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

Last week, I provided an update on our cord-cutting efforts. Maybe I should have waited, as things are changing yet again.

Which, when you think about it, is one of the key benefits of cord-cutting: You can subscribe and unsubscribe from services at will. And we have.

This seemingly sudden change came about because of two recent and coincidental events.

First, Hulu with Live TV finally added a guide to its Apple TV and Roku apps. I really like Hulu in general. And when I tested the TV service last year, I came away feeling like it would eventually emerge as a top cord-cutting contender. But it lacked a guide for browsing what’s on TV now and in the future, a curious omission.

Second, my brother-in-law decided recently to drop cable TV and go the cord-cutting route. He did this to save money—to the tune of $50 to $70 per month, if I’m not mistaken—and he made some good choices: He got a Roku and a Chromecast for each of his TVs, and he subscribed to PlayStation Vue.

Interesting.

You may recall that I had tried PlayStation Vue last summer. We had mixed results. The guide worked fine, and you could pretty easily switch between what you’re watching now and what you most recently watched, a key action for sports fans and those bored with commercials during live TV.

But PlayStation Vue had a lousy DVR interface: It lumped recorded and on-demand shows together, and it needlessly mixed in shows it will record soon, making it seem like they’re “new.” As bad, the commercial-skipping functionality was a bit limited and we had lots of reliability issues. So we moved on.

Last weekend, I was checking out my brother-in-laws new TV setup and I was struck by how nice the guide looked. I really like YouTube TV, but his guide, from PlayStation Vue, looked even better. And I started thinking that maybe I should look at the Sony service again. (See below for the reason why this guide looked different/better to me.)

In the course of researching the options—again, things change all the time in this market, and experiences from last summer are increasingly out-of-date—I found out an important negative for Hulu with Live TV: You have to pay $15 extra each month to fast-forward through commercials in recorded shows. So the real cost of this service would be about $60 per month. That’s almost the same cost as both YouTube TV ($40 per month) and Sling TV Blue ($30) together. I was hoping to save a bit more.

But that made me think of PlayStation Vue again. Maybe this was worth another look.

So I looked. PlayStation Vue has four service tiers, which range in price from $40 per month to $75 per month. The second tier, called Core, costs $45 per month and adds several channels, including DIY, IFC, SundanceTV, and several others, like MLB Network, NBA TV, and the NFL Network, that are sports-focused. This was the tier I had chosen last year and is the one my brother-in-law chose as well.

I also looked at two related choices: Whether it would make sense to just continue with Sling TV Blue, which is only $30 per month. And whether to continue using the Apple TV as our primary interface for whatever mix of services we continue using going forward.

Apple TV—we have the 4K version—is a compromise of the highest order. The remote is, as I’ve described it before, a crime against humanity. But I’ve come to terms with its terribleness by using the Logitech Harmony smart remote I first wrote about last November instead. That remote is a game changer for Apple TV.

But … why even use Apple TV? My brother-in-law, for example, had chosen Roku for his own cord-cutting exercise, and I do generally recommend Roku as the best all-around set-top box.

The primary reason is that we have tons of purchased content, mostly movies, that are tied up in the Apple ecosystem. And that was/is deliberate. In the past, the primary advantage of choosing Apple over competing services was its excellent selection of movie extras, similar to what you often get with movies sold in physical formats. But today, it’s that Apple is automatically providing 4K versions of movies you previously purchased in HD as they are re-released, and it is doing so for free. My movie collection is getting upsized for me, for free.

More recently, however, Apple joined the Movies Anywhere service, which means that any content from participating movie studios that you purchased from Apple will also appear in other compatible services. So about two-thirds of my Apple purchases now appear in Google Movies & TV, in Amazon Prime Video, and elsewhere.

Two-thirds is not 100 percent. And many of those movies that are 4K on Apple are just 1080p elsewhere. But it occurs to me that I could switch to the Roku and access all of the cord-cutting and other media services to which we subscribe, sans some Apple content. And I could, of course, still use the Apple TV on a separate input so I could access that content there when needed.

So I’ve begun experimenting. First, I pulled out the Roku Premiere+ that I bought about 18 months ago, got it up-to-date, and installed each of the cord-cutting and media services apps that we’re using on Apple TV. This device provides 4K and HDR capabilities, and though it’s since been replaced by a newer Roku Ultra model, it should be serviceable enough.

Should be. But I’ve already run into a few interesting issues related to performance, which is poor compared to the Apple TV, and to reliability. The sound has cut out a number of times already, but it’s not clear whether that’s because of apps or the system itself.

Worse, there are crazy differences in the same apps running across Apple TV and Roku. This is very similar to the experience I see with some of the same apps across Android and iOS. And it confuses me: Why wouldn’t the same apps look and work the same way, as much as is possible, across platforms?

But they don’t. PlayStation Vue, for example, presents what I think of as a “normal” guide (compared to how this is presented, typically on cable TV), where you scroll up and down the channel list and left to right through time. On Apple TV, however, this is reversed: You navigate through the channel list from left to right and through time from top to bottom. Sling TV, likewise, is clunky on both systems, but also different. On Apple TV, your saved TV shows (“My TV”) are presented in rows of rectangles and when you select one, it appears in a new screen. On Roku, My TV appears as a grid, and when you select a show, a weird slide-over panel appears.

Ah boy.

Granted, few people would use the same services on both of these devices. But I’m very interested in portability in all things—a topic to which I hope to write more about soon—and these kinds of differences can be maddening.

The Roku remote also can’t control the volume on the TV, which is a barrier. I could solve this by using that Harmony remote, of course, and probably will: I just need to program it for the Roku. But Roku also sells an Enhanced Voice Remote for $30 that includes TV power and volume controls. That’s perhaps a better buy for those who go the Roku route, but I’m curious why this is not just included with their high-end set-top boxes at least.

Speaking of the remote, I also noticed during my “can I skip commercials in the shows we record the most?” testing that I could not do so in PlayStation Vue on the Apple TV. But that was while using the Harmony remote: When I use Apple’s terrible remote, you can, in fact, skip forward in 10 second increments. (Which is terribly hard to do on that remote because, again, it is a crime against humanity. You have to repeatedly tap the right side of the touchpad and more often than not it registers as a center tap, which just pauses the show. Infuriating.) Point being, I will need to figure out whether I can further program the Harmony to make that work. (Or just use Roku.)

Ultimately, what I think I’m heading towards is that the Apple TV plus the Harmony remote may be my best choice, because it performs better, and because the Apple TV is the only device on which I can actually access 100 percent of my content. (This simply confirms the original reason I went down this path.) But in reevaluating the cord-cutting service(s) we use, it might just make more sense to use either Sling TV Blue or PlayStation Vue.

Sling TV is cumbersome on both boxes. But it does work, and it’s less expensive than PS Vue. And it working includes “working with the Harmony remote as-is,” which is a big plus. Having to re-program this thing to work correctly with PS Vue is not all that interesting to me.

We’ll keep testing each box with each of the services and see where this lands. I’ve marked the next month’s payment dates for PlayStation Vue, Sling TV, and YouTube TV in my calendar so I can make a “yay or nay” decision on each as they occur.

But right now, I’m leaning towards Sling TV on Apple TV. And if you think back to last week’s breakdown of our monthly costs, this would change things to look like so:

Sling TV (Blue plus cloud DVR) – $29.98 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)

That adds up to about $56 per month. (Or about $70 if you include MLB.TV and assume a 7-month season, which I don’t: It was paid for in a one-time payment up-front.) Previous to that last article, we were paying $106 per month thanks to YouTube TV and a more expensive tier of Sling TV. But after adjusting our Sling TV subscription in the course of writing that, the monthly bill had fallen to $90. So this is a savings of about $35 per month overall.

That’s great. But we need some more testing to see if that’s where we end up. And I’m sure that things will change yet again by the time all these renewals come due. That’s how this market works. And it’s a good thing: If some new or improved service changes things yet again, I will keep re-evaluating our choices.