Neal Waterstreet

Switching back to streaming…

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Well, today is the day… After a couple of years with cable, I’ve decided to again go the streaming route. Having cable was sufficient but I think streaming will work a little better for me now.

Here are my three main reasons for switching back:

  1. Gigabit Fiber. We have more consumers now than we did a few years ago. I’m seeing some evidence that we need more bandwidth.
  2. Channels. Just like everyone else, we watch less than 10 channels. All the rest are not needed. Now that almost everything is available this is an easy choice. This is one space that has significantly improved since we switched back to cable.
  3. Access control. We have a Circle to control access to the internet at home. It’ll be much easier to control television access without cable.

Here is the setup I’ll be using:
AT&T Fiber for internet. This is a big difference from what I currently have. Several of my neighbors have it and are happy with it. The price is a little bit more than needed for streaming but we wanted the extra bandwidth.

Roku for the main access point. There are other alternatives here but we will stick with this for now. We can always switch over to Xbox or just use the TV itself.

SlingTV for television. There are many choices of services now and it’s really hard to decide which one to go with. We chose SlingTV since there are international options. I did look at Hulu Live TV and YouTube TV too. DirectTV Now would have also been an option but there wasn’t a way to bundle with Fiber. I also selected the optional DVR. I haven’t used that yet.

Plex for local media. Plex is perfect, no complaints there.

One are I don’t have a solution for is local channels. Looks like I’ll need to set up the antenna again. This isn’t a big concern and I’ll need to dig up my old antenna.

T-Mobile announced they will get into television. I’ll take a look at what they offer. They usually make a big splash when they jump in.

This set up should work pretty well for us for now. I’d like to see what others are using though. The big test will come next year when GoT starts back up.