This was on my 2017 list and did not get it resolved so here I am trying to tackle it in 2018. I’m not very technically astute. All I know is we pay too much for bundled landline phone/internet/cable. Did try to negotiate down with very little success despite being a long term customer of several decades. Did threaten to disconnect. May do so soon.
We already use Apple TV for some stuff. Cable allows for watching tennis and European soccer, otherwise we could live without cable.
Need internet.
Could live without a landline although for emergency response rates and a few other reasons, I don’t think it is a bad idea to have that access.
Please share what you have cobbled together and a ballpark of what you pay. Especially interested in hearing if you have worked it all out while keeping the soccer/tennis sports coverage!
We ditched the landline about 5 years ago. This is what we do:
Comcast/Xfinity up to 55 Mbps. Cost has varied -- usually ~$50/month average
Netflix - ~$20/month for 2 discs at a time & streaming. That gives us nearly every TV or movie we want to see.
Amazon Prime - We have it anyway for shipping, rarely use the streaming but it is an option.
Regular TV channels via flat antenna -- live in a city, so get over 25 channels free.
Pay something like $6.95/month for an online fax service (since gave up the land line).
But you are right about sports. Just today I discovered my college football team’s bowl game was on ESPN and my planned vegetative state in front of the TV for a few hours was ruined. And the Olympics are coming – I’d pay something for sure just to see all the Nordic ski coverage (the US women are strong this year, 3 medals in World Cup in the last 3 days by 3 different women!). I wish I could just buy a one month Olympic subscription – I’d pay for it!
There is an app for phone called ESPNwatch that H used to broadcast through chromecast to get it on TV screen. But think it’s dependent on carrier (we have Xfinity) and bandwidth. Try it.
I’m in same boat as Dos so welcome good ideas also.
We don’t have a land line. We just switched from century link back to directTV because century link was terrible AND because we had west coast feed, which meant all cable shows were on at 8 or later Pacific time, and 9 or 10 mountain time. That was annoying.
We now have century link for internet (I think it is about $50-60 month including modem) and the directTV is $70 or so. We like TV and especially sports.
When the guys were installing the DirectTV, they said comcast just for internet is really expensive, and AT&T is too (they were AT&T guys).
My daughter has internet and a roku stick, which works for the limited cable she wants to use.
We’ve got Google Fiber for internet and TV with a couple of DVRs for, I think, $130/month. No premium channels. The landline is Magic Jack which costs next to nothing but it isn’t a true landline. Gotta have the cable TV because I watch or tape every baseball game of the season and it’s only on cable. Also MSNBC. Also reruns of Trauma: Life in the ER. Looking forward to the Olympics. I guess I would cut elsewhere before I’d cut the cable cord.
Thank goodness out for asking this question as dh and I have been discussing it for a while as we pay an exhorbitant amount every month even tho we watch little tv. I’d say 80% of our (well, dh and my teenage boys) tv viewing is sports…of all kinds. I mainly watch PBS and network news. We have Netflix, Amazon Prime and two Amazon fire sticks. I’d be happy to ditch FIOS tv, install an antenna for local network channels, but then is it possible to buy subscriptions thru Netflix or Amazon Prime access to different sports channels? For example, while watching either Netflix or Amazon Prime one time, I noticed that I could watch something on STARZ thru Netflix/Amazon if I paid something like $8.99/month. If I could purchase monthly subscriptions to the sports channels, PBS, etc, I think even that would be cheaper than what I pay for FIOS now. But I have no idea if this is possible.
Then the other issue is that we would probably need to buy a DVR. Before they were provided by Verizon, we had a TIVO, but that was years ago.
Hoping your thread will get some great feedback for all of us in similar situations.
We got rid of cable 18 years ago and our landline about ten years ago. We have Cox internet, Netflix, and Apple TV. If we’re missing anything, I’m not aware of it.
We cut the cord last summer and love it. The only addition I would make to what everyone else has mentioned is PlayStation Vue. It’s a live tv streaming service. You do not need a PlayStation to use. It’s cheap and it’s similar to having cable…same channels. Sling is a similar service.
“we pay too much for bundled landline phone/internet/cable”
Same here. At home we have the same Comcast triple play, but we nearly always watch netflix. The two reasons that we don’t watch much regular TV is that there are few shows that interest us, and there are too many advertisements. We don’t get interested in the new shows because there are so many ads that it isn’t worth spending the time to figure out whether we care about any of the new shows.
At our cottage we only have Internet. We watch netflix, and we watch PBS via the Apple TV box. We don’t seem to miss regular TV at all. We can watch yesterday’s news on PBS, and check today’s news on the Internet.
At this point I think that if we cut off the triple play at home and cut back to just Internet service the only thing that I would miss would be football games and the olympics.
Note that most “landlines” these days are actually VOIP regardless of who your provider is. We switched the home phone to a NetTalk device years ago - costs us something like $30/year. Internet we get through AT&T for $60/month.
We have Amazon prime anyway, so we get that streaming, but the offerings are limited.
We put up an HD antenna and get quite a few channels that way. You can use sites such as https://www.antennaweb.org/ to see what is available over-the-air for different antenna types. We needed an outside high-mount antenna, but we’re far away from any broadcasters.
Sling or Hulu TV allow reasonably priced subscriptions that include the channels we care about -such as ESPN and BBC America. YouTube TV is also supposed to be quite good, haven’t looked at it yet.
We have a Roku box on one TV, a ChromeCast on the other. If I were to replace either I would probably go with an Amazon FireStick.
It’s kind of cobbled together, but gets us what we need at lower cost than the cable providers in the area, and we’re not locked into contracts with anyone, so if I decide YouTube TV is better than Hulu I can switch at any time with no penalty.
We have Comcast Triple play. We negotiated almost 2 years ago, it’s almost over. We pay $144 for the basic service without all the fees, extra connections for different TVs, or taxes. It all totals $219 now. I know the rates have gone up and out contract will be up. We have Preferred, but may go down one level, DH likes the sports channels. I don’t want to cut the landline, because I don’t want to feel stuck with my phone all the time at home, or worry that the battery is low all the time…plus the emergency factor, and I find it more comfortable talking on it.
I’ll be renegotiating then. We just have Netflix streaming on top of that.
We ditched cable. We have an antenna and get more channels and better reception than we did with Charter Cable basic. Our internet was always doing weird things with them too.
So…we switched to DSL via Frontier and have had no issues. We have a landline because if we bundle the landline with the DSL, it’s cheaper than just having DSL…I know…stupid. Anyway…that’s $42 a month.
We have a Roku stick and Netflix…and we are fine. We can also stream some other things.
We cut the cord over 1.5 years ago and haven’t looked back. We still get internet and landline through our cable provider. We have an indoor antenna to get the local channels, Sling for other channels (including some sports), and Amazon Prime. DH finds more to watch now then when we had cable. Yes, there are some sports we can’t get, but we’ve adjusted to that. We were just tired of our cable bill increasing regularly and the cable company being reluctant to negotiate with us - until we actually cancelled them. Too late.
Most sports are available for free to stream over the internet. You can search reddit for any given game and usually get a list of streams.
So if I want to watch a game I can’t get on cable, I’ll run an HDMI cable from my laptop to the tv, and use a stream.
Last week at my sister’s house, I used my phone as a hotspot (they have terrible internet), connected my laptop to the phone, and watched the Patriots game, which wasn’t on locally. Whatever it takes…
Legal? Beats me, but I don’t feel guilty. My cable bill is outrageous.
If you really feel you want to pay something for sports, you can subscribe to a service like Fubo for $20/month or so, which gets you all the games for the 4 major pro leagues in the US, the Premier League and LaLiga, and a ton of other stuff.
If you have a smart tv or a Roku Stick or equivalent, you don’t even need a computer.
@thumper1 — you are the FIRST person I have ever run across who has anything nice to say about Frontier. I have been afraid to try them.
I ditched cable TV last fall. We get cable internet for $60/month, currently using Ooma premier for $15/month, and we have hulu live tv for $40. Hulu includes cloud dvr and all of their streaming tv. I believe they have ESPN. I may dop Ooma next year— Google Voice has a free service— but I haven’t gotten any feedback on the quality. Also it’s a hassle— you can’t switch to Google from a landline, so you have to port the number to a cell phone and go from there. We have Amazon Prime and Netflix (predating our switch).
When I called the cable company to downgrade our service, I was swtched to the “retention “ department where a rep condescendingly asked me why I hadn’t checked to see if I was eligible for a promotional rate. She didn’t believe me when I told her what I was paying.
