I've had a Tivo Roamio Pro (circa 2014), connected to my Comcast Xfinity service, and it's done its job without complaint until a few days ago. It's been boot-looping, where it gets up to letting you watch TV, then it tries to download an update from TiVo, then it crashes. Repeat. This happens with Ethernet or WiFi.

So far, all that TiVo has done is confirm all this with me and leave me with an escalation trouble ticket number. The TiVo still works, but I had to disconnect the network, and it will eventually run out of guide data. Needless to say, this does not spark joy. Based on TiVo's apparent absence of product support, much less any new product launches in the past two years, and it seems that I should ponder my alternatives.

The two top choices would be going deeper with Comcast and getting an X1 setup, or going in the other direction and subscribing to YouTube TV, wherein everything is "in the cloud".

YouTube TV is abstractly the correct solution, because it plays nicely with the TVs we already have (built-in app on one, Google TV dongles on the others). Bonus points that you can use it on the road, like connect a Google TV dongle to a hotel television, figure out the stupid hotel WiFi, and you're good to go. (Remember when we'd travel? Sigh.)

Another attraction of YouTube TV is that I would be down to buying a single service from Comcast -- just the Internet and nothing else -- which means that my other local choice, AT&T Fiber, would be price competitive, and it would be really easy to just switch back and forth every year based on whoever had the best deals at the time.

Of course, Google being Google, you never really know whether they're fully committed to any of their products. Never mind whether or not there's going to be network peering shenanigans that artificially degrade YouTube TV's QoS. That said, it's probably difficult for an ISP to distinguish regular YouTube from YouTube TV, and they don't want to degrade regular YouTube.

Pricing notes:

My current Comcast monthly bill, with the "HD digital starter plan", HBO, and 500 Mb down / 15 MB up, is $210.33. I'd previously had a variety of negotiated discounts that knocked this down to more like $150, but those have expired. And there are going to be some rate increases coming in the next billing cycle, I think. Now's a good time to jump.

Meanwhile, there's a T-Mobile customer discount on YouTube TV that causes the price to be $55/mo, which may or may not go up to $65/mo. I think, maybe, that I can also get my HBO through them, although for exactly the same $15/mo that I'd pay for getting it directly from HBO.

For raw Internet with no additional services, the prices seem to be:

- AT&T Fiber Internet 500 (500 Mbps symmetric, $45/mo plus taxes plus another $10/mo for equipment rental, minus a $200 "reward card"), so probably $65-70/mo, all said and done.

- It's hard to find a straight answer on a data-only plan from Comcast, but one sketchy web site claims I can get 600 Mbps down / 10 Mbps up for $50/mo "starting price" and then $96/mo after that. I already own the cable-modem, so no equipment fees.

- What about fixed wireless? T-Mobile fixed 5G is not yet available in our neighborhood. Verizon offers "LTE Home Internet", but not 5G, so this presumably isn't going to be enough bandwidth.

This tells me that it might be worth it to switch to AT&T, but keep the cable-modem around so it's easy to switch back later on. Alternating between each vendor, on annual basis, to get the best promotional deals, might be the best way forward.

So.... what am I missing here?