Posted on 11/01/2017 9:53:28 AM PDT by oh8eleven
Cord-cutting, or at least the speed at which people are ditching pay TV, is on track to be the biggest upset of the year. There’s finally a collection of cheap-ish streaming services widely available, and as you’d imagine, people are jumping ship from cable as fast as humanly possible.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
$140 here with crappy cable and internet. Waaay too much but “ruality” limits our options, too.
Two months ago I went to my local cable office to drop the two premium channels.
The clerk dropped them and said she would bundle my internet and tv (I have basic and the advanced tier). She said that would reduce my monthly TV-Internet bill by about $50.
I was shocked. I told her that was the first time in the 18 years I have had cable that the cable company ever reduced my bill voluntarily.
She did say that the reduced bill would be for 1 year and I would need to contact them in a year to see what bundles would be available then.
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Try to negotiate with your provider. They are all hurting, apparently. They, like mine, might be more susceptible to reducing costs rather than losing customers.
Not in my area
I used to feel the need to keep the landline for emergencies but not after it went up to $70/mo. Now have that plug in the wall AT&T wireless for twenty something.
LOL, yeah the Hallmark channel. My wife and daughter really like watching that.
Oh well, it was a thought. Their service sucks anyways...............
The modem IS wifi and I have two smart TVs ... NETLIX for $11 bucks a month and Comcast internet and land line for $94 ... $105 for internet, movies, and phone.
TV is local with a box I readjust every weather change ... after $20 box two years ago ... local and some other channels for free.
We don't live on the phone or in front of a TV but when we want something ... it's there.
All I see on youtube are selected videos for reruns or paid subscriptions for live streaming. If I have to pay separately for each channel, I might as well have cable.
We cut that cord yesterday :-)
Dish Network..115.00/mo
Everyone is now very happy after I showed all how to watch anything on our fiber internet :-)
We pay 70/mo for internet but we offset all of that by using the free long-distance phone from Google Voice..not to mention the new savings of 115.00
I have several free phone numbers running, one is our old number in El Paso..so old friends can reach me with a local call. I pick up the calls on 15.00 android smart phones connected by WiFi.
YUP ... and we watch Philippine news as well.
I’d go for a la carte. 4 channels instead of 200 garbage channels. FOX News, CBS during prime time, ION for old police shows and one Hallmark channel for the movies.
The modem is wifi and my smart TV's allows internet viewing on my 42" screen(s).
Netflix foe $11 a mo and a landline.
All tolled; $105 for TV, internet and landline
re: ala carte
The first company, Internet/cable/satellite, to offer true ala carte can run the others out of business.
Too many of the streaming TV services are following the cable/satellite TV model — offering groups of channels, rather than true ala carte.
More streaming TV services are coming online. By the time a customers adds this tier for X and that one for W and another for Z, they are getting into the level of costs one would pay for cable/satellite TV — without the reliability.
Yes. You nailed it. Providing TV service in whatever format costs a lot of money. There is no free ride. You eventually pay one way or the other. It all depends on one’s individual needs and wants. Also you need a solid Internet connection. I have seen amazon streaming look like crap at times since it is using best effort Internet CoS.
Directv peaked about 2001. Has been on a down run ever since. Terrible service. On demand doesn’t work. Multiple TV’s a mess. Way too much for today’s PC programming and infomercials.
I always thought I would like them. We just quit too.
YouTube. Search for “Fox News live”
At around $100 for 5 years worth of phone service that pans out to about $1.66 per month and only have to deal with the bill once every 5 years.
I cut the cord a couple of years ago but have seen my high speed Internet bill steadily rise. At present it's about $68 a month which is the same cable company I used to pay for TV. Combined with Kodi and an app or two; TV, Internet, and Phone are all covered for under $70 a month and unless I'm watching something streaming live; no commercials. I really like that part. The only downside is if the Internet goes down; so does my landline but I keep a pay by minute cell phone which I pay $100 per year to maintain since I don't use it that much. For most calls I use the Magic Jack phone line. My Internet company doesn't like that I use another phone service but so far there's been nothing they can do about it. They would rather me pay them a couple hundred bucks a year instead of the $20 a year I pay now. I figure I'm paying a premium price for the Internet; what I do with it as long as it isn't hurting anyone or something weird like pedo stuff - I should be able to use it as I see fit.
I highly recommend using a VPN service if anyone is planning on watching TV via the Internet simply because it's a safer more private way of being on the Internet in general. People use IP addresses for lots of nefarious purposes like hacking your system or router. There is a downside though; my 50 MB download speed drops to 20-25 MB download speed when using the VPN which is still fast just not as fast. Most times I don't even notice the difference because there are bottlenecks all over the Net which slow access times down to less than 20 MB. If you shop around you can find a VPN for $50 for two years of service.
Internet sites are becoming more of a pain to stop ads than anything else. A lot of them want me to turn off my ad blocker or whitelist their site so they can push ads. I get that they make their money from ads which allows them to maintain the site but it's still irritating sometimes. Oh well; round and round we go. :)
I called to cut my bill a couple weeks ago. The customer service person helpfully quoted me a price for a reduced package that was actually more than what I was currently paying.
I told him to just cancel my cable entirely.
If you even HAVE cable then you are not really rural.
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