We canceled Xfinity recently and have been replacing all the Xfinity functionality. Our cord cutting kit is:
NVIDIA Shield running Plex server and serving as streaming device on one TV
HDHomerun tuner
Roku Ultra on the other TV
Outdoor Antenna installed by Dish
Services:
Netflix
Amazon Prime
PBS App with donor privileges
YouTube TV
Pluto TV and other free streaming
We have already canceled YouTube TV Good service but get the networks over the air and dvr with Plex. ESPN and HGTV aren’t worth $50 a month. I value ESPN and the other sports networks together at maybe $15 a month and HGTV at maybe $5.
We get about 40 over the air channels including all the networks. Paid streaming gives us plenty of content and free streaming gives us the feeling of more channels than we could ever watch. Frontdoor on Pluto is the substitute for HGTV; it’s HGTV shows from years ago.
We switched to Frontier FIOS for internet. We get faster service and it handles all the streaming as well as all the work at home. Xfinity was $165, we could have gotten $145 with 2 year contract. Frontier will be about $55. With YouTube TV we really lose nothing and we would be saving at least $40 a month since we had Netflix and Amazon even with Xfinity. Without YouTube TV we save at least $90 a month and the only thing we lose that we value at all is ESPN and HGTV. It’s a bit more complicated to get to the shows we want but not at all difficult.
The upfront antenna and hardware costs will take some months to recover but the hardware should last years and the antenna a decade or more. And we’re sticken it to the man.
