We cut the cable at our house a year and a half ago. We had talked about it for months, and tried to look into streaming services and all the things associated with the new-ish tech involved; but like most things of a technical nature, the combination of obscurantist jargon and arcane pricing practices made it difficult to evaluate streaming with any confidence. Plus there was another inhibiting factor: I didn't find any commentary from ordinary non-techie users that described streaming as an experience, in comparison to cable. After a year and a half of streaming (and about 25 years of cable), I think maybe I can rectify that.
So our cable bill dropped from $280 to $95 a month, while our phone bill increased from $100 to $175, for a net savings of $110 a month. I felt good about that. (In the year and a half since then, those bills have crept up by about $30. I feel less good.) We also added one premium streaming service, Peacock Premium, for the Premier League soccer matches that are important to us; we got it for $5 a month and it immediately went up 20%, to $6. (On the other hand, we no longer get USA Network, a cable-only channel where many matches we want are shown.)
So what's the streaming experience like? Well, first we had to have another router added, to get a strong enough signal in that room. That was frustrating but immaterial for present purposes. (It also cost us nothing.) Then we had to get a digital antenna to receive local broadcast channels that had been included with the cable package. It does not work well, but honestly, except for some programs on Public TV (which we can't get with the antenna we have) the content of broadcast TV isn't worth the added cost of a better antenna.
- recording shows;
- finding shows to watch; and
- actually watching.
When we had cable, we had a DVR that would record several programs at once. We used that all the time, and it seems to have made our TV watching easier and more enjoyable. If there's a way to record "live" streaming programs, I haven't found it, but with a few exceptions, we don't need to record them. Just about everything of interest to us is available on demand. Finding a program can be tricky, and once found it's not as convenient to watch, but we're not limited to what the DVR drive can hold. So that's pretty much a wash.
Finding shows is generally much more difficult with streaming. Just by chance, we have a Samsung TV, and when, after 2 or 3 years of watching it, we attached it to the internet (with our privacy settings carefully chosen and re-checked from time to time) we discovered that it can access something like 500 channels of mostly drivel, but some of it is in our fields of interest, and we watch that crap most of the time. We have the Peacock Premium service, and the service in the Disney Bundle; there are also a number of free streaming apps -- Pluto, Plex, Tubi ... I can't remember all the names. They all contain various old TV series, free movies, and the same sort of crap that makes up most of your average 350-channel cable lineup. We occasionally will watch soccer matches on ESPN+, but after sampling what's on Disney+ for a couple of months, I don't think I've even opened that app in over a year. If you're a real Star Wars fan, or have small children, you'll probably feel differently about it, but to me it's pretty uninteresting. Hulu might be good if you could sort the wheat from the chaff quickly, but you can't.
The problem with all these things is finding anything. If you don't already know where a program is, there's a "global search" function, but it doesn't work very well. Despite its name, it's not comprehensive; it seems to be intended to promote streaming services we don't have and don't want, like Apple TV and Netflix; and it's very hard to use, so generally we don't bother.
So we've settled in to our favourite channels, and hardly look at anything else. I flip through a dozen or so news channels* and channels devoted to a single long-running program: the Top Gear channel; the America's Test Kitchen channel; BBC Earth; Modern Marvels; and so on. These channels run the same programs over and over, but since the subject matter is of interest, I'm willing to check it out and maybe stick with it long enough to see how they make their jambalaya or get that roast to brown just right, or see why a ship sank or a bridge collapsed, or explore how scientists are learning that plants hear sounds. (Top Gear is an English skit-comedy show about cars, though it's very rarely funny. I like some of the cars, and the scenery.)
Each streaming app has its own guide function. They're all a little bit different, but they all share two attributes. One, they're clunky to use, and two, they all give minimal but inaccurate descriptive information. If you already know what a show is, that doesn't matter; but if you're trying to decide if you might want to watch something you're not familiar with, the only way to know is to try it and see. In my case, the answer is almost always No, but the App will keep pushing the program to me anyway -- "Made you look!" -- and will recommend other crap of equal disinterest on the strength of my having sampled the first crap show.
(In a similar vein, each app uses the buttons on my remote differently, so I end up having to start over a lot before I can settle in to watch a show.)
The third aspect, actually watching TV, is one that makes me less and less satisfied with streaming as time goes by. With cable, I could change quickly from one channel to another. This, combined with digital video recording, made it possible for me to go months without actually watching a single commercial. When one came up on the channel I was watching, I'd use the two or three minute interval to surf around other channels I frequented, and since I was seldom really invested in a show, often I'd find something more interesting to me than what I'd been watching. It'd drive my wife crazy, though, so to keep peace I'd often just mute the TV and read until the commercials ended.
You can't surf channels with streaming. Most of the apps prevent you skipping the commercials at all, so all I can do is leave the room or, more often, mute the TV and read emails on my phone. Luckily, many streaming channels count down how long is left before the programming returns. But if you're watching something on, say, Hulu and a commercial comes on, you can't switch to another app, you just have to sit through that time, watching as life ebbs away to no good purpose.
On my Samsung TV, I can switch channels. But whereas a new cable channel comes up after a minimal delay -- a second, two at the most -- streaming channels seem to take FOREVER to start up. Usually it's only in reality maybe 3 or 4 seconds, but too often it's longer, up to 15 or even 20 seconds. I don't usually wait that long, but switch to yet another channel and make my way back later on. Honestly, the content is so uncompelling that it doesn't really matter. (And switching to a channel accessed by the digital antenna is even more painfully slow; plus the picture quality is often abysmal.)
And there are so many commercial breaks on streaming channels. They advertise "fewer commercials than cable," but if that's true it's because there's so much unsold commercial time allocated. (They also have relatively few different commercials, so you end up seeing the same damn thing over and over and over, no matter what channel you're watching.) You frequently end up staring at a screen with what amounts to a screen-saver on it, and it just goes on and on. You would think that the channels' bosses would recognise that by skipping the commercial breaks where there are no ads sold, they could build viewership. They would have to adjust the starting times for each program on the basically-worthless programming guide, but that's the job of a moment. But they'd rather just stick to their planned ad breaks, even thought they've nothing to show. I find it frustrating.
The upshot is, I'm seriously thinking about going back to cable. Meanwhile, though, I'm watching a lot less TV overall.
TL,DR:
Streaming is no better than cable; cable is no better than streaming. It's all crap.
* The news channels are particularly bad about commercial breaks. CNN's stream, for example, frequently cuts off mid-sentence and goes to a "we'll be right back" screen-saver, or changes in medias res from one report to the middle of another before the first is finished.
