Not really wanting to hijack my own thread here but post #18 makes me want to share a recent change at my place. I've long argued the best balance of cost & quality is DISH in many threads. Policing them well (meaning getting on the phone and threatening to cancel to get a "special deal" regularly) and not having too many TVs to feed (proprietary box lease rentals do add up) kept them priced pretty low. Comcast for a "double play" covered broadband + land line phone (which yes, does still have a place in the modern world).
Cord cutting and al-a-carte threads have always been interesting but every option for streaming sacrificed something I considered very important (Dolby Digital 5.1 surround) and other niceties (the fully-featured, generally-unhindered DVR experience- virtual DVRs still seem lacking, or not being able to watch a first run show until a day or more later). Nevertheless, I've kept my eyes open.
I live in an HOA where Comcast already has itself embedded in the HOA fee. So indirectly, I've been paying for some Comcast cable TV too even if I never used it. However, in al-a-carte/CC research, a number of smart people around here turned me onto the combo of the terrific Channels app for
TV which works with HDHomeRun boxes from Silicon Dust.
I picked up a couple HDHomeRun boxes (4 tuners for local OTA signals and 3 tuners for cable) and hooked 'em up. The Channels app has added really good DVR functionality which works with my own storage. I wanted a few channels NOT available in the included HOA package, so I visited Comcast to get a cable card and got the upgrade to get the rest of the channels I wanted. Of course, they wanted money for both but it was not a lot of money.
Long story short: this made me into a Comcast "triple play" user in their system, discounted by the HOA fee which had total cost for all 3 services arrive at what DISH was costing alone. I get all the TV channels I desire, with a fully functional DVR with "unlimited" storage and no odd requirements (like stored shows being deleted in 30 days, etc) and everything is in HD
and Dolby Digital Surround. Channels app brings a classic cable/satt guide to
TV so it's easy to see what's on every stream without having to just magically know and/or hopping app-to-app.
One of the biggest hassles of the cable bill is the leased box costs for multi-TV households. However, this combo SHARES the HDHomeRun boxes and shares the DVR, all running through the Channels App installed on multiple
TVs. Conceptually, I could have 50 TVs in my house and the monthly fee to feed them all is the same as if I have only 1 TV.
If I had a LOT of TVs to feed at the same time, there is a fixed cost to potentially buy more HDhomerun boxes to add more available tuners... and more
TVs so they all have a box on which to run the Channels app. But the setup "as is" is feeding 3 TVs just fine with 3 available tuners for cable channels and 4 for local OTA channels.
Channels is not the free or dirt cheap app you may expect all apps to be on
TV. But for about $25 once, and a DVR service fee of $8/month, it is pretty much a FANTASTIC alternative to every other option I researched. If I didn't care about Dolby Digital 5.1, stuff like PSVue looked like a great backup option. But this option doesn't make me feel like I gave up much vs. DISH while still chopping the price I felt coming out of my wallet (subsidized some by what was coming out for HOA fee anyway) down to combo service level for about the same as DISH alone. Yes, that means I've finally returned to cable but it doesn't FEEL like cable since I'm not using their box- just their cable TV streams.
If your situation is such that you can go the cable card route with your cable provider and a chunk of the pain in the cable bill is in a number of leased boxes, the above might be a good way to go for you too.
Relative to the topic of this thread: If Comcast followed through and:
- raises the broadband pricing, I could step down the speed to try to manage that move and not lose ANYTHING on the television side.
- adopts tiered pricing "for high bandwidth" users, I wouldn't be one of those because all this video is excluded from the broadband tally since it's still THEIR cable television signal.
- tries to raise the price for the boxes or DVR service, I'm immune because I don't have even 1 such box.
- opts to scramble all channels so that cable card could no longer work here, I could ultimately drop them, switch to the alternative, or go back to DISH and get new subscriber discounts with a 2 or 3-year price lock-in.
The point is that for those still leaning hard on cable but trying to find a way that doesn't jettison full DVR and full DD 5.1, that combination of
TVs with the Channels app and however many tuners you need in HDHomeRun boxes is a good one. My
TVs have never got so much use before, now basically being a single little box that does everything. While I can stream to mobile devices, Comcast does have a pretty good mobile viewing app themselves which doesn't utilize any of the tuners in the HDHomeRun boxes.
If the above sounds like a big commercial- sorry, I have no affiliation to the Channels app developers or Silicon Dust- just passing along something that is working surprisingly well for me, saving me money without making me feel like I had to give up much to get it. And it seems to have multiple ways to beat this particular problem if this problem starts really showing itself.
