Cord Cuttin' Status 18Oct16

This has basically been read via personal emails already by those most interested, yet I wanted to blogify my cord cutting system and savings. I've "cut the cord" in multiple domiciles and now just buy bandwidth from CenturyLink, Comcast and AT&T Wireless (for mobile). I've also dumped all wired home phone services.

Don’t miss home phones and really don't miss the junk calls. We do cover 3 mobile users @ $180/mo for 20G/mo total plus 3 iPhone leases… damn it I now have to monitor LTE use.

Total Internet/broadband costs are $100 covering two sites... both exceed 40Mbps down and 5Mbps up ~ so, good big pipes. Current monthly content costs are <$66/mo total (all incurred over the top for streaming) covering both Summit and COS…

• $25 SlingTV for ~25 "live" channels including all ESPN/CNN & sports
• $8 NetFlix for movies & shows
• $10 Showtime for movies, Homeland, etc.
• $15 HBO for movies, Game of Thrones, etc.
• $8 Hulu Plus for missed episodes of broadcast TV (we rarely use this and it could be dropped for future savings)
• $0 Amazon for their content; it is zero as we’d use Prime for other reasons

Summit is much more expensive with Comcast at $75/mo and "traffic shaping" is more evident through them. I am working on measurements that could tell a lot about offer vs actual from vendors. I talked to CenturyLink about xDSL in Summit ~ only $35/mo for me so plenty of additional savings are possible.

Regarding video product/system evaluations thus far... my hardware is fully depreciated and/or very cheap (except for final stage display and sound transducers).

• Plex is awesome. I moved recently to Plex DVR as a beta tester and await a chance to try Plex in the Cloud. I have a multi-terabyte Win7-based server at home to stream Plex videos and music to anyhwere and anything. Plex DVR picks up HD terrestrial broadcasts from my net-connected HDHomeRun dual tuner (attached to a high gain bow-tie array) for video recording, and to my music store (I was using GooglePlay but hope to get the same "cloudification" from Amazon for unlimited storage for $60/yr).

• A MediaSonic digital OTA receiver is used for live broadcast viewing in COS and Sling with SlingPlayer casts those signals to any remote client as needed.

• Roku, Chromecast and iDevices all receive streams of any of the music, DVR recordings, packetized channel content or "slung" signals effectively
• Boxee/Kodi and PlayOn have been decommissioned - they were not reliable enough.

We've saved >$1,500/yr in cutting cords and dropping wired phone service ~ and we actually have more content now with HBO & Showtime funded with the savings.

The downside of purely packetized content via Rokus or iDevices is that flipping between "channels" not in the same content provider requires exiting one app, launching another, finding what you want and launch watching it... probably more time consuming to navigate than an integrated view of all channels and recordings. When casting to/thru a Chromecast, an iDevice with appropriate castable apps (all the ones I use) is required and used in the stream initiation process.