Saturday, July 4, 2020

Life after DirecTV

It has now been a little over a month since we bid DirecTV goodbye. So how are we managing?
Fairly well actually.
Our budget appreciates the 45% savings and we are still watching what we want.

So how do we now watch Television?

OTA

 Over The Air. Also known as free T.V. We added a better antenna and suddenly got a lot of local stations. We did have the local stations on DirecTV but you were only able to see the one basic station. A lot of the stations have additional programming tied to their station. Surprisingly, we have been watching a lot more of these programs.

ROKU

As we don't have a smart T.V., we have to use a device that connects the Television to the Internet. We selected the Roku for various reasons. This is like the old Mac Vs. PC, VHS Vs Beta when people talk about the streaming device they choose.
We bought a Roku enabled universal remote to tidy up the collection of remotes.

STREAMING T.V.

While we had DirecTV, we also subscribed to Netflix, CBS All Access, and Hulu.
We may be evaluating whether or not to keep Netflix and Hulu. We don't use them much.
The big service change was of course SlingTV. We subscribed to both Blue, Orange and some add in packages. They cover over 95% of everything we used to watch.
The picture quality seems better. We do occasionally have buffering problems, but that seems to be going away. Certainly no more disruptive than a monsoon rain storm blocking the dish.

Then there is all of the other channels.
Roku lets you add from a video buffet of channels. Most free, others requiring subscription, like Netflix, Disney+, and CBS All Access.
We have the basic free You Tube, CW Seed, The Roku Channel itself, Pluto, Tubi, Amazon Prime, Google Play, A number of network news channels, Crackle. The only one we pay for is Amazon Prime which, of course, comes with Amazon Prime subscription.

There are a lot of other channels out there with more being added all the time.

So we are braving the new cable-cutting frontier quite well. The only lingering question is what to do with this old obsolete set box and dish! They don't want them back.