[OtinG]

I dropped cable about 18 months ago. I started out using Hulu with Live TV, but they raised the prices twice in less than a year, which drove the cost to around $60/mo. Their DVR was rather clunky too. And that no commercials option was anything but no commercials in most cases! So I switched to Philo TV about 6 months ago. Fewer channels, but the cloud DVR is really good. It is $20 plus tax, but you don’t get local stations, sports, or the more popular news channels. All of those drive up the cost of streaming and cable TV services. I don’t watch sports much anymore, even before the pandemic. I can get my news on the internet, plus Philo has BBC World News which is pretty good. I use the Fire TV Recast to record OTA programming, and here in the Dallas / Fort Worth area I can receive over 60 channels OTA, not including foreign language Channels, religious programming, and shopping channels, none of which I watch. Most of the OTA programming is garbage, but I do get all the major networks.

I also subscribe to various independent channels like BritBox, Curiosity, Netflix, MotorTrend, etc. I tried out Disney+ but their programming is more for younger people. The NatGeo was limited, and the ESPN+ was a friggin’ joke. I have a free year of Apple TV+ because of the iPad mini 5 I bought. I probably would have gotten that with the purchase of the ATV 4K too if I already didn’t have it. But ATV+ doesn’t have much worth watching yet. Maybe later on it will improve. Steve Carrel’s new Space Force comedy looks like it might be good. I periodically switch out independent channel/service apps when they run out of interesting stuff to watch. I tried out CBS All Access, but it blew chunks. I was hoping Picard would be great, but it was a slow moving pile of poop, IMO. So I cancelled it after one month. Patrick Stewart is great, but the show was not.