AMEX has a $20 back FUBOtv offer you can add to your account for the next 3 months (that they have been renewing pretty much all year, so probably even longer than that), which you can use for FUBOtv to bring it down to $45.98 for 141 channels (we have the $5.99 fubo extra add-on included in that price), multiple streams, and a 500hour dvr, the best deal out there. Better interface and way more channels than Philo (including a lot of news channels), and MUCH better video quality than SlingTV.

Video quality is about the same as Vue, and the only real negative is no profiles for individual DVR queues, but that's coming in the next update.

Philo has a terrible interface, bad DVR, no news channels, and about 1/3 the channels. I wasn't comparing them, really. The base Fubo still has more than 2x the channels and with the AMEX promo is only $39.

We've tried all the streaming services except youtubeTV (we're de-googling ourselves as much as possible now that google is evil), and now that VUE is gone, Fubo is the best all-around that's left. Their only problem is price, but the AMEX promo fixes that. They ran it almost all last year, so I don't see the promo credit ending anytime soon.

My main problem with SlingTv is the video quality is ATROCIOUS. So crappy. I got spoiled with Vue, which had very good to excellent video quality, so SlingTV was a slap in the face. We were out after the one month trial and moved to Fubo (because we already tried Philo and its channel selection was too limited and had a bad interface, too).

There's a huge market for the taking for the first service that gives you all the channels you would get on cable AND a decent interface AND a good cloud DVR - at a reasonable price. No one provider has that - yet. But as HBOMax and Peacock and others enter the market this year, there will HAVE to be consolidation. There is just too much fragmentation and it's only getting worse.

It's not stuttering, it's compression. The video quality looks BAAD if you're sensitive to it. We watch on a 4K HDR OLED (but it looks equally bad on our high-end Panasonic plasmas in other rooms) and Sling video is massively overcompressed, so the crispness of the video is lost, leading to a generally indistinct, softened non-dynamic-looking image. Trust me, they're massively over-compressing what they're sending out to save bandwidth.

We don't use Fire products (terrible) or Rokus (only slightly less terrible). Sling looks bad on Nvidia Shield and Apple TV 4k, which are two top-tier streaming boxes at the moment.

We ditched Spectrum when tuning adapters came to our town (we escaped them for a long time) and the video quality turned to crap because of overcompression.

Interesting to see that SlingTV lost almost 100k subscribers in the 4th quarter. That's almost 5% of their total in one quarter. Eventually the crappy interface and poor video quality seems to be overcoming the cheap buy-in. Warms my heart to see people ditch mediocrity.

https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/dish-narrows-tv-subscriber-losses-in-q4-but-drops-sling-tv-customers-for-the-first-time-1203507445/

Don't get too used to it. Aereo did basically the same thing and was sued out of existence. Locast is being sued now. The only difference is they are (allegedly) non-profit in the service of the public interest. So they have a slim chance. But they could disappear next week or next month if it doesn't go their way.

Yeah, we're doing our broadcast networks with a Roamio OTA and TiVo Minis. Few hundred bucks set up the whole house. Problem is, supposedly TiVo will force all boxes to the new terrible interface sometime this year, no reverting after that point. Not looking forward to it. TiVo had the best interface in the business. No idea why they changed it.

They have a spare OS partition. They WILL upgrade you, and it will suck.

We were original TiVo loyalists. Bought a Series 1 the first month it came out. We owned at least one of every model they made up until the Bolt where they lost their way. Now, we've sold all our Roamios except the OTA one and are sadly mostly out of TiVo. They lost us for the most part. And yes, it does suck.

It would've been hard to believe they'd force COMMERCIALS on you before letting you watch recorded shows on your local TiVo, not that long ago, but the "new" TiVo company is doing that now, too. Terrible all around.

Sinclair is bad news. They've been sucking up local affiliates to push their propaganda. In the old days not so long ago, they wouldn't be allowed to own as much local TV as they do.

We're very sensitive to video quality and Sling is objectively terrible. Massively overcompressed, making everything muddy, and crappy 20th century 30fps frame rates on all but a couple sports channels. Nasty.

It's not just us, though. Here's one of dozens of articles on how crappy SlingTV quality is:
https://www.techhive.com/article/3408376/sling-tv-would-be-great-if-it-wasnt-so-chintzy.html

We have a 400Mbps connection and AppleTV4K boxes, so it's not that. SlingTV says they can deliver the best quality (for them) at 3mbps, which says it all. Netflix needs 7Mbps for 1080p/60 and 3.6Mbps for 720p/60 and has noticibly better quality. Fubo delivers 720p/60 on broadcast live and 1080p/60 if you watch the shows on demand.

Netflix is fine. Fubo is acceptable. Good streaming can be done. SlingTV just isn't doing it.

Philo is okay. Better than SlingTV because it's compressed less so the picture isn't as soft, but they only offer 30fps. We had it for a while, but the interface was the thing that turned us off more than anything. If they had popular news channels, we'd probably have sucked it up and kept them since it was a perfect compliment to our OTA TiVos. But extremely limited news options (Cheddar news doesn't count!) killed them for us.

Depends on your TV/AV receiver. We're working with 4k OLED and Plasma (depending on the room), so if you have crappy source, it's obvious.

Same thing with frame rate. If you're sensitive to it, it's obvious.

Netflix is MARKEDLY better on our OLED than SlingTV. Not even in the same universe.

Well there's your problem. If you are okay with QLED after having OLED, you must not be sensitive to picture quality.

I hate this crappy trend to require discrete apps to get the content you want and refuse to do it. Companies just want the user data for themselves, so it's an artificial constraint. I won't support it.

You DO realize thewirecutter.com is a pay for review site that has been caught pushing product they've been paid to. That linked article reads like an advertorial for Blu Ray, which it likely is given their history and reputation.

AMEX Blue Preferred outright gives you $20 back on Fubo each month as a rebate, as long as you're signed up on the AMEX control panel.

The only thing I outright hate about Fubo is they have it set so if you swipe left or right (even a little) on the apple remote, it changes the channel and you lose the buffer of the channel you're watching. I've picked up the remote and in the process accidentally changed channels more times than I can count. It's a TERRIBLE feature, but there's no way I can see to turn it off.

If you buy your own well-researched equipment it will ALWAYS perform better than the crap from the ISP.

You rang?

Cheap isn't a deal if the product is annoying. Philo is annoying. With the AMEX 20 back, Fubo is substantially better with more channels (about 2x as many) for $40/mo net, a MUCH better DVR interface and more storage.

Fubo screwed their subscribers by pulling CNN and some other channels with ZERO notice last week. We got the email after it was done. Oh, and they're raising the price, too. They justified it by saying they're adding some more channels no one wants IN TWO MONTHS, but the loss of CNN International and CNN is a drag. I had "news row" with all the channels lined up, and CNNI overnight is usually pretty good, so pissed they took it away with no notice.

The drag is that it seems to be a "thing" that Warner will be doing as contracts expire so they can drive people to a new platform of theirs in 2021. Crazy.

We already have Hulu no commercials at a discount and you can get the gift cards for 20% off occasionally, so considering moving to Hulu Live, no commercials and ditching Fubo. Only problem is Hallmark channels which my wife and daughter are addicted to. Probably have to add FriendlyTV for $8 just to get those in that scenario.

Streaming is such a mess with everyone wanting their own platform that Reed Hastings is right - piracy is the competition. It's just about to the point that setting up an automated pirate server to get the shows you watch is easier and less hassle. Almost. The first company that brings all these together at a reasonable price will own the market, but with Disney having so much power, I don't see that happening.

I'm totally serious. CNN international has some good shows. I watch ALL news (PBS, CNN, CNNI, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, NHK, etc). It's the only way to get a complete picture. People that watch FOX News and think they're getting actual news are delusional.

Don't know. I don't watch them. But cutting ANY channel, then telling subscribers after the fact is bad for keeping those subs.

I don't subscribe to National Enquirer, People, or US Magazine, either. Same thing.

All the providers are playing a dangerous game of greed because the apps that enable you to get what you want to watch automatically delivered to your own server and pay nothing have improved substantially. I never really considered it before, but am definitely now. If there's another change with the lineups or pricing after we move to Hulu Live, we'll probably just move to getting our content for free. Not a move I want to make, but I'm not going to keep playing these games while the providers fail upward. We'll see...

If you put the VPN on a mini computer instead of a router and it's automatically grabbing everything you've "favorited" in the app, you can set it up with scripts to reboot once or twice a day, which automatically restarts the VPN, so if it died, that fixes it. Like I said I'm not to that point *yet*, but I'm definitely staying aware of options.

Youtube's channels suck for what they charge. You need at least two other services to fill in the blanks, and then you're back close to $100 again. Fubo was great for exactly 5 months until they pulled this delete channels and tell your subscribers later bit.

Not if you bind the application to the VPN port only, so if the VPN dies, the app stops cold via the kill switch.

PIA is US based, which is bad news for privacy.

Pretty sure their CTO is still Mark Karpeles, the dude that did a bunch of slimy stuff and melted down Mt. Gox. That's also a bad sign.

Didn't know Privado offered VPN service. Last I heard they were in private searches. But they're located in Spain, so that's a plus for privacy. They're not in the 5 or 9 eyes, just the D-list 14 eyes.

With any luck Sinclair will be broken up and media ownership rules will be strengthened.

OTA TiVo is a great supplement to streaming. We have a Roamio OTA (any TiVo past that sucks) with the classic interface and it's come in handy for shows that weren't available on streaming or during internet or provider outages.

That said, we're looking at getting off Fubo and heading to YoutubeTV right now. Fubo's 2020 surprise price increase and dropping CNN while adding (and HEAVILY PROMOTING) Fox News was not welcome. Now they've changed the interface and made it a lot worse so you have to scroll down to get to your favorite channels (they now push "Fubo favorites" first). Last straw situation. I like Fubo's DVR a lot better, but we can get more channels (including BOTH CNN and Fox News) for less money with YoutubeTV, so we're doing the trial to see if we'll make the jump.

The main downers for YoutubeTV so far is the heavier compression makes the video softer than Fubo (I assume to nudge people to the $20/mo extra 4k tier) and the YTTV dvr is so bad it's barely a DVR. It's more like a container to put the shows you like and it may have recorded (no commercials) or on-demand (commercials) stuff and it's hard to tell which is which.

You can double up antennas so you get different orientations to try to pick up more signals reliably. You need to make sure the cables to the antennas are the same length, though. There are DIYs on the internet on how to do it. If the towers around you are in much different locations, it can help.

This sounds great, but do you have a recommendation for a LNA? There's an ocean of noise in the segment when you just search for broadcast antenna LNA and I'm sure most of it is garbage...

Thanks. I'll give that a shot.

AT&T is purposely neglecting the maintenance of the copper wire landlines so they can move people to IP based phones. This sucks for many reasons, not the least of which is landlines are powered through the line, so they work in power outages, and landlines have real 911 location tracking. Internet phone service does not.

We were stuck with degrading landline service that went up in price every year $3-4 until we were paying for local only phone service (no long distance) for $60/mo, which was CRAZY. I kept it until the line quality got so bad it wasn't worth having, which is AT&T's plan. Made the change to OOMA internet phone last year. Was not happy about it.

We tried YoutubeTV because Fubo changing the interface and dropping channels without notice pissed me off, but YoutubeTV is a DISASTER as far as I'm concerned. Their UI and DVR are terrible - amongst the worst in streaming. Meanwhile FuboTV put their interface change back to the way it was before, so we're sticking with FuboTV for now. Why can't SOMEONE with some industry clout and money get this right? Classic TiVo interface with YoutubeTV channels and video quality would print money.

Here's the ones we've tried over the past few years:
Sling blue/Orange - generally poor video quality, way overcompressed
Philo - bad video quality (but better than sling), limited channels, excellent price, though
PlayStationTV - really liked this one, but the service is dead now
YoutubeTV - terrible UI, terrible DVR, good video quality, very good channel selection, pricey
FuboTV - good UI, very good DVR, decent video quality, good channel selection (but missing CNN and some others) TONS of soccer and other odd sports crap I couldn't care less about, pricey

It's going by latitude, so I have to think Florida will be a while. We're up at the north end of CA and it's here, but only some of the people that signed up actually got dishes so far. I know some who already have it and others who are still waiting.

Nope. We had the same experience. Youtube tv's DVR implementation is TERRIBLE. Stayed with FuboTV and OTA for the networks with an old TiVo roamio OTA.

I just wish SOME provider (I'm surprised Apple hasn't) could get everything under one umbrella with a decent DVR and good audio/video quality (Sling/Philo are especially terrible video). PlayStation TV came the closest to ideal, but it's gone now.

Roku, Nvidia Shield, Apple TV 1080p or 4k - Sling (orange AND blue packages) looked looked like crap on a 400Mb connection on 65 and 77" OLEDs professionally calibrated regardless of the box used when other streaming services used at the same time looked good to great. Dunno.

Gigabit internet wired to jacks in every room. The fact that other streaming services looked fine and sling did not at the same time points to sling and not the internet service or the router or the wiring. I *guess* charter could have been throttling Dish/Sling traffic at the ISP level, but that seems really far-fetched.

Fubo is raising prices again. Pretty sure this will be the thing that finally makes us drop them. I was pissed when they canceled channels and added Fox News AND raised prices last time with NO notice - a triple Will Smith. This time we're not even getting any channels, just more DVR space (who needs 1000 hours?) and more simultaneous streams (10. The 3 we paid $2 more for were fine. Who is 10 simultaneous streams for? Brady Bunch? Duggar family?).

I miss Playstation TV. Still can't believe no one bought them. They had the best setup and channels for streaming.

Disney had a deal for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ together for $19.99/mo recently. Pretty good deal.

(in iOS)
Open the Settings app.
Tap your name.
Tap Subscriptions.
Tap Bally Sports.
Tap Cancel Subscription. You might need to scroll down to find the Cancel Subscription button. If there is no Cancel button or you see an expiration message in red text, the subscription is already canceled.