Paul’s Tech Makeover: Our TV Defeat (Premium)

As many predicted, and as I had feared, streaming TV services simply aren't ready for prime time. So we've gone crawling back to cable TV.

It wasn't supposed to be this way: As I've written over several articles now in this series, Paul's Tech Makeover: Preparing to Cut the Cord, Paul's Tech Makeover: A Cord-Cutting Update, and finally Paul's Tech Makeover: TV Terribleness, we attempted to cut the cord and use streaming TV services instead of cable.

Charitably, it has been a disaster.

As I've noted in the past, we've used PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and Hulu with Live TV. Of the three, PlayStation Vue is the best, by far. Which is cute, because it sucks.

Hulu with Live TV is terrible. It doesn't even offer a guide, so you can't browse what's available on live TV. Instead, you have to just blunder into weird content areas and---who knows?---You might get lucky and find something live to watch. It's terrible. So we killed that one right away.

(We do, however, maintain a Hulu subscription, you know, one without live TV. We're binge-watching our way through a number of series on the service.)

YouTube TV is something I'd like to use. The UI is good, there's a guide, and I feel like Google will eventually nail this one. The issue is that there are no YouTube TV apps anywhere. Not on Apple TV. Not on Roku. And not on our Samsung Smart TV. That will change, obviously. But as of today, watching YouTube TV---on our actual TV---is painful, and involves navigating content and then casting from our phones. Sorry, that's just not elegant.

And then there's PlayStation Vue. You know, the "winner" of this little comparison.

PlayStation Vue is a nightmare of reliability issues. By which I mean, it will just randomly stop streaming whatever you're watching and lose its place. Sometimes it stops streaming and then silently removes the show you were watching. Today at lunch, we were watching House Hunters International and it halted six times in a row after I had manually re-navigated back to where we were in the show. That was the last straw.

(It doesn't matter which device you use. This reliability problem is present on Apple TV, Roku, and even iPad.)

If you use PlayStation Vue on Apple TV, you get additional hurdles courtesy of that device's remote control, which I've described (accurately) as a crime against humanity. Navigating through a recorded or DVR show with the Apple TV remote is like punching yourself in the face; the only good news is that it has to end eventually. (And it's not just PlayStation Vue; the Apple TV and its remote suck for everything.)

We reintroduced Roku into our living when Movies Anywhere happened: This service lets us access much of our Apple-based movie library on other services and devices, so now we can watch many of those movies on a set-top box with a great remote, like the Roku.

But ... TV. We have to address TV.

As I've noted in the past, our TV viewing habits change over the cours...

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