app on Roku
because the way the streams are coded they just
don't have one.
So I actually had to plug in an Amazon Fire TV dongle
in the new 4K one into the back of it.
And it works fine, it's out of the way but yeah it was
one more expense.
Other than that it works great.
And yes I leave it out here all the time.
Now one thing I haven't mentioned here is actually
DVR stuff and people always ask about that.
I tell you most everything we watch is available on demand
or just streaming in general right.
So I can still watch it whenever I want.
And I don't have to worry managing local recordings
which has been really nice.
So let's wrap it up.
Has all this non cable TV streaming stuff been worth it?
I'm not counting all the hardware and all those purchases.
Those are one time costs right.
But $80 a month for internet, $100 a month for all
the services we're using, $2200 a year for all that,
that's down from $3000 a year that we were doing before
when we had cable TV.
So that's real money, that's beer money.
That's new phone money.
So for us, yes it's definitely been worth it.
My kids don't even notice.
My wife is perfectly fine with it.
And the really cool thing is no contracts.
I can hop between all the services I want.
Use free trials.
And figure out exactly what it is we want to use.
So that's it.
If there's' anything else you want me to take a look at
let me know down in the comments.
Hardware services, something I missed that's really awesome,
let me know.
Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already.
Go share this video with all your friends.
I know a whole lot of you out there are looking
at cutting out cable TV.
You can do it, you absolutely can do it.
If I can do you can do it.
So that's it.
Catch you next time.
See ya.
(upbeat jazz music)