I just wanted to do a quick shout-out to YouTube TV for its awesome services. I think I posted something before about it, but I thought it was worth praising once more. I’ve done my share of bitching about the bad experiences I’ve had with Time Warner Cable and AT&T over the years, so I figured I should start to balance things out, now that I’ve found something we’re really happy with.

We now have only Internet with Spectrum — the 400 mbps package for a flat $96/month — and that works great. No surcharges, no addons, nothing. It’s a very stable, flat $96/month we can rely on, and it’s pretty reliable for us. I have to reboot our router from time to time when things seem to get flaky, but that’s about it. Everything else we use is streamed. Dropping Spectrum’s TV services, including 3 receivers and 1 DVR saved us a ton monthly, so we had no problem with paying the $40/month flat fee for YouTube TV (it’s $50/month now, by the way, but still acceptable). This made us a bit nervous at the time, wondering what the catch would be. We still have all the channels we watch, and even better DVR services, yet our total month cost went way down. Well, it’s been months and we still haven’t found a catch. It really is worth it. In fact, we now find that our picture quality is much better than it was through cable boxes. Every channel on YouTube TV is crystal clear and a lot clearer than anything we saw on cable. I’m not exactly sure why, but it is.

YouTube TV also recently added another batch of new channels, which include content Sandy and I really enjoyed on cable but had to get on Hulu Live TV (another additional cost) after we “cut the cable”, so I quickly downgraded our Hulu service back to basic Hulu when those channels came to YouTube TV. So now it’s even better. We also have Showtime on YouTube TV, which is an add-on package. I only wish it had HBO as well, then it would be a REALLY complete service for us! Unfortunately HBO is only available as a stand-alone app, with a cable subscription, or with Amazon Prime Video as an add-on. I’m not sure which is better, so we just have HBO Now, which is their standalone service.

Over the last several months we have learned many of the nuances with YouTube TV and how it’s different than cable and a in-home DVR. For one thing, you can’t schedule an individual recording of a show or movie. You search and tell it to record a show, but it automatically records every occurence of that show and even renews any recordings you have of that show. Since space is no longer an issue (unlimited DVR) it makes it a lot less stressful for us (me) to schedule anything and everything I might possibly want to watch later on. There’s a 9-month limit on recordings, but since most shows rebroadcast everything in reruns and on different networks, it looks like this limitation may not even ever be a factor. Shows re-saved themselves each time they re-air, so they seem to stay there. We’ll have to see down the road I guess.

And each user in our family has their own private unlimited cloud DVR too. Each of us can record our favorite shows separate from everyone else. Not having a physical DVR box or any of the receiver boxes we had in each room makes it that much more comfortable too. Especially knowing how many hard drives we actually killed over the years in our DVRs! I think I might have ranted quite a bit in a previous post or two on my website, if you’d like to know exactly how many.

Even movies–it’s amazing to see how many good movies you can find out there too… Just search for a movie title you know and it’ll show up as long as it’s not currently in theaters or very recently released. Tell YouTube TV to record it and the next time it’s on any channel, it will. There are even a lot of free movie sources out there now, especially with Roku boxes and Roku TVs… Many even completely free without commercials. How they can do it I have no idea, but they’re out there, and I’m not referring to the “Kodi” type services that are very shady and illegal. Those services will eventually get you a warning letter from your internet service provider if you use them to any extent. These are just straight-up legitimate services like the Roku Channel on any Roku box or MoviesAnywhere, which regularly offer thousands of free movies through one or more of their connected retailers, which include ads, kind of like if you watched a movie on regular TV.

Anyway, the streaming landscape is totally new and ever-changing these days, so it’s difficult to keep up with everything, but we’re finding it a lot of fun and much less stressful with YouTube TV that it was with all the cable hardware and services. Now i just need to rip all of these annoying round black “cable” wires out of my house… they’re everywhere!