If you are a night owl (or insomniac) and you have Dish, you get to watch...infomercials late at night. Your favorite channels are not available.
I can’t remember the last time we turned on the TV. YouTube has become the family’s favorite channel.
I find Youtube frustrating. They have a movies section and TV shows section, but I don’t want to spend hours going through their listings.
Considering that Google, the biggest search engine of all time, owns Youtube, one would think they could develop a more user-friendly approach to Youtube.
Most of what I watch is via Netflix and Amazon Prime and Tivo-ed TV programs. Tivo can skip through the commercials on most recordings. I hate to watch anything on regular cable TV. Commercials commercials commercials. Some commercial breaks are now 8 minutes long.
I would drop cable, but my cable company requires at least the basic tier (broadcast plus a few cable only channels) to be able to get internet service. Most of what is watch is on the next tier, so there no real way to cut costs without dropping cable entirely.
In my area there are few real options. Mobile internet only offers about 10Gb (3 high def movies). Cable preferred internet allows 350Gb. For about the same price. Thus, cable is much more cost effective and offers significantly more for the price.
DSL might be an option, but the phone company requires one also have landline service to get the ‘good’ rate DSL. Landline alone is around $30 per month for local service only.
We keep cable TV for the wife’s cooking and “Runway” shows. Me, it’s only “Last of the Summer Wine” and “Death in Paradise” - everything else is YouTube - you name it, they got it - covers the whole spectrum.
For those that can get cable and not restricted to satellite.
I use Earthlink which uses Time Warner cable. First 6 months are about $30 then $42 after that.
I have a ROKU 3 box http://www.roku.com and also subscribe to Netflix and Amazon prime (I do most of my shopping thru them). Each are about $9 a month. I have many “channels” from ROKU website downloaded and have all kinds of movies and old tv shows.
I use a MOHU tv antenna to get the free over the air tv channels. http://www.tcguide.com
I also subscribe to Sling TV http://www.sling.com which is $25 a month. It includes all the cable channels I had before (Time Warner charged $141.88) and then some like 4 EPIX channels where I watched a James Bond film called Spectre last night (not bad).
I pay less then half of when I had cable and get more variety of shows to watch.
I have never subscribed to cable, ever. I haven’t watched television since the mid-late Nineties.
I do watch a lot of movies, and youtube, though.
When my wife and I go to a hotel, they have cable usually, and we watch it...for a while, until we look at each other and say “People PAY for this? What a bunch of crap.”