Are there cord cutters here? I have to imagine there are. What are you folks doing? What's your setup?

I've been investigating it for a few years, but it never really worked out for our viewing habits and for the price of our current TV services VS the price we'd pay for just internet. These cable companies are clearly aware that they're becoming a utility and they intend to price their services to avoid that.

Our current costs for television and internet services are currently around $140/month. This is for 100Mbps down/up, basic cable, HBO, and Tivo.

We're considering jumping from Verizon Fios to Comcast. They have a 60Mbps plan (all we really need) for $39/month to start and $76/month after a year. We'd drop Tivo, get HBO Now, get network TV shows from the antenna, and pay for basic cable stuff. It basically saves us around $40-60/month after the first year, and at least $80 in that first year. Apparently folks have had good luck in keeping those intro rates when they call the retention folks at Comcast.

Now it's all about setting this stuff up and getting it to work. Plex is NOT Tivo. Their UI is pretty bad, and the setup is challenging. I'm hoping I can get the kinks smoothed out. For example, we tried watching the World Series last night as it was recording, and it kept freezing up and restarting or just acting weird. I'm worried it's because the processor in my Synology can't keep up. I assume that the feed is getting transcoded as it records, and then transcoded again to play on the Apple TV? Not sure how it works. But it might be more than my DS415+ can handle even though it has pretty good specs.

I'd love to hear about all your folks' setups.

I have never had the pleasure of paying to watch TV. That is, never subscribed to cable, satellite, or TV-over-copper from anyone.

Instead, I put the money into OTA gear early on, and a MythTV setup (very old outdated version now, but configured to be usable..) for PVR and advertisements removal. This has worked well.

But these days I mainly download stuff.

Internet here is currently CAD$35/month for 300/20 mbits/sec. That's a six month promo offer, after which it theoretically might cost as much as CAD$80/month, or as little as the current $35, depending on the outcome of regulatory appeals.

Telephone is about USD$5/month from voip.ms over the internet connection, and mobile phone is CAD$45/month with a 2GB data allowance.

Expensive stuff, but better to send money to 2-way multi-use services than simply to a 1-way consumption provider!

Cheers

Our family is probably better described as never-corders. We have so much stuff available to watch for free, and not enough time to watch it. Incurring a monthly expense so that we can have even more is foolish.

I think in the last couple of years, the only live TV we've watched has been Stanley Cup playoffs, and that's been OTA. We've never subscribed to cable or satellite, nor paid for Netflix, Hulu, or anything else. My wife has Prime for the shipping (because of her company) but doesn't use it for watching media. For TV shows, we'll wait until stuff hits the network's website. Otherwise, it's Youtube or DVDs.

Our library has a great and growing DVD collection, a large (though rather esoteric) selection of streaming titles, and we sometimes pick stuff up at garage sales/rummage sales for pennies on the dollar.

Our personal media collection is (slowly) getting ripped, and put onto a plex server (running on a freenas box powered by an Intel Atom). Our plex server is fairly out of date, so I'm looking at alternatives before I go updating it. Maybe jellyfin...

Mark- not sure I understood that last sentence, but you're describing pretty much what I'm planning on doing. Internet through Comcast, cell through TMobile, and TV through various streaming services (and OTA). The only difficulty is that - in the US, at least - the difference between an internet/TV bundle and plain internet is already pretty small, and when you add back in the cost of replacing the few shows you might watch with that big selection of channels, the added inconvenience that most cord-cutting solutions often comes with, you might as well just stick with the bundle. I think the only reason I'm considering it is also that I've been watching a little less TV lately.


I'll admit, your overall approach is appealing, but I think we watch too much stuff to go with it. There's not much we would be able to get for free, as network TV doesn't really have much content we like. Most of the programming we like is on streaming services and cable. But that's us.

I like Plex, and have already used it for years for my ripped DVDs. It's good, and they seem to improve it fairly often. I'm trying it out for live TV and DVR services and the more I iron out the kinks the better it seems to do. For one thing, I disabled the built-in transcoding feature and that seems to have fixed some funkiness I was getting. This is ironic as the entire reason I bought the older Extend model off ebay was to take some work away from my Synology so it wouldn't have to do the transcoding, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Anyway, I plan on moving from Fios to Comcast this week. We'll see how it goes...

This is accurate and is becoming hard for even me to ignore. When I met my wife, the only TV I paid for was the now-defunct Aereo service, so my personal live TV needs are very basic. We're now settled on YoutubeTV ($50) and Frndly ($7.99) as our only paid TV services. We don't have Netflix, HBO, Hulu, or anything like that. I have a promotional Fios 100/100 rate plan that runs about $42 per month after taxes. So, that's just-about $100 for TV and Internet.

Optimum is the local cable company that competes with Fios for TV and internet. They're currently running a promo that includes the standard 220+ channel cable package and 200Mbps internet for $64.99 "for life". Of course, that price does not include "taxes, fees, and charges" which they are free to tack on at will. Even if I called them today, it would be impossible to actually pay $64.99 since some of the fees are unavoidable such as "NY Sports Surcharge," "Broadcast TV redistribution fee" and nonsesne like that. But the deal is still very tempting if you don't need to rent their modem or cable boxes. It would definitely be under $90 with the CableCARD rental fee.

If you don't need much in the way of traditional television channels, locast.org might service your area. I've used Philo in the past as a low-cost addon for a handful of non-sports cable channels.