Well, it's been about two weeks since I cut the cord.
There's good, there's OK and there's bad to it. For instance, remotes. The Roku remote only controls the Roku. For awhile I would have a PILE of remotes in bed and it was a fight to find the right one. VERY ANNOYING.
Until I found this little gem, the SideClick.
https://www.sideclickremotes.com
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Since it's a learning remote only and not tied to "codes" you can program it to control many devices !! However the lack of a prominent MUTE button is a bit annoying but not enough to stop me from buying more of these.
I'm going to buy two more for the other two Rokus in my house.
My old Roku HD was a DOG. It was miserable and unusable so I bought a refurbished Roku 3 to replace it. It's much better now. However I still hate my Roku 4, it locks up a LOT and I have to pull the power cord on it several times a week. But it just got a firmware update a few days ago so maybe it will behave better, too soon to tell yet. I won't buy another 4. The next time I upgrade it will be to the Roku Ultra and whatever the next evolution of the Apple TV turns out to be.
On to the services. Vue and Sling are, um, OK... I just added the DVR service to Sling for another $5 a month so now it's $30 instead of $25. I'm ok with that but I FEEL the DVR service should be included for free. But, whatever.
Vue is INTENT on trying to have me watch F*x "news" and sports. Not once have I ever watched either one intentionally nor would I ever. 99.99% of the time when I start the Vue app on my Roku it comes up defaulting to F*x.
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On a rare occasion it will instead suggest that I should watch some "sports" show. Which I will not. But it's almost always defaulting to that one particular channel which I deeply object to.
I can not find any way, anywhere to disable this obnoxious behavior. You would think that it would default to offering up shows or channels that I do watch. But no.
At this point I am 100% certain that F*x is paying Sony to have their content pushed to the top. I HATE that Vue/Sony is doing this but being that there is no way to stop this I just have to learn to ignore it.
I also have to be careful to never, ever select the option to watch ANYTHING offered up by the "Recommended by Viewers" feature because as sure as the sun rises, when something is done playing it will indeed begin playing something else in that list and without fail it will always be that channel that I will not watch. It's a shame I can't block channels or shows. TV shows and movies have ratings but "news" and sports do not. Even if they did it appears that Vue has no option for recognizing and blocking things by ratings.
No channel numbers. There is no easy way to quickly access your channels. You have to maneuver through their idiotic little system of tiles full of cr*p that I do not want to see.
I don't want to see the "Recommended by Viewers" feature at all. I don't want their own top recommendations, at all. I want MY favorite channels listed at the top so I can navigate to them quickly.
The Vue UI is horrible. It's a steamy pile of poo and I can't stand it. BUT, on Sling, they got it right. I like the Sling UI 100% better. Vue needs to copy the Sling UI because it's smart and easy and it works.
Access to On Demand content through Vue is pretty shabby. I wanted to watch more episodes of Fear Thy Neighbor from Investigation Discovery but they only offer TWO episodes, period.
To see more episodes I had to install the ID GO app and then do the log in with credentials thing. Once inside the ID GO app I found all of seasons 2-3 and 4 but season one is missing.
ALL of the content available over the ID GO and Science Go apps, the picture quality is HORRIBLE. They seem to have everything set up for 1990 CRT TV. The picture is interlaced for old style CRT type TV's and looks like POO on LED TV.
Really???? WT F ?????? I was shocked at how horrible Science Channel shows look on Science Go. Oh, and I have all my screens and systems set up to run at 720p 60fps because that seems to be what pretty much all the services stream at. The one exception is HBO NOW which I have set to run at 1080p because all of their content is streamed in 1080p and looks fantastic. I subscribed to HBO NOW as soon as it appeared, I bought an Apple TV 3 so I could watch Game of Thrones and was very, very happy with the quality. Even on my Roku's the quality is excellent. BUT, I despise the HBO NOW UI. It too is a steamy pile of poo, just like Vue. I hate it with a passion. It's a massive pain to navigate.
I suspect that Vue hijacked people from HBO so they could both have a horrible UI.
Vue gives me some buffering problems and sometimes it makes me so mad I have to stop myself from beating the Roku into fundamental atoms with a baseball bat. Every time it buffers, it backs up a bit so that you don't miss anything.
But after it's buffered several times in a row over a matter of minutes, it can be backed up by 5 or 10 minutes. And if you try to fast forward back to where it should be, it gets worse and if you persist, it will eventually just blow up and crash.
I've found the best way to avoid this is that just before I sit to watch something I go to the menu and do a system reset. It wastes several minutes to do this but it cuts down on the buffering problem.
And my internet speed is NOT a factor in the buffering. I'm paying for 60 but I'm actually getting 70.
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Vue still cuts shows off when you're doing catch up, dvr or on demand stuff. I hate that. Sling, gets it right. They record PAST the scheduled end time and not once have I had a show on Sling DVR terminate before the actual end of the show.
Vue badly needs to fix this. Again they need to look to Sling for the right way of doing DVR, just like Sling gets the UI right.
Vue has more channels but it's more annoying to navigate their system and they have more buffering problems than Sling. But because neither of the two services have ALL the channels I want I have to subscribe to both of them.
And I'm ok with with because even so I'm subscribing to two different services at once, it's still a substantial savings over Dish.
I tend to like using Sling more than Vue but View has channels that Sling doesn't. I haven't found the 720p / 30fps thing on Sling to be a problem because the things I watch are not action oriented and move pretty slowly.
Going back and forth between the multiple services it a bit annoying but not a deal breaker. I also have a work around for moving around the house between multiple TV's.
Downstairs I had one of my Dish tuners connected to a "1 to 4" HDMI splitter. I removed the Dish tuner and put the refurbished Roku 3 in it's place. It feeds the big screen TV in my living room, the TV in my kitchen, it also goes to the TV in my bedroom upstairs and to my desk upstairs. In my bedroom I have another Roku 3 and originally my satellite tuner downstairs fed the TV in my bedroom upstairs. I could switch between the satellite or that Roku as needed.
Now at that TV I can select between either Roku. And the same is true at my desk, I have a Roku 4 at my desk but I can select either it or the Roku 3 downstairs. So when I want to go downstairs for a few hours I wait until a commercial then I kill the Roku 4 and switch the TV to the Roku 3 downstairs, I use the Roku app on my iPhone to open whatever app I need and restart the program I was watching before the commercial. Now the Roku downstairs is running so I just go downstairs to the kitchen, turn the TV on in there and continue watching. That's for LIVE shows. If it's on demand stuff then I don't have to do all that, I just kill the app, go downstairs and load the app down there, it will remember what I was watching and put me right back to where I was when I killed the show and app on the upstairs Roku. And of course this all works in reverse too.
One of the problems I'm struggling with is that for many decades I have been conditioned to watching TV as it is presented to me, in real time, in serial fashion. So I had schedules that I would follow to watch my shows every night.
That's a hard habit to break. With the automatic DVR'ing of my shows I can watch everything at anytime I please. And that's good for me because I keep extremely bizarre hours that change every single day.
For years I had a habit of watching the multiple evening news shows from 5-7pm but I lost my TV tuner that was built into my Dish tuner, that was nice that it integrated my local TV into my Dish tuner and guide, I miss that because it allowed me to watch local OTA TV all through the house and record it. What I had to do was subscribe to Plex Pass which gives me the ability to DVR my local TV channels. So I set up Plex to record the evening news shows for me and I just watch them later on whenever it's convenient to me, pretty much the way I now watch everything else.
Watching things as their air in serial order isn't as big a deal for me anymore as it used to be. I'm trying to adjust to it and eventually I will. I miss some of the convenience of having an All in One system like the Dish and OTA tuners but this new way isn't too awful that I feel I want to switch back. I think I'm going to stick with this as it is. I hope that Vue will fix their HORRIBLE UI but I'm not holding my breath. I hope that they will fix the problem with their DVR service cutting off the last few seconds or in some cases, MINUTES of stuff. If Sling would pick up the channels I subscribe to Vue for, I would drop Vue. But I don't see that happening.
Oh yeah, and the Vue bluetooth remote control, it's horrible too. I hate the placement of the mute button and I HATE WITH A FLAMING PASSION that it powers down every 30 minutes no matter what options I set on the Vue service or the PS4. I do like the TV guide feature that Vue has but that only works on the PS4 and isn't available on my Roku's. Because of the PS4 remote always powering down / going to sleep mode, I don't like use the PS4 to watch TV.
Also the PS4 pumps out 170 degree air constantly. It's a freaking space heater !! There's no need do that thing to get so flippin hot all the time. I need to rig a duct to it to draw the hot air out of the room.
Cutting the cord has been a bit frustrating but I'm too hard headed to take the easy way out and go back to Dish. There's some definite advantages this way but there's some definite disadvantages as well.
But the good things outweigh the bad things so I'm in for the long run.
What I subscribe to now:
- HBO NOW
- Hulu Plus (commercial free option)
- Netflix
- Amazon Prime (for the shipping but the video is useful too)
- Playstation Vue Elite Slim
- Sling Blue plus DVR
- Curiosity Stream
- Plex Pass (to get OTA DVR feature in my Plex server)
I think there is maybe one more streaming service I subscribe to but it escapes me at the moment. I've got access to a LOT of shows and movies now and now I can watch them almost anytime I wish.
The picture quality of some of it isn't always the best but what can you do? They store and serve it that way so it's out of my control. At least it's there.
I don't have any real regrets over cutting the cord. It's basically OK. Thankfully my ISP, Spectrum doesn't have data caps. I won't know for a few weeks yet how much data I'm using but I'm sure it's a staggering amount.
