The first thing I needed to figure out is if could get away with 100% Streaming or if needed/wanted to mix in OTA. I looked at a few streaming services and will get into each of them a little below. I also wasted a few bucks here and there to get a taste and some free gear.
I don’t care for the what Dish is costing me but I knew they owned Sling and thought I would give them a try. The free Fire TV Stick with voice remote when I pre-paid for service was a bad deal either. Basically I got 2 month of Sling for $5 and a new streaming stick. I also like their redemption system. You pre-pay for the service and they instantly give you a code to redeem on Amazon. No waiting 4 to 6 weeks for your Fire TV Stick. If you are in the market for a new one and want to try Sling it might be worth a shot. I actually set my subscription to cancel the same day I received the Fire TV stick so it didn’t auto renew and didn’t have to worry.
As mentioned previously BBCA and kids programming are important to me. Sling has Nick Jr. and Cartoon Network. Between Blaze, Paw Patrol and Umi Zoomi my kids would be happy, sort of. My youngest loves Mickey Mouse and there are no Disney channels on Sling and there are also limited major networks or quick access to them like other services I’ll get into later. Sling does offer on demand for channels similar to their Dish offerings or having a channels individual app in some instances. One of the new series this year that has caught my attention is The Gifted on Fox. Sling has all previously aired episodes available up to at the time of the writing episode 12/13 which is a double episode but billed as a single on Sling. Today is the 17th and the episodes aired on the 15th. I didn’t check religiously to see what the lag time is but as I write this the Fox Now Android App has the same episode but only goes back to episode 9 “outfoX” which aired December 4th, 2017 that is available free. I wrote this post over the course of a few days so I am trying to keep reference dates in the post. I am actually saving the draft right now and will explore another show that airs on Fox live tonight or tomorrow and thanks to magic of the internet you get to read about that in the next sentence. On 2018-01-17 a new episode of 9-1-1 aired on FOX. The Episode Next of Kin was available on Sling when I checked at 8 AM the next morning. It was also available on the FOXNOW app. I did not check in the evening as I had some some other things going on but I may check over the schedule for the major networks one night and see the comparison with their apps. In my area FOX on demand is only Major network on Sling.
So Sling is a decent option but misses a few channels I want and I don’t care for their Blue/Orange plan breakdowns. It just doesn’t seem to fit my needs for providing easy access for the entire family. Next up I looked into Playstation Vue. I have 2 PS4s and I know they make an app for Android, iOS and Roku.
Playstation Vue has some attractive packages and pricing plus they support one of my local stations which could come in handy if I wanted to stream everything. The $39.99 Access package has BBCA, Disney Jr for the kids and direct access to FOX, ABC and NBC on demand. CBS seems to not want to bundle with any provider and I think this has a lot to do with them trying to sell their own all access and Hulu seems to be their focus. The Access package also has ESPN which covers my Monday Night Football needs. To get some more sports the addition $5 for the Core package. I fired up the trial on my PS4 which lead me to an issue. It auto located me and unfortunately the area lost me access to the local and it wouldn’t let me specify on the PS4. I called the support number and they were awesome. The rep explained this is an issue with the PS4 and he cannot change it during a trial. He canceled the auto-renew on my account and said to either call in if we decided to keep it or to sign up using my PC instead which should let me specify my exact address and not have the issues. Unfortunately my trial was already expired by the time I am writing this and cannot check on how fast the shows come on. I assume it is the same though since it lists Fox On Demand as the provider. I really liked the interface and cloud DVR feature while my trial was active. I had a winner on my hands but still was not happy with how slow some shows were to get into the on demand section of ABC or CBS, even a few on FOX seemed to have a lag. This made me realize I wanted OTA and DVR.
You can get OTA with DVR fairly cheap. A few tuners I found were as low as $39.99 and then you add an external hard drive. Not bad but I lose my existing whole home DVR feature and the wife didn’t want to have to pick and choose. We had been both spoiled by the Dish ability to start in one room and finish in the other. That Brought me to TiVo which is decided to go with and will go over in my next post since this one again got longer than I wanted.
Time for another TL:DR. I want whole home DVR of the 4 major networks. I want cloud DVR. I decided I had to go with a TiVo which I will go over more in my next post and right now Playstation Vue seemed pretty good for a filler of all the premium channels. Then I found Hulu Live and needed to add that to evaluation for streaming. As of today my new OTA Antenna was delivered along with my TiVo Bolt. I’ll be setting those up tonight and writing my next post about why I went with TiVo and which antenna I purchased.