Paul’s Tech Makeover: A Cord-Cutting Update (Premium)

As you may recall, I had decided to rethink the technology we use at home as part of our move to Pennsylvania. Our work revamping the new home’s electrical system was inarguably the most painful and expensive part of this process. But we’ve also struggled to find a cord-cutting solution.

I’ll spare you the gruesome details here, but the short version is that we experimented with PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and Hulu with Live TV before finally giving in and just getting cable TV again. Then, four months into that nightmare, we dropped cable TV for what I hope is the last time ever, and we started using YouTube TV again, this time using a native app on the Apple TV.

But it’s not just YouTube TV. We also use Sling TV, because it offers access to HGTV shows like House Hunters. And, of course, we subscribe to Netflix and other services, too.

This all adds up—which I’ll get to in a moment—but there are other practical problems. Each service/app is a disaster in some way, either from a user experience or functional perspective. And while the collection of services/apps that we currently use is arguably a reasonable replacement for cable TV, you lose some familiar features like the ability to switch instantly between two channels; you can’t do this with most of the services/apps we use. And you certainly can’t do so between apps (quickly or easily).

In the three months or so since we’ve switched (back) to cord-cutting services, we’ve been mostly happy with the decision. And I don’t see a scenario where we go crawling back to cable TV, at least not in this home. But, as always, I am constantly re-evaluating what we use. In part because of the expense of it all. In part because of the complexity of using so many different services. And in part because things change: Apps and services improve, and new offerings are becoming available over time.

So let’s look at each of those things.

First, the cost. Running down the list of the TV/video services for which we are now paying, I see the following:

YouTube TV – $39.99 per month
Sling TV (Orange + Blue plus cloud DVR) – $44.98 per month
Netflix (Premium, Ultra HD) – $13.99 per month
Hulu (Base Plan, No Commercials) – $11.99 per month
Amazon Prime Video – n/a (included with Prime membership)
MLB.TV (Boston Red Sox only) – $89.99 per season

If you break that down, we’re currently paying about $106 per month for streaming services, or about $120 per month if you include MLB.TV and figure on seven months of active viewing. That’s actually not that terrible, especially when you consider that we’d be paying for some of those services—Netflix, Hulu, MLB.TV—even if we were paying for cable TV too.

But there are some savings to be had. The Hulu subscription is potentially temporary, for example; we’ll likely cancel it when the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale ends. That said, we will then probably temporarily pay for Showtime so we can binge watch the new season of Homeland next. We can assume we’ll often have that (or a similar) cost on the monthly tab, I guess.

The more obvious area of savings would be the two TV services, YouTube TV and Sling TV, both of which are about $40 per month. I could save a bit of money each month right now by downgrading from the Sling TV Orange + Blue plan to Sling Blue, which would still let me stream/record three channels at once (Orange is just one stream). That could cost $24.99 per month, a savings of $15 per month.

(While writing this, I did switch from Orange + Blue to just Blue, saving $15 per month. So the total cost of Sling TV now is $29.98 per month.)

We’d save even more if we could just drop Sling TV. After all, the only real reason we use this service is for the several HGTV shows we watch, often during lunch. If HGTV were just available on YouTube TV, I could cancel Sling TV immediately.

It’s not. But there are some emerging alternatives that might make a single TV service possible. The leading contender—for me, at least—is a relative newcomer called Philo. I evaluated this service recently, but they don’t yet offer an Apple TV app. It’s due any time now, and once that is available, this service will get interesting. (There is already a Roku app.)

Here’s why: Philo only costs $16 to $20 per month, depending on which channel lineup you go with. And because it offers HGTV, it could potentially save me $65 to $85 per month, since I could eliminate both YouTube TV and Sling TV. I will start testing this on Apple TV as soon as I can.

Let me wrap up with the final issue with these services today: Quality. All of these apps, literally all of them, is that they offer their own unique user experience terribleness. Even if using a single TV service were possible, it would be problematic for this reason.

YouTube TV is the best of the lot. And it offers the “purest” cable TV-like experience in many ways. But the biggest issue we have with it, aside from the HGTV thing, is that it lets networks determine whether customers can skip over commercials in “recorded” TV shows. (Really, they add commercials to the stream.) This sucks, and many of the shows we do watch on this service—animated shows on Fox, The Americans—insert unskippable ads. Boo.

Over on Sling TV, many of those same shows can be watched in recorded form without ads, which is great. But the Sling TV user interface is arguably the worst of the lot (at least on Apple TV), with nonsensical and nonsensically-placed buttons. When you finish watching a show, the default action is “stop recording this show” instead of “delete this one episode.” You have to be careful, and that’s dumb.

In any event, that’s where we’re at now: In a holding pattern with YouTube TV and Sling TV, and waiting for that Philo app for Apple TV to emerge. Then we’ll see what happens next.