Today we finally “cut the cord” and dropped cable TV.  We’ve been trying Google TV for nearly a year (Family Plan, $36/month for up to 6 users, so about $6 each per month), and they’ve been slowly adding channels and features.  Well, they finally added Milwaukee’s Fox 6, and that was key for us.  We watch that channel a lot, and it was the default channel for our cable DVR. 

Google TV includes unlimited cloud-based DVR too, which just blows away the hard-drive-based DVR that the cable company offers (and also charges monthly fees for).  Plus, each Google TV user gets their OWN cloud DVR!  We often realize we missed a particular show that we forgot to DVR, but most of the time, on Google TV, we can still find the show and play it, or easily set it to record the next time it airs.  Cable DVR was pretty sluggish in comparison, and it sometimes crashed and often froze up on us, forcing us to reboot the DVR, which for us, often took 10-15 minutes.  We have also managed to “kill” several DVRs over the years – at least 4 of them I believe, (you can search this site for the keyword “DVR” and probably find most, if not all of the times each of our DVRs has failed) and this one seemed to be heading in the same direction–often freezing up, sometimes indefinitely and not returning to functioning until we forced the power off and back on and rebooted it.  From past experience, and from working with computer hard drives for decades, these are very often symptoms of a failing hard drive.  I also think our current cable boxes (we have 1 DVR and 2 receivers) were pretty old… so old, I don’t even think the cable company wants us to ship them back.  They simply dropped our services and we haven’t gotten any instructions to return the equipment like we had in the past.  We’ll hang onto them for awhile, just in case though.  If they try to charge us for un-returned equipment, they’ll definitely get them back pronto!

We’ve noticed that the picture quality of any app we use on our Samsung SmartTV is much clearer and sharper (HDR and 4K upscaled) than any image we’ve seen from cable DVR or through one of the cable receivers, so every TV channel, show, and movie we watch now is much clearer and sharper than before–a clear improvement.

So our cable bill just dropped over $100 and we’re now streaming-only for our TV services.  We have 400 mbps internet speed though, so I’m sure that helps a lot with the quality of service.  Now I’m eyeing the new 1 Gig internet plan they’re offering… Oh that sounds really sweet!  It costs $199 for installation, since they have to run special lines to the house, but other than that the monthly fee isn’t much more than we’re paying now.  Hmmm.