I just got rid of DirecTV and am down to a few streaming services. Fubo TV is okay because it gives me MSG, but I cant find anything with the YES Network. How do you cord cutters watch YES?
I dont disagree with your post, which is why I said I focus on value rather than bottom line price.
But when people reference Netflix & Amzn Prime that shouldn't count b/c most everyone who has those services would have them with cable or with a streaming service.
But the other things you note - having to buy indiv services to make up for what is lost by switching from cable, totally agree with you
Question: Does anyone us a VPN to get around geo restrictions?
I'd be interested in getting an account that would let me stream get local coverage of Mets, Knicks and local coverage of the Giants, but I'm way, waaaay out of market here in SoCal.
RE: Question: Does anyone us a VPN to get around geo restrictions?
I'd be interested in getting an account that would let me stream get local coverage of Mets, Knicks and local coverage of the Giants, but I'm way, waaaay out of market here in SoCal.
I do it at work. I work for a foreign organization, and our office is routed through their VPN at the mothership... so to stream local radio, I use my own VPN on top of their's to get 'back into' the United States and then can stream local radio.
with cutting the cord is not replacing it with streaming live tv. That's still expensive because it's essentially cable on a different platform.
I don't have YTTV or Fubo or whatever. We have Netflix and Disney Plus, and then we alternate between Hulu and HBO depending on what's airing. Sports I find live streams.
But my watching habits are MUCH different than when I had cable. I was more of a browse and watch whatever shitty game was on ESPN before. But when we cut the cord, I basically only ever watch Knicks/Giants. Sometimes Rangers, sometimes Yankees (but MLB.tv from Tmobile takes care of that).
I also notice that a lot of people include the cost of internet when factoring in cable vs. cord cutting. I mean, when I had cable, we had internet and Netflix as well. So that's how I determined the bottom line.
But to each their own. You def don't need ALL the services EVERY month of the year. If you're interested in savings, there's savings to be had. But I think a lot depends on your income and your watching habits.
i cannot figure out the streams for live sports everyone talks
I tried the Reddit one for the Nets/Sixers game a few weeks back that was suggested on BBI and it may as well have been in Japanese.
no idea how to actually access them.
First things first, make sure your browser has good Adblock. I use uBlock Origin, and AdBlock or Adblock Plus.
From there, you can go to sites like SportSurge or BilasSports and find your sport then the game. Bilas is a little easier to use, you just select your game and then play the video after the game has started.
If you have Chromecast, you can right click on the stream and select "Cast" and cast it to the TV or device of your choosing.
doesn't move the needle for me, that's probably the maximum i'd save cutting the cord but I'd also lose a bunch of content, YES included. This was always going to happen with cord cutting, it just happened faster than people thought/wanted it to.
I'd pretty much just pay that savings for YES alone if it were an option.
So you're saving minimum 240 and max 360 a year. You can get MLB gamepass (all teams) for $130 and a VPN for the year for $60. If you live out of market, you don't even
need the VPN. Maybe that's not worth the hassle, but it's an option.
That's a pain in the ass to save $50 a year. If you just keep cable/fios/dtv, you can watch the Yanks and still flip channels during commercial breaks.
I get that every dollar saved is still a dollar, but at some point the savings vs. inconvenience requires a really miserly position to be worthwhile.
Not to mention, you can probably get things like free HBO via the retention team of whoever your traditional TV provider is, which more than offsets that savings if you were going to subscribe to HBOMax anyway.
if for some reason I don't like it or it doesn't work well for me, i'll then have to get my cable back and I can see that being a giant pain, and will also lose the lifetime pricelock I have.
I'd only watch the Yankees anyway so the full MLB package wouldn't be a value add. Plus I get NESN and SYN with cable so I've got the games in the Northeast covered just in case, along with whatever ESPN plays on sunday night baseball.
I had gone down to one Fios box in my house and had Hulu Live in the bedrooms and basement, and had downgraded my Fios channels to basically cover whatever Hulu didn't. I just recently took advantage of the free Hulu (w/ commercials, no live content) that VZW was offering in the Disney bundle for my cell phone, got rid of Hulu Live, upgraded my Fios channel lineup to include everything, added the Fios mini boxes (might as well be Apple TV hardware, they're that small and require no coax wiring) to my bedrooms, and I'll stick to streaming services in the basement, which is really just our home gym anyway, so even having Pluto available down there is fine - it's not like I'm going to hop on the bike while there's a game on.
My home office has also kind of become my de facto man cave, so I wanted to make sure that I had the full suite of sports up here, and it's nice to have multi-room DVR again. On top of that, I'm saving money by just leaning into Fios, and I don't have to sacrifice any channels or content in the process.
Granted, I wasn't a full cord-cutter in the first place, so it's easy to save money compared to an attempt to pair live streaming with traditional cable (or Fios, in my case). But I think my use case might be pretty common - a customer who half-asses the cord cutting process to avoid losing any elements of an eclectic content mix (especially between Mrs. Dunk's preferences and my own) and has so many different streaming services that the cost savings, if they exist at all, are nominal. And I don't think people properly valuate their own inconvenience. I'm not jumping through hoops to change apps for every different thing I want to watch so I can save what? $500 a year? There are other things I can cut back on to achieve those savings if necessary.
and I value live sports over programing, so I prefer having cable so I don't need to mix and match services to get all of the sports networks I want. I don't have a Netflix account or Hulu or Disney + (or any other + out there). Every year when my promotional cable pricing expires, I call up the provider and threaten to leave and get the promotion extended for another year. I've been going through the same routine since I've owned a home.
streaming services get stricter with their screen cap (number of screens to be logged into) and overall account sharing. They are letting it slide right now but I'm not sure how long that will last. I can see more expensive "family plans" to offset this in the near term, and act as a soft bridge to flat out blocking multiple screens on different IP's at the same time.
with cutting the cord is not replacing it with streaming live tv. That's still expensive because it's essentially cable on a different platform.
I don't have YTTV or Fubo or whatever. We have Netflix and Disney Plus, and then we alternate between Hulu and HBO depending on what's airing. Sports I find live streams.
But my watching habits are MUCH different than when I had cable. I was more of a browse and watch whatever shitty game was on ESPN before. But when we cut the cord, I basically only ever watch Knicks/Giants. Sometimes Rangers, sometimes Yankees (but MLB.tv from Tmobile takes care of that).
I also notice that a lot of people include the cost of internet when factoring in cable vs. cord cutting. I mean, when I had cable, we had internet and Netflix as well. So that's how I determined the bottom line.
But to each their own. You def don't need ALL the services EVERY month of the year. If you're interested in savings, there's savings to be had. But I think a lot depends on your income and your watching habits.
Many are factoring in internet because often when you unbundle TV from the cable provider, the cost for internet increases. This cuts into any savings.
streaming services get stricter with their screen cap (number of screens to be logged into) and overall account sharing. They are letting it slide right now but I'm not sure how long that will last. I can see more expensive "family plans" to offset this in the near term, and act as a soft bridge to flat out blocking multiple screens on different IP's at the same time.
I think it's only a matter of time before this happens (and is enforced). And when it does, cue the outcry from the cord-cutters that the big bad media companies are out to get them.
The shame of it is that there was a real opportunity with cord-cutting, that cable companies would offer more competitive a la carte pricing to allow customers to assemble their own bundles (and stop paying for channels they never watch, but those carriage fees are baked into their monthly bill), and that would have resulted in legitimate savings without having to piecemeal content. Alas, the cord-cutters went too far, cut too many cords, stole content along the way, and now the pendulum may swing back with minimal changes to the previous cable infrastructure.
As usual, humans can't be trusted to behave themselves.
streaming services get stricter with their screen cap (number of screens to be logged into) and overall account sharing. They are letting it slide right now but I'm not sure how long that will last. I can see more expensive "family plans" to offset this in the near term, and act as a soft bridge to flat out blocking multiple screens on different IP's at the same time.
I think it's only a matter of time before this happens (and is enforced). And when it does, cue the outcry from the cord-cutters that the big bad media companies are out to get them.
The shame of it is that there was a real opportunity with cord-cutting, that cable companies would offer more competitive a la carte pricing to allow customers to assemble their own bundles (and stop paying for channels they never watch, but those carriage fees are baked into their monthly bill), and that would have resulted in legitimate savings without having to piecemeal content. Alas, the cord-cutters went too far, cut too many cords, stole content along the way, and now the pendulum may swing back with minimal changes to the previous cable infrastructure.
As usual, humans can't be trusted to behave themselves.
I mean, I agree with almost everything that you said, but I am confused at how you landed on it being the consumers fault.
Cable companies stuck to their guns with an antiquated business model and bet on the fact that everyone would just have to deal with their shitty business practices.
streaming services get stricter with their screen cap (number of screens to be logged into) and overall account sharing. They are letting it slide right now but I'm not sure how long that will last. I can see more expensive "family plans" to offset this in the near term, and act as a soft bridge to flat out blocking multiple screens on different IP's at the same time.
I think it's only a matter of time before this happens (and is enforced). And when it does, cue the outcry from the cord-cutters that the big bad media companies are out to get them.
The shame of it is that there was a real opportunity with cord-cutting, that cable companies would offer more competitive a la carte pricing to allow customers to assemble their own bundles (and stop paying for channels they never watch, but those carriage fees are baked into their monthly bill), and that would have resulted in legitimate savings without having to piecemeal content. Alas, the cord-cutters went too far, cut too many cords, stole content along the way, and now the pendulum may swing back with minimal changes to the previous cable infrastructure.
As usual, humans can't be trusted to behave themselves.
I mean, I agree with almost everything that you said, but I am confused at how you landed on it being the consumers fault.
Cable companies stuck to their guns with an antiquated business model and bet on the fact that everyone would just have to deal with their shitty business practices.
What is the consumers' fault was the login sharing, which will probably accelerate the streaming services' response to lock down accounts and/or geo-fence multiple logins based on IP addresses. That's happening quicker than it would have taken for traditional cable providers to feel enough pain to consider a la carte pricing.
So the cord-cutting will be curtailed before the cable industry is forced to correct itself - because customers took advantage of every single loophole (I'm looking squarely at Gen Z consumers here), including what amounts to a borderline theft of service by sharing logins, we may not see the full pendulum swing back toward cable companies needing to lure customers back with enticing offers and a complete reimagining of the way they package their content.
I think that train has left the station with the streaming services and all the media conglomerates are going that way. I think they probably could have secured their place among services by offering a la carte channel selection, but it feels more and more that that's what the streaming services are. A la Carte. Buy one, drop one, change one. And they need tentpole shows to get people to keep them.
I mean, you already have some of the ISPs trying to capture marketshare with their own streaming service, but I think the natural reaction will just be the increasing cost of internet and implementing data charges. Comcast has already started where they're charging if you go over a certain data limit, so if that is successful for them, I'm sure it'll become more and more commonplace.
The shared login issue... I know that it's been talked about by some of the main streaming services (I read an interview with an exec from HBO Go, so they've got their eyes on it). I'm sure as soon as they're able, they'll close that loophole. And if not, they'll keep inflating the price of their services.
a la carte was never realistic for cable companies
their prices being affordable hangs completely on their bundled content. If you unbundle 25% of the content you might as well just unbundle the entire thing because the price will no longer make sense or be competitive.
Limiting logins to one screen at a time is not hard. Every app on the planet has done it forever. If the streaming apps wanted to do it, they could easily do it.
HBO LET'S people share logins. Why? I don't know... my guess is that they're getting tons and tons of actionable data from it.
When they are ready to make their move and lock it down, they will. Almost every other app, including Netflix, already limits the screens that can watch content at one time.
I actually don’t think cord cutting saves me any money anymore. Between what I pay for internet, FuboTV, Hulu, Disney+, etc, I think I am around what I was paying for cable. Especially once FuboTV stopped carrying YES. I use my in-laws’ cable login and watch Yankee games on the Fox Sports app. That’s what it’s really about these days, networking with friends and family to use each others’ logins. I use my in-laws cable account for Fox Sports Go, they use my Disney +, I use my parents HBO Max, they use my FuboTV...ultimately, I still like not having cable. It simplifies things in terms of hardware in my house, but financially, it isn’t as lucrative as it was a few years ago. FuboTV has gone up $20 a month in the past year.
I will suggest you should try the free trial of ustvnow360 they are offering several channels and DVR. ustvnow360 - ( New Window )
But when people reference Netflix & Amzn Prime that shouldn't count b/c most everyone who has those services would have them with cable or with a streaming service.
But the other things you note - having to buy indiv services to make up for what is lost by switching from cable, totally agree with you
I do it at work. I work for a foreign organization, and our office is routed through their VPN at the mothership... so to stream local radio, I use my own VPN on top of their's to get 'back into' the United States and then can stream local radio.
I don't have YTTV or Fubo or whatever. We have Netflix and Disney Plus, and then we alternate between Hulu and HBO depending on what's airing. Sports I find live streams.
But my watching habits are MUCH different than when I had cable. I was more of a browse and watch whatever shitty game was on ESPN before. But when we cut the cord, I basically only ever watch Knicks/Giants. Sometimes Rangers, sometimes Yankees (but MLB.tv from Tmobile takes care of that).
I also notice that a lot of people include the cost of internet when factoring in cable vs. cord cutting. I mean, when I had cable, we had internet and Netflix as well. So that's how I determined the bottom line.
But to each their own. You def don't need ALL the services EVERY month of the year. If you're interested in savings, there's savings to be had. But I think a lot depends on your income and your watching habits.
I tried the Reddit one for the Nets/Sixers game a few weeks back that was suggested on BBI and it may as well have been in Japanese.
no idea how to actually access them.
I tried the Reddit one for the Nets/Sixers game a few weeks back that was suggested on BBI and it may as well have been in Japanese.
no idea how to actually access them.
First things first, make sure your browser has good Adblock. I use uBlock Origin, and AdBlock or Adblock Plus.
From there, you can go to sites like SportSurge or BilasSports and find your sport then the game. Bilas is a little easier to use, you just select your game and then play the video after the game has started.
If you have Chromecast, you can right click on the stream and select "Cast" and cast it to the TV or device of your choosing.
Quote:
doesn't move the needle for me, that's probably the maximum i'd save cutting the cord but I'd also lose a bunch of content, YES included. This was always going to happen with cord cutting, it just happened faster than people thought/wanted it to.
I'd pretty much just pay that savings for YES alone if it were an option.
So you're saving minimum 240 and max 360 a year. You can get MLB gamepass (all teams) for $130 and a VPN for the year for $60. If you live out of market, you don't even
need the VPN. Maybe that's not worth the hassle, but it's an option.
That's a pain in the ass to save $50 a year. If you just keep cable/fios/dtv, you can watch the Yanks and still flip channels during commercial breaks.
I get that every dollar saved is still a dollar, but at some point the savings vs. inconvenience requires a really miserly position to be worthwhile.
Not to mention, you can probably get things like free HBO via the retention team of whoever your traditional TV provider is, which more than offsets that savings if you were going to subscribe to HBOMax anyway.
I'd only watch the Yankees anyway so the full MLB package wouldn't be a value add. Plus I get NESN and SYN with cable so I've got the games in the Northeast covered just in case, along with whatever ESPN plays on sunday night baseball.
I had gone down to one Fios box in my house and had Hulu Live in the bedrooms and basement, and had downgraded my Fios channels to basically cover whatever Hulu didn't. I just recently took advantage of the free Hulu (w/ commercials, no live content) that VZW was offering in the Disney bundle for my cell phone, got rid of Hulu Live, upgraded my Fios channel lineup to include everything, added the Fios mini boxes (might as well be Apple TV hardware, they're that small and require no coax wiring) to my bedrooms, and I'll stick to streaming services in the basement, which is really just our home gym anyway, so even having Pluto available down there is fine - it's not like I'm going to hop on the bike while there's a game on.
My home office has also kind of become my de facto man cave, so I wanted to make sure that I had the full suite of sports up here, and it's nice to have multi-room DVR again. On top of that, I'm saving money by just leaning into Fios, and I don't have to sacrifice any channels or content in the process.
Granted, I wasn't a full cord-cutter in the first place, so it's easy to save money compared to an attempt to pair live streaming with traditional cable (or Fios, in my case). But I think my use case might be pretty common - a customer who half-asses the cord cutting process to avoid losing any elements of an eclectic content mix (especially between Mrs. Dunk's preferences and my own) and has so many different streaming services that the cost savings, if they exist at all, are nominal. And I don't think people properly valuate their own inconvenience. I'm not jumping through hoops to change apps for every different thing I want to watch so I can save what? $500 a year? There are other things I can cut back on to achieve those savings if necessary.
I don't have YTTV or Fubo or whatever. We have Netflix and Disney Plus, and then we alternate between Hulu and HBO depending on what's airing. Sports I find live streams.
But my watching habits are MUCH different than when I had cable. I was more of a browse and watch whatever shitty game was on ESPN before. But when we cut the cord, I basically only ever watch Knicks/Giants. Sometimes Rangers, sometimes Yankees (but MLB.tv from Tmobile takes care of that).
I also notice that a lot of people include the cost of internet when factoring in cable vs. cord cutting. I mean, when I had cable, we had internet and Netflix as well. So that's how I determined the bottom line.
But to each their own. You def don't need ALL the services EVERY month of the year. If you're interested in savings, there's savings to be had. But I think a lot depends on your income and your watching habits.
I think it's only a matter of time before this happens (and is enforced). And when it does, cue the outcry from the cord-cutters that the big bad media companies are out to get them.
The shame of it is that there was a real opportunity with cord-cutting, that cable companies would offer more competitive a la carte pricing to allow customers to assemble their own bundles (and stop paying for channels they never watch, but those carriage fees are baked into their monthly bill), and that would have resulted in legitimate savings without having to piecemeal content. Alas, the cord-cutters went too far, cut too many cords, stole content along the way, and now the pendulum may swing back with minimal changes to the previous cable infrastructure.
As usual, humans can't be trusted to behave themselves.
Quote:
streaming services get stricter with their screen cap (number of screens to be logged into) and overall account sharing. They are letting it slide right now but I'm not sure how long that will last. I can see more expensive "family plans" to offset this in the near term, and act as a soft bridge to flat out blocking multiple screens on different IP's at the same time.
I think it's only a matter of time before this happens (and is enforced). And when it does, cue the outcry from the cord-cutters that the big bad media companies are out to get them.
The shame of it is that there was a real opportunity with cord-cutting, that cable companies would offer more competitive a la carte pricing to allow customers to assemble their own bundles (and stop paying for channels they never watch, but those carriage fees are baked into their monthly bill), and that would have resulted in legitimate savings without having to piecemeal content. Alas, the cord-cutters went too far, cut too many cords, stole content along the way, and now the pendulum may swing back with minimal changes to the previous cable infrastructure.
As usual, humans can't be trusted to behave themselves.
I mean, I agree with almost everything that you said, but I am confused at how you landed on it being the consumers fault.
Cable companies stuck to their guns with an antiquated business model and bet on the fact that everyone would just have to deal with their shitty business practices.
Quote:
In comment 15160559 UConn4523 said:
Quote:
streaming services get stricter with their screen cap (number of screens to be logged into) and overall account sharing. They are letting it slide right now but I'm not sure how long that will last. I can see more expensive "family plans" to offset this in the near term, and act as a soft bridge to flat out blocking multiple screens on different IP's at the same time.
I think it's only a matter of time before this happens (and is enforced). And when it does, cue the outcry from the cord-cutters that the big bad media companies are out to get them.
The shame of it is that there was a real opportunity with cord-cutting, that cable companies would offer more competitive a la carte pricing to allow customers to assemble their own bundles (and stop paying for channels they never watch, but those carriage fees are baked into their monthly bill), and that would have resulted in legitimate savings without having to piecemeal content. Alas, the cord-cutters went too far, cut too many cords, stole content along the way, and now the pendulum may swing back with minimal changes to the previous cable infrastructure.
As usual, humans can't be trusted to behave themselves.
I mean, I agree with almost everything that you said, but I am confused at how you landed on it being the consumers fault.
Cable companies stuck to their guns with an antiquated business model and bet on the fact that everyone would just have to deal with their shitty business practices.
What is the consumers' fault was the login sharing, which will probably accelerate the streaming services' response to lock down accounts and/or geo-fence multiple logins based on IP addresses. That's happening quicker than it would have taken for traditional cable providers to feel enough pain to consider a la carte pricing.
So the cord-cutting will be curtailed before the cable industry is forced to correct itself - because customers took advantage of every single loophole (I'm looking squarely at Gen Z consumers here), including what amounts to a borderline theft of service by sharing logins, we may not see the full pendulum swing back toward cable companies needing to lure customers back with enticing offers and a complete reimagining of the way they package their content.
I mean, you already have some of the ISPs trying to capture marketshare with their own streaming service, but I think the natural reaction will just be the increasing cost of internet and implementing data charges. Comcast has already started where they're charging if you go over a certain data limit, so if that is successful for them, I'm sure it'll become more and more commonplace.
The shared login issue... I know that it's been talked about by some of the main streaming services (I read an interview with an exec from HBO Go, so they've got their eyes on it). I'm sure as soon as they're able, they'll close that loophole. And if not, they'll keep inflating the price of their services.
Limiting logins to one screen at a time is not hard. Every app on the planet has done it forever. If the streaming apps wanted to do it, they could easily do it.
HBO LET'S people share logins. Why? I don't know... my guess is that they're getting tons and tons of actionable data from it.
When they are ready to make their move and lock it down, they will. Almost every other app, including Netflix, already limits the screens that can watch content at one time.
I will suggest you should try the free trial of ustvnow360 they are offering several channels and DVR.
ustvnow360 - ( New Window )