If you have friends or family, YTTV is pretty great as they can glom off your subscription for free with their own separate accounts and DVR.
Thanks for re-linking this. I’ll be trying YTTV over the weekend and expect the answer will be made by Monday of next week.
Oooh, one minor nitpick. I didn’t see that after picking channels it was showing me YTTV + Philo. I guess we will see how that works out. My guess is the one or two shows on Philo just won’t be watched as much.
After resolving my issues with VOD playback, I am loving YTTV. It’s $40 a month for the base package and for reference, Verizon is charging me $50 a month JUST FOR A DVR. So screw them.
Don’t forget you can give out five other accounts completely for free by attaching them to yours. Friends, family, etc. They do technically need to be in the same area as you, but there are ways around that.
Ooh ooh, I’m great friends with Charlatan!
Right?
Right?
Do I get ads if I watch say, The Good Place, on youtube DVR?
(I really hate ads. Even manually skipping ads is annoying.)
Yes but you can fast-forward through them, just like with a cable company DVR.
The exception is CBS and CW, which force you to watch the VOD versions for a couple weeks after first airing, and you can’t skip ads on VOD.
Is it a good skip like Tivo or a bad skip like timewarner boxes?
I haven’t used a cable box since 1998, but YTTV fast-forward works like netflix, you skip forward and have little keyframes of the video over the timeline. If you’re using a remote control I believe each individual press is 15s, or you can hold it down and it accelerates the longer you hold down the button.
@susser is correct about the skip. If you’re using the app on, say, the Roku, you push the forward or backward arrow on the remote to move the time marker forward or back 15 seconds. You do see key frames of the show at that time (most of the time). When you hit the OK button on the remote, the time skips to the location the time marker is at.
On an iPad or the like there are 15s forward and back buttons, but you can also double click on the left or right of the screen - anywhere. Left goes back, right goes forward. Each additional tap adds 15 seconds to the motion. So if I tap on the right side 4 times that’s 15s (first 2 taps) + 15 seconds (tap 3) + 15 seconds (tap 4) - it advances 45 seconds. When you’re tapping like this it just goes when you tap, no need to hit any other buttons.
The disadvantage of this technique is that you don’t know where you’re going to end up, so it’s more difficult to skip commercials without landing in one a couple of times.
You can drag the time marker itself, and when you do that you see the key frame. But it’s hard as hell to get the precision you want when using your pudgy finger to drag that little red dot around.
Wasn’t sure where else to put this, want to watch F1 and there’s a new streaming service being offered by F1 themselves (well, Liberty Media actually) and I wanted to hear from anyone who has used it what the experience was like. It launched last year and initial reaction was it wasn’t completely baked, want to know if that’s still the case or not.
For reference this is what I’m talking about: https://www.formula1.com/en/subscribe-to-f1-tv.html?gclid=CLGD8Zn5juECFQfSgQod87EB1g&gclsrc=ds#en
Last night YoutubeTV announced they are adding 5 or so channels including Discovery And HGTV and three or four others from the same people. They are also increasing the monthly price to $50 a month for everyone, including those grandfathered in at $35. I am currently only paying $40 a month but they are adding a bunch of channels I will never watch and jacking up the price and that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Super annoying.
I am thinking of checking out DIRECTV now since it’s the same price and it includes HBO. The DVR is worse there but I can probably live with the downgrade.
Sling are doing an offer right now for $15 for the first three months, you should check that out.
It’s like they don’t understand why people cord cut in the first place. Though I’m sure part of this is increased cost and forced bundling from the content providers - especially with cable ratings spiraling down.
I think they do understand, but the content owners won’t let them offer tiers to their customers. Which is a real shame.
Yeah, they understand, they’re as quickly as they can turning streaming back into cable. The idea is to force everyone full circle and preferably paying more than the first go round.
Carrier bundling still kills my ability to cut the cord. Here in the NY/NJ Metro area, I get gigabit Internet triple play (we want a land line) from Verizon FiOS for $85 bucks. Unfortunately, even killing the phone and TV would cost me the same for gigabit Internet alone. Spectrum is the only competitor and costs more or less the same.
Spectrum offers me my 100/Mbps for 65 dollars a month. It drops down to under 50 for about a year as part of their under 100 packages which promptly go back to almost 200 dollars after 12 months. They’re so cowardly now instead of writing this 100 dollar bundle will revert to the regular rate, currently 179.95 they just say the promotional rate ends.
I just decided 65 < 200 so… paying full rate for Internet and nothing else. Charter/Spectrum… whatever they want to call themselves, have been offering the same bundle under different names for about 10 years now all trying to hide that huge bump after 12 months instead of just offering a reasonable price to begin with.
200 dollars is just ridiculous, and I don’t care if they try to get it via cable, or dish or streaming. A decade has taught me that I can easily go without. I watch less and less TV every year since I’ve cut.
At that price I’m not sure why you’d want to cut the cord
One of the selling points that Charter tried to push with their TWC merger is that they’d be able to offer lowered costs and fees due to economies of scale. Last year, the broadcast TV fee for Spectrum was $8.75. Starting next month, they’re raising it to $13.50. Internet is also going up $4 to $70. The only other ‘option’ in this area is AT&T DSL which comes with a 1TB data cap - which they’re happy to waive if you bundle with TV.