Cut the (CableTV) Cord - Went to Roku

For some of you more youthful and tech savvy folks, you’ll roll your eyes as you’ve already done this years ago… But for some of us that have “always” had a dial-up phone and “always” had CableTV, it’s mostly the consistency of what we’ve been used to (or unknown of what happens if we cut the cord). BUT, this past month, I finally did it, cut off DirecTV and the $128/mo TV bill, shifted us to Roku.

Here’s what we did:

This Roku thing requires Internet connectivity, which I use Comcast cable for Internet (DirecTV for TV). Our Comcast is a very basic “Performance Plus” service at $49.95/mo which is 75Mbps down / 5Mbps up, which for streaming and gaming for 3-4 people at the same time is plenty.
Bought a Roku Stick Plus for $40. It’s a 1 time purchase, you buy the stick thing off Amazon, plugs into an HDMI port on the TV so when you switch to that HDMI port, the Roku menu shows up just like the old CableTV menu.
(note: they make a Roku Stick (does standard HDMI) that's $5 cheaper, whereas the Roku Stick + does HDMI and 4K high definition, so despite not having any 4K TVs at home at this point, still popped the $5 extra for the “plus” version for the future. We also ended up buying a Roku Express Plus for one of our really old TVs that didn’t have HDMI, instead the thing has the old fashion RCA (yellow / red / white) plugs. They make a Roku Ultra LT that is their top of the line that basically comes with headphones (which I have plenty) and a MicroSD slot (to download and save videos for offline playback (which we’re just fine streaming live or on demand over the Internet whenever we want), didn’t think it was worth the 2x price.

FYI, once you buy Roku, there is NO monthly fee or anything you ever pay to Roku. They’re just a hardware device vendor that you buy their thing once (other competitors are things like SlingBox, Apple TV, Amazon Fire Stick, etc)

We used the Roku thing for a month and took advantage of all of the free 1-week / 1-month service trials that were available to confirm ALL of what we watch were able to be done with the services available.
We found after a month, we really only watch fewer than 10 services, which we were able to buy for $3/mo or $20/season or something reasonable. Basically at $128/mo we were paying for CableTV, we had a LOT of $$$ to spend on $3 here, $20 there…
The net of our services:

PBS / PBS Kids: Making a $60/year donation to KQED and using their PBS Passport Service allows us to stream all new and historical PBS content https://www.kqed.org/tv/passport.jsp
Netflix / Amazon Prime Video: We’ve already been paying monthly for Netflix and get Amazon Prime Video as part of our Prime membership, so you just associate these services to the Roku box at no additional cost than what we’ve been paying in the past
CBS All Access: For $6/mo, we signed up for CBS All Access https://www.cbs.com/all-access That “subscription” provides us all live CBS content, all live NFL (AFC) football games that CBS broadcasts, and even their premium content like Star Trek Discovery, etc…
Fox Sports / Sling TV: For NFL (NFC) football games, they don’t provide a direct subscription to Roku in our area https://www.foxsports.com/watch/instant-access the cheapest option is Sling TV https://www.sling.com/ “Blue” package at $25/mo that provides a bundle of the various sports channels, plus CNN, National Geographic, E!... Their Fox Sports are “select markets,” so use the free subscription to see what you get each week is what you want. If you don’t find what you want, then you look into full bundled packages below.
Full Bundled Packages: If you are a big TV person, you can start looking into Hulu https://www.hulu.com/liv e-tv ($45/mo) OR YouTubeTV https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/ ($50/mo) or DirecTV Now https://www.atttvnow.com/ ($50-$70/mo) These 3 companies offer various channel packages, they stream live ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, Food Network, HGTV, TNT, Fox Sports, etc. The top of the line offering is ATT TV Now MAX package at $70/mo and includes HBO, Cinemax, plus all of the Fox Sports, CBS Sports, EPSN, FX, TBS, TNT, CNN, VH1 stuff. We have decided to NOT buy in to one of these packages yet, $45-$50/mo is definitely cheaper than $128-$200/mo that most people spend on CableTV, but just feels like we’re back to paying for a bunch of channels we don’t really want/need. So we have held off on this for now.
Buying A La Carte services: As an alternative to buying a big bundle, you can buy the various services a la carte, like we are considering subscribing to HBO a la carte. For $15/mo for their “HBO Now” service https://subscribe.hbonow.com we can watch all HBO movies, shows, etc. It seems most content providers are going this route, so Disney Plus, Showtime Anytime, etc are all providing their services individually. You just have to do the math that if you pay $15/mo for 5 services, you might be better off getting the $70/mo full ATT Now Max bundle, but the nice thing is these are all month to month, you buy and cancel at any time, you’re not locking in for a year with some special promo that expires, no cable boxes to return, etc, so it has been REALLY easy to sign-up and pay monthly, and cancel and switch…

This might not be for everybody, but with our usage, PBS @ $60/year, CBS All Access at $6/mo, buy a season of X-Files for $20, maybe $15/mo for HBO Now, plus the $50/mo for Internet service and we’re spending == $950 for a year vs $2100+ that we were spending…

Mostly just being a more conscious buyer in keeping better track of what we’re spending money on than just buying a bundle we never use…