Finally cut the cord after years of nibbling at it
I’ve mentioned before I’ve been in the world’s longest cord-cutting endeavor. This was complicated previously by being on an ISP that was throttling the crap out of streaming services and also went down quite frequently.
I’ve been gumming at the cord for months now really.
TL;DR – just cut the cord finally (I’m probably the last one,) and here’s what I’ve got going on.
I’m not here to advertise AT&T fiber, but I’ve been down all of 6 seconds that I recorded in the past four months. This includes during two power outages (my router is on a UPS.) Time was pretty well ripe. Called up AT&T and cancelled my DirecTV and I’ll be on YouTube TV unless something happens.
As both my Vizio and TCL are smarties, installing an app is all it takes to get that particular bit running.
I’ve been really disappointed in the quality of the satellite for the past couple of years. Really felt like at $80something a month I shouldn’t be watching artifacting at 14 feet away, and 1080P shouldn’t be steamable only. Changing channels in under three seconds would also have been nice. May have just been my plan, but 50″ artifacting is extremely noticeable and I felt I was getting effectively 480p at best.
The cancelling of my way out of contract satellite service took about 14 minutes. They tried playing the two-4 minute wait and offer a half price option. They also let me cancel it without the security code which sketches me out a bit. Guess it’s rare for people to cancel services for other people.
In contrast the YouTube TV signup was somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 seconds. Only so long because I kept trying to change the zip code it detected. It wasn’t my work’s, wasn’t my house’s, wasn’t where the node was, but wasn’t too far off from where I live.
YouTube TV didn’t have a couple of local channels, I’ll write about the workaround for that later.
Currently unless I mathed wrong I’m looking at about a $48 a month savings for significantly higher quality (1080P 30/60fos everywhere) and an unlimited DVR. I’ve got the local channels it’s missing via Plex and a HDHomeRun device.
During the transition I ran into some interesting (to me,) problems and solutions I’ll detail later.
So yeah, welcome me to 2016 guys.
