Paul’s Tech Makeover: Stepping Back from the Cable TV Abyss (Premium)

Our experience with cable TV has been hugely negative. And after struggling with various issues, we've decided to go back to a cord-cutting service.

Yep. We're doing it again.

But then I always figured we'd come back. It was simply a matter of timing. And of the services improving.

As you may recall, we eventually threw in the towel and ran screaming back to cable TV in late October after about three months of testing various cord-cutting services, including YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, and Hulu with Live TV.

Of the three, we liked YouTube TV the best, but that's a low bar. Each service had its issues, from inscrutable user interfaces to, amazingly, the lack of a program guide in one case. But even YouTube TV wasn't perfect. It had only a small selection of channels, but not HGTV, which is one of our most-watched. And through the end of 2017, you couldn't even access the service directly on your TV: There were no Apple TV or Roku apps, and thus no normal remote control, so you were forced to cast from your smartphone. That was inelegant at best.

But cable TV has been eating at us since the day it was installed. RCN initially installed a basic TiVo set-top box that could record multiple channels. But a few days later a technician showed up to make sure everything was OK, and he up-sold us on a version of the box that could record 6 channels at once for just $5 more a month. I bit and was rewarded with a never-ending fan hum coming out of that box even when it wasn't being used. I'm sensitive to noise, so this made me crazy.

Worse, the box was buggy as hell. Certain channels---like HGTV, actually, featured regular video and audio glitching, which made watch live or recorded shows unbearable. (Other channels were fine. We never did figure that out.) And the cost roiled me. We had been paying a bit over $70 for just Internet access, but the cable TV service and box rental brought the price up to about $155.

Over time, these and other issues wore on us. Until finally, last night, having given up trying to watch a recorded true crime show that was so glitchy we couldn't understand any of the dialogue---even the captions were screwed up---I had had enough. I started a live chat with RCN and canceled the service. I'll be driving the box and remote back to a local office this weekend. Until then, I can watch whatever recorded shows we have.

Free at last.

Well, not free. We still need to figure out which cord-cutting service makes the most sense for us. For now, I've signed (back) up for both YouTube TV and PlayStation Vue, but I can already tell the former will be where we land because the Sony service still has the same terrible user interface that makes it hard to find newly-recorded shows. The one advantage that Sony has over YouTube, however, is the channel selection: It has more channels, and it has one---HGTV---that we sort of need.

But a few things have changed since late October. Most notably with YouTube TV, w...