Joe Doakes from Como Park emails
My Comcast bill seems high for what I get. I have the Basic TV package which we use for watching Family Feud and that’s about all. Basic TV, Service to extra TV, Extra TV cable box, Broadcast TV fee, and Taxes – it’s $50 per month. I’m thinking of dropping cable TV for a couple of those Over the Air digital TV antennas. Anybody have any experience with ‘cutting the cable?’ Do they work? Am I on the right track?
Joe Doakes
Comcast cable service is pretty ridiculous. But their Internet is still the best option available (that I’m aware of, anyway) where I live. And it cost more to on bundle them then to take them together
More’s the pity.
JD:
I have Comcast/xfinity, too, but have one TV hooked to an HDTV antenna. I get about 30 channels, although 5 of them are religion related and 2 are shopping (of course you would get those). I get good reception on most days, but on windy and occasionally on rainy and snowy days, I get freezes and erratic pictures. The TV and antenna are on the second floor in the southwest corner of my house. My understanding is that the dish companies always put their antennas facing southwest for the best satellite reception.
If you can get only internet, Roku. It’s free and what you pay for is the channels/outlets you use. Only.
We have no Teevee subscription, only internet. We are big fans of Roku.
All I have is Roku.
Currently watching the Youtube channel “Great Art Explained.”
Not watching much “Family Feud.” 🙂
jdm,
As Mitch mentions, Comcast is the best option in most of the outer ring of the metro. I’ve got businesses less than a mile from me, yet CenturyLink hi speed internet isn’t available in my neighborhood. Further, they have a major switch that serves the neighborhood, that they won’t upgrade, despite over 200 residents requesting it.
Again, to Mitch’s point, they make it pretty costly if you unbundle your phone, internet and TV. Now that our parents have all passed, we never use our landline and haven’t for five years. If we drop it, our cable bill jumps up $50 per month.
We live out in the country near Austin and Albert Lea. Our antenna picks up Rochester, Mason City, Austin and Albert Lea, giving us a choice of almost 30 free over the air channels.
In addition, we get fast micro-wave internet off the top of a silo a mile away – which costs a whole lot less than satellite TV.
We had Direct TV until three years ago when I clipped the dish with the roll bar on my lawnmower. When I called to get it fixed, they said, “three weeks” to which I replied, “Cancel the service.”
Never regretted it a single day.
When my family and I moved from Des Moines to one of its suburbs 3 years ago, we discovered that the mature-growth tree in our neighbor’s yard behind us blocked getting any sort of coherent satellite signal unless the wind was gusty, say during a derecho. Mediacom is the cable provider here, and a prior experience I had with them left me resolved to never do business again. Instead, we got a fiber Internet connection that’s been fairly reliable, with a pipe large enough to handle streaming over the Rokus. Initially, we had DirectTV Now (later AT&T Now), but then they dropped a bunch of major channels and raised prices. So I checked out Philo. Pretty reasonable, pretty good selection of channels, except in the cable news channels– they don’t carry FNC, but they also don’t carry (and I’m not paying for) CNN, MSNBC, etc., so it’s a worthwhile sacrifice.
Still need internet access – comcast has everyone by the shorthairs.
That Broadcast TV fee is just an extra amount collected by Comcast. Spectrum does the same thing here in Dallas. The fee is not levied by anyone but the cable provider. If I were wealthy, I would consider suing for false advertising, since they never include it in the advertised rate of the cable. We went to just internet when we moved into the condo here. Have one HD antenna for the second TV, it gets a lot of channels. I stream on the other TV.
I cut the cable a while back.
Look to Locast for cheap over-the-air streaming in most major metro areas, including here in the Twin Cities metro. For me, it’s $5/month to get metro reception, and worth it since the over-the-air antenna doesn’t do as well as streaming.
We have Netflix, Disney+ (grandkids), Hulu, Amazon, etc. Between over-the-air stations and these services, we don’t need broadcast TV.
Other than that, I don’t watch enough sports anymore to make it worth my while to subscribe to one of the big live streaming packages like YouTubeTV and the like. If you’re an absolute sports addict, those might be worth it, but my view is that at most I’d want it for a few months for college football. But I’ve decided that if there’s a game not on over-the-air that I want to watch badly, there’s always BDubs or some other local sports bar, and I’ll still likely save money for the month.
BTW, from what I’ve heard, ESPN is $7/month for each cable subscriber by itself.
My local “communications provider” is trying to get folks to dump their TVs and just stream; they’ve had it with Big Entertainment and the local stations. It’s a huge headache for them to try and negotiate all the over-the-air f
ees with all the stations they have to carry, not to mention all the bundles they have to create for the various tiers they’re supposed to offer. They don’t like the bundles that they have to force on their subscribers just because to get ESPN you also have to get 13 other worthless channels. Did I mention they’re a coop, so they have public meetings and actually explain what they’re doing and why?
I signed up for CenturyLink Price for Life deal 5 years ago for Internet only. No issues. Use Roku for any TV watching we do. My dad uses Locast and has had good luck with it.