Paul’s Tech Makeover: Embracing our Cord-Cutting Future (Premium)

Thanks to reader feedback, I’ve expanded the list of cord-cutting services that I will be testing. But it’s become very clear that each has its own issues. And that the move to a cord-cutting service will require the same ability to give up the expectations we have from past solutions and be open to doing things differently.

In other words, it’s all about embracing change. Isn’t it always?

I don’t believe I ever wrote this up, but for a long time, I had planned to write something about the shift one needs to make to adopt any cloud service. The example I thought of at the time was music services, which of course evolved over time as connectivity improved and technologies changed.

That is, in the beginning of the digital music revolution, we were able to rip our audio CDs, curate our digital music collections on our PCs, and then sync that content, including custom playlists, to portable devices like the iPod and other MP3 players.

Over time, of course, the center of this system shifted from the PC to the cloud. And services, like iTunes (Match), Amazon Music, and, later, Google Play Music, let us upload our own music to the cloud so that we could stream it anywhere and sync to devices—increasingly, smartphones—from there.

More recently, subscription cloud services like Spotify and Apple Music have emphasized access to their own cloud music libraries over customers’ own music. Some, like Spotify, in fact, provide almost no way for you to access your own music: It’s all about the services’ libraries, not to mention their curated playlists and other personalization features. (Yes, I know you can technically access your own music on Spotify, but this is not commonly-used and it’s hard to use.)

For younger folk with no personal music collections—like my daughter, for example—this is fine. They don’t need access to ripped CD music from yesteryear, and they are perfectly fine with the 4+ million songs that Spotify and other modern services offer. They’ll never look back because there is nothing to look back to.

For those of us who did, however, rip our own CDs and then carefully back up the subsequent digital music collections and playlists, our options are getting limited in this new world. Groove Music Pass is no more, as you know, and Amazon just this week shut down the ability for its Prime Music customers to upload an unlimited number of their own songs to the service. Apple, through iTunes Match, and Google, with Play Music, are the only viable choices for those who wish to access their own ripped music from the cloud. (Spotify, as noted, is useless in this regard.) One wonders when those services will disappear, frankly.

The point of the article I had meant to write about cloud computing in general and about music services specifically, was that one needed to “think differently” in order to make a successful transition. If you go into these things expecting that everything is going to be just like it was before, but in the cloud, you’re going to be disappointed. You need to be able to live with the fact that some of the things you used to do are no longer possible. And they may never be enabled in that new (cloud-based) thing.

Obviously, I can’t take my own advice.

As I wrote last fall in passing in Paul’s Tech Makeover: Here’s to an Even Smarter 2018 (Premium), my own attempt to use Spotify (and save $10 a month in the process) failed, mostly because it really bothered me that I could access hundreds of songs I’d ripped from CD that were not available in that service’s catalog.

And as I discussed over a series of articles last year, our first try at cutting the cable cord and using online services instead likewise failed.

Thanks to the utter terribleness of cable TV, however, we’re trying again. And in the wake of Paul’s Tech Makeover: Stepping Back from the Cable TV Abyss (Premium) this week, in which I described this second push for cord cutting, I received some interesting feedback from readers. Much of it centered around services that I was ignoring for some reason.

Look, I’m open to anything when it comes to this stuff. One of the many nice things about cord cutting is that nothing you sign-up for is particularly sticky. That is, I can join, quit, and rejoin something like YouTube TV at will. And doing so is much quicker, easier, and less expensive than trying to do the same with cable. (To that point, I will be driving to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania this weekend to physical return my cable TV hardware to RCN.)

But I did want to address some of the feedback. And maybe just discuss, generally, why I believe that cord-cutting services make a lot more sense than cable TV. At least for me.

Thanks to some feedback, I tried both DirecTVNow and Sling TV this week.

DirecTVNow has plans that start at just $35 per month and it looks ideal. Until you realize that they don’t even offer DVR functionality. Right, you can’t even record shows. We time shift everything except, perhaps, for sports. So that is a non-starter and I canceled the service. And even got into a fight with the company when they initially refused to refund my upfront payment. Which is illegal.

SlingTV can be even cheaper: It has plans that start at just $20 per month. But SlingTV is burdened by bizarre and unpredictable capabilities. You can’t even pause or rewind/fast forward some TV shows, even those you’ve recorded. And you have to pretty much test each channel, and I believe each show, to figure out what’s possible. That is unacceptable, but I may keep it anyway if only because HGTV allows pausing and that’s one of the channels we don’t get with YouTube TV.

Other have recommended two services I’d never heard of.

A service called Philo is very inexpensive, starting at just $16 per month, and it does offer HGTV access too. But there’s no Apple TV app at the moment, so I’d have to use another box (Roku, perhaps) or stream from my phone. That’s too complex. So I’ll keep my eye on this one.

I discussed cord-cutting with Andrew on What the Tech this week and he couldn’t remember the name of a sports-oriented service. I believe he meant Fubotv based on a few reader emails. This one is actually a full-featured cord-cutting service with 75+ channels (including, yes, HGTV) that costs $19.99 “for the first month,” which is a bit deceitful. In fact, there’s no way to see the real cost of this service on its homepage. I believe packages start at $35 per month really, which is fine, but why not be honest about this? It does have an Apple TV app. I will look at it.

In using YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, DirecTVNow, and Sling TV this past week, I’m reminded of how painful it is to change. What I want, of course, is something that offers a cable TV-like experience when it comes to a guide, pausing and recording capabilities, and so on. But with less complexity, fewer pointless channels I’ll never watch, and better picture quality.

What I’ve gotten is more complexity through having to use multiple services. And it’s hard to erase years of muscle memory when it comes to cable TV. I’m just used to doing things a certain way.

I suspect this would be near-universal. Like it or not, we’ve been trained, over many decades in some cases, to accept TV as this basically unchanging thing. The number of channels has changed, I guess, but the basic experience is the same today as it was in the 1970s. And the experience on cord-cutting services is only an approximation of that cable experience, for good and bad.

YouTube TV, my current favorite, is low on channel count. But the biggest issue is its guide: There isn’t one, except for a list of what’s on now. You can’t navigate forward in time on any given channel, at least not easily (from the actual guide) and see what’s on next. This is a feature of every traditional cable guide. And I need it.

PlayStation Vue hasn’t updated its UI since I used it last year. I signed up, looked at it, and canceled it again. It’s terrible.

DirectTVNow has a wonderful guide. You just can’t record anything, as noted. That is ridiculous. So I killed that immediately too.

You get the idea.

Ultimately, though, the things I didn’t like about cable are, I think, bigger issues than anything I’ve pointed out here. And the reasons for that are two-fold. One, online services can be and are updated all the time, so the issues I have should be temporary. And, two, the problems with cable TV are endemic, by contrast: They are not going away.

The biggest issue I have with cable, aside from the lousy performance of the hardware and the terrible picture quality—is what I think of as the tyranny of choice. There’s just too much … stuff. Too many channels. Too much useless UI on-screen. Too many choices.

Looking just at the channel lineups, RCN offers over 375 channels where I live, a mix of SD and HD, and with no way to filter out the SD options. This creates a classic case of “hundreds of channels with nothing to watch.” It makes it hard to find something good. It’s like having 100 different salad dressing choices in a supermarket aisle. You only need a several, and its human nature to simply seize up and not make a decision when confronted by this kind of thing. (This is the issue with Netflix, too.)

As bad, there is no easy way to remove the channels I don’t subscribe to, so I will often see something I want to watch in the guide, select it, wait a bit (again, performance issues), and then be told that I do not get that channel. Yes, you can remove channels one by one, but screw that. There should be a way to only display those channels I do get (and then only the HD versions if there are two). Online services only show me what I get.

Anyway. I will keep testing these services and figure out which one—or which mix of services—makes sense for us. It’s a struggle, but I think we’ll get to a happy place soon. Well, a happier place anyway.