#18 - A Few Changes to Our Streaming Subscriptions

Recent Changes

• Last August we "paused" our YouTubeTV subscription for 6 months. The subscription was set to reactivate automatically in February. We decided instead to cancel the serivce. At $65 per month, it's just too expensive for the benefit it provides. If we change our minds, we can resubscribe without penalty.
• Recently, Amazon made a change so that the wonderful 1950's TV series, "The Adventures of Robin Hood" is no longer free on Prime Video. It's now part of the "Best TV Ever" subscription, along with many other old shows. The price is only $0.99 per month, so we've added that subscription, at least until we finish watching the final season of Robin Hood.
• We've also subscribed to locast.org, which provides live streaming of all Detroit-area TV broadcast channels without a TV antenna. The cost is $5.50 per month. We haven't used it a lot, but we did use it to watch the Superbowl and to watch a UM basketball game on CBS. Locast does not include ESPN and Big Ten Network; I've watched highlights of those games on YouTube.
• At the beginning of the year Comcast increased the fee for our internet service to $75.95 per month.
• We received a free one-year subscription to the Apple TV+ network when I bought an iPad in November 2019. Apple has twice extended our free subscription, and it is now due to expire in July 2021, 20 months after the iPad purchase date.

 #17 - Living without YouTube TV

Our YouTube TV Pause went into effect a couple months ago. It's a definite change for us, but we haven't felt deprived. 

YouTube TV was our service for broadcast TV channels and standard cable TV channels. The biggest change for us is that we no longer have access to live sports, except for Thursday night NFL on Amazon Prime. I haven't yet felt deprived. We never watched much baseball, and the Lions are, well, the Lions.

As for Michigan football, I've been satisfied watching game highlights on YouTube after the game is over. Michigan basketball might be a different story. We might have to resume our YouTube TV service for a while if the season goes well.

We've never been in the habit of watching TV news, so we don't miss that.

Nancy watches some of the late-night show highlights on Instagram.

We can stream PBS shows on PBS Passport.

We watched the presidential debates and the Biden/Harris post-election speeches live on YouTube.

With our various streaming services, we still have more good TV available to watch than we have time to watch it.

Some Recent Comcast Developments

1. Comcast has increased our monthly data cap from 1 TB to 1.2 TB. We haven't gone over 500 GB during the last six months.
2. Some months ago, Comcast upgraded our download speed from 60 Mbps to 100 Mbps without a price increase.
3. Comcast sent us a free Xfinity Flex device with a remote control. It could possibly replace a Fire TV stick or a Chromecast device, but for now it just sits on the shelf.
4. Comcast is also providing us a free Peacock Premium streaming service (it has "limited commercials"). We haven't watched anythng since verifying that it works.

#16 - Still No 5.1 Channel Surround Sound on YouTube TV

 I had a chat session today with YouTube TV customer support. I wanted to find out the latest information on when they might support 5.1 channel surround sound. The representative confirmed that they don't support surround sound today, only stereo, and they have not projected date when thy will support surround sound.

I'm disappointed. Since we first subscribed, YouTube TV has introduced two large price increases, but still no surround sound. I don't understand what makes this difficult. Over the air broadcast TV supports surround sound, and the number of bits required to encode sound is much smaller than the number of bits required to encode video.

Our YouTube TV "pause" goes into effect in a couple days. Implementing surround sound would be an incentive to reactivate the service.

#15 - Pausing YouTube TV

Effective this month, YouTube TV has increased their monthly fee from $50 to $65. They've also added a few channels, but nothing of great interest to us. You can read Google's announcement here: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-tv-update

I expect Google will see a lot of subscribers cancel or pause their memberships, especially as various college conferences are suspending their fall sports programs.

Nancy and I paused our membership today. The way this works is that the pause goes into effect at the end of the current billing period, which will be September 7 for us. During the pause we will not be able to view any live programs or any programs recorded on the YouTube TV DVR. Our existing DVR recordings will be preserved, subject to the nine month DVR storage limit, for viewing when our pause expires.

We chose to pause for six months, the maximum allowed. (Four weeks is the minimum.) If we change our minds, we can reactivate our membership immediately at any time; we don't have to wait the full six months.

I think it's likely we will end up cancelling the service altogether. Or perhaps we will reactivate the service one month at a time if there is some live event that we really, really want to watch. We don't watch much live TV now, and we've been using the DVR less and less. 

Some of the networks we've watched on YouTube TV are also available via other subscriptions, so we will be looking into those alternatives, too. 

#14 - Some Observations 10 Months After Cutting the Cord

We're generally happy with the decisions and choices we've made to cut the cord. Here are some observations after ten months.

Devices: We've tried the Amazon Fire TV Stick, Google Chromecast, and Roku. For our purposes, the Fire TV Stick is the most versatile and the easiest to use. It supports all of our TV streaming services, and it comes with an easy-to-use remote control. In particular, the Fire TV remote works great when skipping over commercials with the YouTubeTV DVR. Each time you click fast-forward it shows a small image of what's 15 seconds ahead, so you can judge whether to continue clicking forward, or to back up 15 seconds if you've overshot the commercial break.

(Note: The Amazon Fire TV Stick might not work well if you don't have an Amazon Prime subscription. We haven't tried that.)

Streaming Services: With our current subscriptions to Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, HBO, PBS Passport, and YouTubeTV, we have more good TV available than we have time to watch. Since we initially signed up, YouTube TV has increased their fee from $40 per month to $50, and they still haven't implemented surround sound. Disappointing, but I think it's still our best option.

Internet Service: Comcast Xfinity is still the only practical service provider in our neighborhood. AT&T offers only a lower speed service. In October, Comcast increased our Performance Internet download speed from 60Mbps to 100Mbps, leaving the upload speed at 5Mbps. Starting January 2020, our monthly fee will increase from $69.95 to $72.95. I don't expect Comcast to add any taxes or fees on top of the $72.95.

Our Comcast internet data service comes with a monthly cap of 1 terabyte. Overruns are very expensive, so we watch our data usage carefully. Typically, we stay under 500 or 600 GB, but one month we almost reached 900 GB. Cloud data backups, not TV streaming, was our biggest consumer of data in that peak month.