savas parastatidis

Moving from xfinity to streaming TV

I know that I am late to the streaming TV party. Last week was the date when our household cut the cable TV line.

First of all… I am fully aware that what I describe below are “first world problems and solutions”! However, I got many requests from my social network to write up my research, so here it goes…

Mary and I have been Comcast customers forever. We subscribed separately to Comcast’s services and continued to do so when we bought our house and moved in together. Over the years, Comcast became Xfinity. The price of the services kept increasing, together with the bundling of services.

Xfinity and Bundling

Xfinity likes to bundle services. When a contract expires, the price for the services increases significantly. You must choose whether you would like to get another contract or pay month-by-month. So, the last time I renewed the contract, it was cheaper (for the 2-year duration of the contract) to get TV, Internet, and a landline from Xfinity than to pay month-by-month for just TV and Internet. Of course, we didn’t need a land phone device. They even required us to rent their modem equipment for the Internet even though I was using my own cable modem.

About a year ago, our last contract expired. I asked Xfinity for options for renewal. They told me that I needed to add a security system and service to the bundle and sign a 2-year contract for all the services in order to get a discounted price.

That did it for me. I refused to do so and started the research on how to decouple ourselves from Xfinity. The price increased to almost $300/month for the TV and Internet services we get (and the land phone line we didn’t use). I was not happy but I was willing to pay that price for the flexibility of discontinuing the service whenever I wanted.

Internet Provider

I was getting 400/10Mbits (download/upload) from xfinity. It later became (500/20Mbits). No other provider came close to those speeds for our address. I kept checking on the Frontier Communications’ web site whether they offered their fiber optic-based Internet service for our address but, unfortunately, they weren’t. I kept checking for months and even called them but no luck until…

In one of my calls few months ago, I got lucky. A lady who worked for them for a long time figured out what was happening. They had installed fiber optic at our street few years before our house was built. So, our address wasn’t in their database even though there was a fiber optic cable outside our house.

I immediately subscribed to their service. They had an offer for their 500/500Mbits (download/upload) service for $50/month without the need to sign a long-term contract. This allowed me to test their service while still being an Xfinity subscriber. I thought that if there was an issue with the fiber optic service, then I could always cancel.
It turned out to be a great service. I’ve been very happy with it since then.

Streaming TV devices

So, after a couple of months of testing our new Internet Service provider, it was time to start testing streaming TV devices. I bought a Roku TV and a Fire TV 4K Stick. I subscribed to YouTube TV (not to be confused with YouTube or YouTube Premium) and tried both devices.

I liked the Roku TV interface better than Fire TV’s but the Roku remote didn’t support my Sonos installations and it didn’t have good voice interface.

The test lasted a couple of months. I didn’t like the YouTube TV interface because I knew Mary liked the simplicity and uniformity of the Xfinity interface. However, at some point we had to move on. But we couldn’t do so until the YouTube TV app was available on Fire TV. Once Google and Amazon released the app, we made the move.

Mary has been a great sport so far. The transition from the Xfinity X1 interface can be a challenge, especially if you aren’t used to the idea of apps. You must figure out which app to use depending on the show you want to watch. Then again, we had already started doing that to some extent thanks to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The Old Setup

The old set up in our house:

  • 5 TVs (Bedroom, Living room, Media room, Gym, Office). Some of these TVs are very old. The Office TV didn’t get Xfinity.
  • 1 Xfinity DVR box, 3 satellite DVR boxes, 1 Xfinity WiFi router
  • 3 Sonos soundbars, 2 Sonos subwoofers, 2 Sonos 1s, 2 Sonos 3s.
  • 2 x Xbox One
  • 1 Apple TV
  • Xfinity $290/month, Amazon Prime (includes Video), Netflix subscription (comes with our T-Mobile family contract)

The new setup:

  • 5 TVs (same)
  • Frontier Communications fiber optic with our own WiFi network
  • 3 Fire TV 4K Sticks, 2 Fire TV Cubes (2nd generation), 1 Roku TV
  • 2 x Xbox One
  • (no more Apple TV, the device)
  • Frontier Communication: $60/month
  • YouTube TV + Showtime: $57/month
  • HBO: $15/month
  • Disney Plus: $3/month (I got an early registration deal for 3years)
  • CBS All Access: $10/month
  • Amazon Prime (includes Video)
  • Netflix subscription (same)
  • Apple TV+ (1y free because I bought the new iPhone)
  • One-time cost for Fire TV devices (some great deals are coming up for Black Friday)

So, we have reduced the total monthly cost from $290 to about $145 for what, I believe, are better quality and value services. Now all our TVs have access to the same content without having to rent equipment. We have access to live TV and all the content via our phones and tablets. Xfinity had an app as well but it wasn’t as flexible as YouTube TV’s. It did have offline download of recordings, but we barely used the feature.

We now also have the flexibility to stop any of the subscriptions at any point. We don’t have any long-term contracts for any of the services (with the exception of our annual Amazon Prime membership but we have that for many other reasons anyway… shopping, music).

Family Sharing

YouTube supports family sharing. I can add family members to the account so that they can get access to the same content on their devices at their homes. This means that the overall cost for accessing to content is further reduced, making our new setup a much better value for the money we pay compared to Xfinity. There are some restrictions on who can be added as a “family member” but I still think it’s an additional value over Xfinity.

Quality

The 4K content on our 75’ HDR TV looks awesome. Streaming content is very high-quality. The Fire TV devices do a great job adapting to the capabilities of the TV.

User Interface

The Fire TVs support Alexa voice-based control. They integrate with the rest of our house’s smart home. We can turn on/off the TVs via voice, search for content, navigate, etc. The YouTube TV doesn’t support voice-based search yet but I am sure that’s coming. The app was just released for Fire TV so it is in its first version. The availability of the YouTube TV app on Fire TV was the reason I waited to cancel our Xfinity subscription.
YouTube TV also offers unlimited DVR and supports different accounts so Mary and I can have different favorite shows that we follow.

Now the bad…

  • There is no uniformity in the interface. Gone are the days of single interface that brought all the channels together.
  • Amazon’s Prime Video is attempting to bring some uniformity, but it doesn’t yet expose YouTube TV’s content. I also find it very busy/complicated. I think Mary agrees with me on that.

Advertisements in DVR recordings?

What is this all about you ask?

Unfortunately, it’s the new reality. Companies are transitioning to streaming and they require you to watch adverts unless you subscribe to their content. With Xfinity, it was possible to record the shows and just fast-forward through the adverts. However, even there some content providers started applying restriction policies. For example, recordings of some CW shows wouldn’t be available for as long as the on-demand version of the episode was an option. This policy is amplified with YouTube TV. CBS applies the policy to most of its shows. I am sure that these policies will catch up with Xfinity at some point, depending on the types of agreements it has with the content providers.

While it was a pain to get used at the beginning, I solved the problem for the few shows that we watch on CBS by subscribing to CBS All Access. I was going to do that anyway because Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery all exclusively available on that streaming service so problem solved 🙂

 

Overall, I am very happy with the new setup. I am sure that the interface will improve, there will be some consolidation of content into unified services with some bundling. However, we now have the flexibility to adjust our services along the way without having to commit to long-term contracts.