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Post by Boomzilla on Dec 22, 2015 7:05:47 GMT -5
Our local cable company (Cox) has the monopoly on local service (thanks to bribing the city council). Now they're all digital, and scrambling more and more of their channels unless you rent their box.
Since my wife and I watch so little content (local news), we're interested in finding alternate streaming services that can take the place of what we formerly got via cable.
I'm thinking that to get what we want, though, we may have to buy a fully-featured package of channels, most of which we don't want at all.
The channels we "must have" include:
the three local channels (only one of which still broadcasts over the air)
the History channel
the Science channel
PBS
the Animal Planet channel
National Geographic
the Weather channel
CNN
HGTV
SyFy
Smithsonian channel
Discovery
As you can tell, we aren't much into sports.
I don't mind buying a package to get the channels I want, but I don't want to have to buy two or three packages, most of which bundle dozens of channels that I don't care about.
Now that said, I understand the economics of bundling. Many of the channels in the bundle pay the distributor to carry them, and that defrays the cost of the package. In fact, for most packages, one would pay MORE for "just the channels that you want."
My movie needs can be handled via Roku streaming.
So where does one go for a comprehensive selection of streaming channels?
Thanks - Boomzilla
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Post by vneal on Dec 22, 2015 8:59:17 GMT -5
Direct TV
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KeithL
Administrator 
Posts: 10,274
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Post by KeithL on Dec 22, 2015 10:13:09 GMT -5
The channels you have listed all usually fall under something like "family cable" - which is at least all in one package around here (and was in NY). A lot of it depends on what you're willing to accept in terms of reliability. In many locations, the various satellite systems are plagued with outages under various conditions. - The dishes tend to get flaky when there's heavy snow or rain. - If you have a dish installed in winter, it may work fine, but reception may get very poor when the trees green up - because foliage blocks the reception. - The dishes are very fussy about physical location - so, for example, if your dish is mounted on a pole, and the pole shakes in the wind, your picture may drop out. I'm also wondering how your Internet is set up. (I get my Internet from my cable company, so I'd still have to pay them for that anyway.) You might also want to make sure you're up to date on the monopoly situation. Many of the old monopoly arrangements have either expired or been voided in the last few years... Google fiber is moving into lots of areas, as are FIOS and some of the other services.... so, if you haven't checked out the alternatives in the last year or two, then look again. You also might want to check out plain old digital over-the-air TV. You won't get any of the cable channels that way, but you might get your local news.... (So, if you can get your other stuff via streaming, that might just work for you - and the quality of digital broadcast is actually very good if you've got a good strong local signal - or a good antenna.) Our local cable company (Cox) has the monopoly on local service (thanks to bribing the city council). Now they're all digital, and scrambling more and more of their channels unless you rent their box. Since my wife and I watch so little content (local news), we're interested in finding alternate streaming services that can take the place of what we formerly got via cable. I'm thinking that to get what we want, though, we may have to buy a fully-featured package of channels, most of which we don't want at all. The channels we "must have" include: the three local channels (only one of which still broadcasts over the air) the History channel the Science channel PBS the Animal Planet channel National Geographic the Weather channel CNN HGTV SyFy Smithsonian channel Discovery As you can tell, we aren't much into sports. I don't mind buying a package to get the channels I want, but I don't want to have to buy two or three packages, most of which bundle dozens of channels that I don't care about. Now that said, I understand the economics of bundling. Many of the channels in the bundle pay the distributor to carry them, and that defrays the cost of the package. In fact, for most packages, one would pay MORE for "just the channels that you want." My movie needs can be handled via Roku streaming. So where does one go for a comprehensive selection of streaming channels? Thanks - Boomzilla |
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Post by millst on Dec 22, 2015 10:43:03 GMT -5
Given your list, I think you're stuck with cable/sat. The biggest single source of a many streaming channels I've seen is Sling TV and they don't cover half of what you want. By the time you are done piecemealing that list together, you'll end up spending more for less convenience.
Buying a TiVo with lifetime service would let you own the box instead of renting. Switching to satellite, you're still going to end up renting a box, but can probably get a deal on a year or two. I doubt the cost is significantly different in the long term.
-tm
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klinemj
Emo VIPs 
Official Emofest Scribe
Posts: 15,100
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Post by klinemj on Dec 22, 2015 14:40:47 GMT -5
I like your channel selection...other than CNN. I try to avoid the major cable news options...too 1-sided. And repetitive
Mark
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Post by audiobill on Dec 22, 2015 14:46:26 GMT -5
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Post by Loop 7 on Dec 22, 2015 15:07:49 GMT -5
In terms of the streaming apps for ATV, Roku, etc, many require users to have an existing cable/sat/FIOS subscription to those same channels. Some networks, like HBO, are moving to standalone app services where a cable/sat subscription is not needed. So, many of the apps are more for convenience and VOD than a path toward saving money. We are in a period of flux right now regarding TV. I do recommend you look into Dish Network or DirecTV pricing. |
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Post by Axis on Dec 22, 2015 15:18:48 GMT -5
Boom go out and buy one through eight seasons of Big Bang Theory. You sound like one of the guys to me. You are smart Boom and after you learn all the characters quirks for this show, it is hilarious.
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Post by Gary Cook on Dec 22, 2015 15:46:20 GMT -5
the History channel the Science channel PBS the Animal Planet channel National Geographic the Weather channel CNN HGTV SyFy Smithsonian channel Discovery Wow, with the exclusion of SyFy all of the other channels, which we have on Foxtel (our monopoly service for all of Australia), I never watch  Plus movies that I don't feel the need to own on BD are watched on the ATV4 via Netflix  At least there is some audio gear and music that we have in common  Merry Xmas Gary |
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Post by Boomzilla on Dec 22, 2015 15:49:19 GMT -5
Given your list, I think you're stuck with cable/sat... After research, I concur. I'll pony up the extra $$ for the cable box, and finance it by cutting my AT&T land line telephone. Between cellular phone and the cable-based phone service, I have two different phone providers - no longer need the $50 / month land line. |
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Post by Bonzo on Dec 22, 2015 16:25:36 GMT -5
In many locations, the various satellite systems are plagued with outages under various conditions. - The dishes tend to get flaky when there's heavy snow or rain. - If you have a dish installed in winter, it may work fine, but reception may get very poor when the trees green up - because foliage blocks the reception. - The dishes are very fussy about physical location - so, for example, if your dish is mounted on a pole, and the pole shakes in the wind, your picture may drop out. First time I'm going to absolutely have to argue with you here. Most people who use these typical excuses to debunk the dish are just ignorant, or they work for the cable companies. We have had Prime Star or Direct TV in our family since Prime Star started, like what, 20+ years ago. Working backwards to your comments: - What kind of pole are you talking about here? A fishing pole? Give me a break Keith. A properly installed dish goes on something secure, not something that shakes with the wind. Professional installers would never mount it to something like you are talking about. Actually, at DirecTV anymore, they are only allowed to use a very short pole (like 3 - 4 feet) that is secured with concrete, or to the roof of your house, which is stabilized with a 3 bar mounting system. I have an old 70's style OTA antenna tower that is like 30 feet tall. I had my old non-HD dish mounted to that about 12 feet up and never had any problems. When the installer came to install my new HD dish, he wasn't even allowed to put it there. Your comment is a total non-issue. - The biggest problem that anyone should allow themselves to worry about with a dish is physical location in relation to Southwest. Some people just don't have line of sight no matter where they might put the dish (like city dwellers etc). But your winter excuse is pretty lame. Any professional installer has dealt with this sort of issue many times, and knows to compensate for it. If there is any issue, I'm sure notes are made and the installer would be willing to come back and make adjustments or move the dish in that event. There is also tree trimming (on your property). So this issue is basically only related to where you live. Your comment is an exaggeration; a stretch. - Yes, rain & snow can cause issues, that is true. (Actually it's not as much of the rain as it is heavy storm activity. The outages usually occur at the very beginning of a storm where it's most intense, many times before the rain even starts). But the impact this has is very much highly over exaggerated. If I took a wild guess I'd say my dish might go out 5 - 10 times a year. On average I'd guess each outage is like 5 - 10 minutes. Let's go way crazy high and say it's 30 times a year at 30 minutes each (which is NEVER the case). 365 days at 24 hours per day is 8760 hours per year. 30 times a year at 30 minutes each is 15 hours. 15 hours divided by 8760 hours is 0.171%. Even if all those 15 hours of outage happened exactly during an average of say 4 hours of actual viewing per day (which they wouldn't), that's only 1%. I can almost guarantee the number is lower than that, far lower (not to mention all my cable TV friends complain about outages all the time, so the odds are equal in my book). The biggest culprit I have encountered is wet heavy snow (as sometimes thick ice). This WILL knock out the signal. Not by falling, but by collecting on the dish itself. What's required is to physically wipe off the dish. So my recommendation is that when ever possible, if you live in an area with heavy snow, have the dish installed on the ground so it's easily accessible. If you can't do that, buy yourself an extender pole at the hardware store that you can attach a brush to. So basically your comments mimic the Cable companies and it's a highly exaggerated cop out of an excuse in my opinion (I relate it to Best Buy sales people (and the like) killing off the sales of Plasma TVs by greatly over emphasizing that they have "BURN IN" and it will ruin your TV). The biggest problem I have in my system is probably the same that cable folks have, and that's the DVR Box itself. It runs like a computer so it does get jammed up and has to be reset on occasion. And as is with all the DVR's, some programs don't get recorded properly due to the guides and the way they get improperly programmed. The only thing I don't love about DirecTV is the price. But again, I'm not sure you can't do much better elsewhere. I haven't bothered looking lately because Dish Network and Cable just can't compete with our priorities. Every single time we come home from vacation or someone else's house we say out loud, "Wow! DirecTV so much better." Ergonomics, the guide, channels, the PQ, the sound; it's all noticeably better to us. |
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KeithL
Administrator
Posts: 10,274
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Post by KeithL on Dec 22, 2015 17:26:20 GMT -5
Obviously, different people have different experiences, with different companies, and in different areas. Where I lived on Long Island (in NY) we were one of the first neighborhoods in the country to get cable (we were some sort of "prime demographic"). In the beginning the service was pretty bad, but, by the time I left thirty years later, it was very good. In my neighborhood, we had a lot of tree coverage, which tended to make getting clear line-of-sight from some houses very difficult. Because of this it wasn't at all unusual to see poles up to about ten feet long on roofs with dishes at the end..... and, even with a tripod mount, a pole that long will flex and, more importantly, twist - enough to throw off the aiming of the dish the degree or two necessary to cause reception issues. Most of our dish installations - for the first few years at least - were done by local subcontractors and, apparently, many of them had little experience with satellite dishes. On my block alone there were several dishes which worked fine in the winter, while the trees were all bare, but became virtually useless when the spring foliage blocked their line of sight. Some people had their dishes re-mounted, while some simply didn't have any clear line of sight when the trees had their leaves... and a lot of people simply gave up and went back to cable. (Obviously the dish companies have upped their game since then.) Please note that I'm not saying that cable is by any means perfect. Where I lived in NY, our cable installation was about 30 years old, so the companies had pretty well "gotten all the bugs out", and it was very reliable. When it was first offered, the cable service was pretty bad there too. Here in Tennessee, I find the service to be somewhat less reliable than it was in NY, but still not bad. Of course, where the dish is subject to individual blockages, the cable is more subject to area-wide outages which can affect a lot of people. And satellite is available to a few other people I know in other states who are, at least so far, "too far out to get cable". Personally, since my highest priority is a fast reliable Internet connection, which the dish companies don't offer at all, I really haven't kept track of their other offerings. However, I can say that the latest cable hardware here in Franklin, with their new whiz-bang X1 box, offers 1080p/60 video, which actually looks like it's running at a decent bit rate, and very rarely pixellates. The old Scientific Atlanta DVR boxes were rather prone to faulting, and getting stuck in FF or REW, but the new X1 DVR boxes seem to be quite stable. The DVR picture now looks about as good as the "live" picture and the menu is also a lot prettier (although I've never seen a guide that I actually liked - from anyone.) Personally, my biggest current complaint is the incessant commercials, previews, and "bottom thirds" - which seem to be put there by the individual stations - and are why, for any movie I consider important, I still usually invest in an actual piece of plastic.... where all I have to worry about are... the damn previews and all the other crap they put on those nowadays. (Sadly, the only way I've found to entirely avoid those is to use discs and a computer.) In many locations, the various satellite systems are plagued with outages under various conditions. - The dishes tend to get flaky when there's heavy snow or rain. - If you have a dish installed in winter, it may work fine, but reception may get very poor when the trees green up - because foliage blocks the reception. - The dishes are very fussy about physical location - so, for example, if your dish is mounted on a pole, and the pole shakes in the wind, your picture may drop out. First time I'm going to absolutely have to argue with you here. Most people who use these typical excuses to debunk the dish are just ignorant, or they work for the cable companies. We have had Prime Star or Direct TV in our family since Prime Star started, like what, 20+ years ago. Working backwards to your comments: - What kind of pole are you talking about here? A fishing pole? Give me a break Keith. A properly installed dish goes on something secure, not something that shakes with the wind. Professional installers would never mount it to something like you are talking about. Actually, at DirecTV anymore, they are only allowed to use a very short pole (like 3 - 4 feet) that is secured with concrete, or to the roof of your house, which is stabilized with a 3 bar mounting system. I have an old 70's style OTA antenna tower that is like 30 feet tall. I had my old non-HD dish mounted to that about 12 feet up and never had any problems. When the installer came to install my new HD dish, he wasn't even allowed to put it there. Your comment is a total non-issue. - The biggest problem that anyone should allow themselves to worry about with a dish is physical location in relation to Southwest. Some people just don't have line of sight no matter where they might put the dish (like city dwellers etc). But your winter excuse is pretty lame. Any professional installer has dealt with this sort of issue many times, and knows to compensate for it. If there is any issue, I'm sure notes are made and the installer would be willing to come back and make adjustments or move the dish in that event. There is also tree trimming (on your property). So this issue is basically only related to where you live. Your comment is an exaggeration; a stretch. - Yes, rain & snow can cause issues, that is true. (Actually it's not as much of the rain as it is heavy storm activity. The outages usually occur at the very beginning of a storm where it's most intense, many times before the rain even starts). But the impact this has is very much highly over exaggerated. If I took a wild guess I'd say my dish might go out 5 - 10 times a year. On average I'd guess each outage is like 5 - 10 minutes. Let's go way crazy high and say it's 30 times a year at 30 minutes each (which is NEVER the case). 365 days at 24 hours per day is 8760 hours per year. 30 times a year at 30 minutes each is 15 hours. 15 hours divided by 8760 hours is 0.171%. Even if all those 15 hours of outage happened exactly during an average of say 4 hours of actual viewing per day (which they wouldn't), that's only 1%. I can almost guarantee the number is lower than that, far lower (not to mention all my cable TV friends complain about outages all the time, so the odds are equal in my book). The biggest culprit I have encountered is wet heavy snow (as sometimes thick ice). This WILL knock out the signal. Not by falling, but by collecting on the dish itself. What's required is to physically wipe off the dish. So my recommendation is that when ever possible, if you live in an area with heavy snow, have the dish installed on the ground so it's easily accessible. If you can't do that, buy yourself an extender pole at the hardware store that you can attach a brush to. So basically your comments mimic the Cable companies and it's a highly exaggerated cop out of an excuse in my opinion (I relate it to Best Buy sales people (and the like) killing off the sales of Plasma TVs by greatly over emphasizing that they have "BURN IN" and it will ruin your TV). The biggest problem I have in my system is probably the same that cable folks have, and that's the DVR Box itself. It runs like a computer so it does get jammed up and has to be reset on occasion. And as is with all the DVR's, some programs don't get recorded properly due to the guides and the way they get improperly programmed. The only thing I don't love about DirecTV is the price. But again, I'm not sure you can't do much better elsewhere. I haven't bothered looking lately because Dish Network and Cable just can't compete with our priorities. Every single time we come home from vacation or someone else's house we say out loud, "Wow! DirecTV so much better." Ergonomics, the guide, channels, the PQ, the sound; it's all noticeably better to us. |
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Post by Bonzo on Dec 22, 2015 17:45:55 GMT -5
Personally, since my highest priority is a fast reliable Internet connection, which the dish companies don't offer at all, I really haven't kept track of their other offerings. I'm sure it's not fast enough for the real computer folks, but that's changing since AT&T and DirecTV are now one. You can bundle U-Verse Wifi with your D*TV service. It's not holy crap fast, but for people like my Mom who lives out in the sticks by Knoxville, it's certainly not bad. |
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