Several years ago I gave up my addiction to DirecTV and cut the cord. It was difficult at first – I missed having a DVR because it allowed me to be a “lazy” tv watcher that could pause TV anytime I needed to. Want to start a conversation with me? PAUSE. Sure, let’s chat. But without a DVR I couldn’t be lazy anymore – and I had to be prepared to possibly miss major plot points if my kids wanted to ask me a question without waiting for commercials. We got used to it after a while though, and for a while relying on only Roku and Hulu was a good alternative.
Until it wasn’t. At some point Hulu changed how their interfaced worked and half the things I watched I no longer had access to. Even though it was cheap, it was useless. So after some debate, I quit Hulu and signed back up with DirecTV but also negotiated a 12-month discount to bring the cost down. But the cost still went up over time. Last year I called and once again negotiated me $50/month discount, but my bill was STILL $80 a month. Cut to last month – my bill was $91. And yet between 12 months ago and last month nothing had changed EXCEPT the amount they were charging me. I’ve had enough.
This month my 12-month discount expired and my DirecTV bill went up to $144. And I don’t even have a super-outlandish setup. We get the bare minimum of channels, no premium channels, and have 3 boxes.
Well, starting today that ends. Tonight I’ll be calling DirecTV to (most likely) cancel my service, and will be signing up for SlingTV. I debated between Sling and Hulu, but Sling just has more of the channels CootieGirl and I watch (Denis only needs news and sports, and CootieBoy rarely watches TV). I’ve signed up for Sling Orange as well as their News bundle and their Lifestyle bundle (I need my Christmas Hallmark movies). Add in their DVR service for $5 and I’ll be paying $40 plus taxes and fees. That’s less than half I was paying WITH MY DISCOUNT at DirecTV.
Even if I’m not completely thrilled with Sling TV, it’s going to be better on our wallet going forward. That alone makes it worth it. My only fear is that Sling does not offer local channels at all, which means having to figure out a way to get those channels AND be able to record – and at that point, if we buy all the equipment we need are we still saving money at all?
Update next day:
Well, change that! After doing even more research I’ve decided NOT to go with Sling TV. When doing a comparison among all over the top streaming services, Sling TV just would not have been a good fit. I looked at Sling TV, YouTube TV, Hulu, Playstation Vue, Play On, our local TV cable company, and DirecTV Now. It was frustrating because there’s no one service that has everything I want. In the end, I’ve decided to trial DirecTV Now for the new few days because I think it has most of what I want:
- All the cable channels that are “must haves” in our house
- Local channels automatically included in package
- DVR is available (albeit only 20 hours of storage and programs only get saved 30 days)
- Can record multiple things at the same time and STILL have two live streams going on two different devices
- DVR allows pause, fwd and rewind – which not all over the top services allow
And even better, the DirecTV now package we’ll likely be getting is the same price as Sling TV was going to be ($40 plus taxes/fees).
