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Directv alternatives

tinboski

tinboski

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 28, 2023
Messages
166
Location
Tupelo, MS
Hey folks.. looking for ideas to "cut the cord" We currently pay $200 per month for DTV reg price and are currently at $155 with the "I'm gonna cancel" plan for a couple more months. We subscribe to all the Plus streams as well which is WTF knows how much more per month. Looking for alternatives as we watch maybe 10 channels on DTV. Ideas? and thanks in advance! KK
 
I cut the cord a year ago and went fully IP-delievered. After trying several options, we settled on YouTube TV, which works great through AppleTV and certainly will work through other smart TV apps and STBs.

Bonus - it instantly gave us live TV channels in our RV AND vacation home in addition to our main residence, all for the same price. Not cheap at the newly increased price of almost $90/month, but it works very well if you feel you must have live TV channels. (The RV has Starlink for connectivity, but we already had that cost and equipment for our on-road streaming and internet needs)
 
josh said:
I cut the cord a year ago and went fully IP-delievered. After trying several options, we settled on YouTube TV, which works great through AppleTV and certainly will work through other smart TV apps and STBs.

Bonus - it instantly gave us live TV channels in our RV AND vacation home in addition to our main residence, all for the same price. Not cheap at the newly increased price of almost $90/month, but it works very well if you feel you must have live TV channels. (The RV has Starlink for connectivity, but we already had that cost and equipment for our on-road streaming and internet needs)
Click to expand...
Thanks Josh, I was kind of leaning that way as well but wondered about the DVR and exactly how that works. Any insight?
 
tinboski said:
Thanks Josh, I was kind of leaning that way as well but wondered about the DVR and exactly how that works. Any insight?
Click to expand...
I was like a 25-year Tivo user and proponent, and hung on to it way too long. The DVR functions of YouTubeTV are not as elegant, nor as easy to navigate, and the "guide" functions of looking through future shows is pretty lame. BUT, it has limitless storage, and it's all in the cloud so shows are available on any of our TVs in any of our homes as well as directly to any of our phones, tablets AND laptops, so that's a huge gain in functionality and ease. That more than offsets the quirkiness of the UI, especially as we just are watching almost no live TV anymore... occaisional sports, occasional news, and one or two other things.

I was worried about cutting the cord, but now would never consider going back to what we had.

... and don't forget you can try YouTubeTV for one month for free (I think they still offer this) so try that out before cutting the cord if you like. $5 says you will quickly see the advantages and never go back.
 
We first tried Hulu's live TV service, and OMG it had the most horrible UI and was pretty much unusable for any of our in the family. They need to fire their whole UI team.

It also imposes SEVERE geo-restrictions on playback... WAY stricter than Google does for YouTube TV, so when off in our RV, we'd constantly get messages about not being able to play back live channels or recorded content based on where the RV was at that moment. Figured it'd be the same on YouTubeTV (or worse), but in fact, everything just always works from anywhere on YTTV.

(Just to be clear, we LOVE Hulu's regular streaming service... it works great and is easy to use. It's only their LiveTV add-on service that is horrendous.)
 
josh said:
I was like a 25-year Tivo user and proponent, and hung on to it way too long. The DVR functions of YouTubeTV are not as elegant, nor as easy to navigate, and the "guide" functions of looking through future shows is pretty lame. BUT, it has limitless storage, and it's all in the cloud so shows are available on any of our TVs in any of our homes as well as directly to any of our phones, tablets AND laptops, so that's a huge gain in functionality and ease. That more than offsets the quirkiness of the UI, especially as we just are watching almost no live TV anymore... occaisional sports, occasional news, and one or two other things.

I was worried about cutting the cord, but now would never consider going back to what we had.
Click to expand...
That's where we are as well.. the wife's afraid of losing her DVR but we hardly ever watch anything recorded. Is either K for movies and honestly a few shows or on one of the + streaming services we pay out the ass for that has the shows the next day. We never sit in the living room waiting for a weekly show, we let them build and binge on the weekends when we are "free".
 
tinboski said:
Thanks Josh, I was kind of leaning that way as well but wondered about the DVR and exactly how that works. Any insight?
Click to expand...
One thing to remember about DVR + YouTubeTV is that you don't need it. When you have YouTubeTV, you can use it to sign in to all of the various apps for the networks, so you can use those as your "DVR".

We have YouTubeTV but rarely if ever use the YouTube TV app. We just have it logged in as our TV Provider on the AppleTV and use Apple's TV app to tell us when there's a new episode of something we're watching available.

(We do, however, use PLEX and an antenna for our local stations and the broadcast network shows we watch, which are becoming few and far between these days, outside of Survivor.)
 
jackuiowa said:
Have you considered directv stream. Might be a good no contract and no equipment alternative with similar channels
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I would not recommend Directtv stream. I have it in five rooms, and they all fail and have to be rebooted constantly. They also stop mid playing mid way and switches back to the TV, so you have to go into the saved shows to find what show you were just watching.

Also, I need a second controller in the theater because my theater guy couldn't get it to work with my Crestron system. He's still going, but it's been frustrating. Hoping to find the solution on here because it irritates me to no end to pay for a Crestron system and still need a second remote for the Directtv. I'm also stuck on a two year plan. It's so bad, I'm willing to just eat the cost to find the solution.
 
ericourt said:
I would not recommend Directtv stream. I have it in five rooms, and they all fail and have to be rebooted constantly. They also stop mid playing mid way and switches back to the TV, so you have to go into the saved shows to find what show you were just watching.

Also, I need a second controller in the theater because my theater guy couldn't get it to work with my Crestron system. He's still going, but it's been frustrating. Hoping to find the solution on here because it irritates me to no end to pay for a Crestron system and still need a second remote for the Directtv. I'm also stuck on a two year plan. It's so bad, I'm willing to just eat the cost to find the solution.
Click to expand...

I think you are speaking of directv via internet using the directv Gemini device which requires a two year contract.

Directv stream is a no contract bring your own device service you can cancel anytime . I use it via Apple TV, Nvidia shield and Roku without issues. All using the stock device remotes.

They are two different services though directv does a poor job marketing them. Here is the comparison

 
Also... check Jeramy's @Techthusiasm channel. He did a good comparison of these live TV services a while ago... though it may be overdue for an update on prices & features.
 
We got rid of satellite DirecTV in favor of streaming years ago and never looked back. For a couple years we were happy with FuboTV until they dropped a number of channels we watched frequently. Since then, we've paid for DirecTV Stream and are happy with it. It runs on our Roku devices throughout the house w/o issue and provides all the channels we want. I like the ability to create a guide with just my few favorite channels and for the others I mainly record using the cloud DVR ... storage is unlimited and simple enough to use.

I have also looked into YouTube TV and the only reason we didn't choose it was because there were certain channels they don't offer. I don't recall exactly what they were, but do remember that DirecTV Stream offered the most channels (at least for us).

Andy
 
I use Channels DVR w/xfinity…

Was along time TiVo user and switch 2 years ago, it’s everything I wish TiVo would of been.

getchannels.com

Channels — Watch TV Your Way

Watch and record your favorite programs on every TV and device. A joy to use and simple to set up.
getchannels.com

Have my DVR running on a Mac Mini and use there app for playback on all my devices.
 
Love love love the user experience with YouTube TV. Menus/navigation felt really slow on DTV.
 
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