What is your experience with live TV streaming services?

July 23, 2023 1:50 PM

We've been multi-decade DISH customers, but at this point we're paying for their top tier just to access the Turner Classic Movies stream. We can get TCM content through another subscription but not the actual channel. This post comparing live TV streaming services [CNET] has me thinking we could save money. Does anyone have any experience with any of the services that include TCM in this article? I'd like to know what the user experience was like, or just a general review.
posted by hippybear to Technology (17 answers total)

I use Sling as my TV provider. Sling offers TCM in an add-on package for like $5. I'm cheap and don't want to pay a ton for a service I don't use all that much. It is subject to the occasional frustrating glitch in DVR playback and a stream can sometimes be overwhelmed by demand (by which I mean "NFL playoff game demand," not "OMG Double Indemnity/Vertigo double feature!!!" demand). Otherwise it works fine. It's month-to-month, so experimenting with it is relatively easy and inexpensive.
posted by praemunire at 2:10 PM on July 23, 2023

(Note: I stream via a Chromecast.)

I'm currently using DirectTV because it was the only way to get baseball games and it's ... fine, but maybe not really worth the cost beyond that (I will cancel after baseball season). It's probably the most cable-like. I found the interface to be non-intuitive at first but I'm used to it now.

I have found Sling's interface to be annoying and the Blue/Orange division on packages always meant I'd spring for both to get everything I wanted (may not be a factor for you) but it is the cheapest of the options (even bundled & with the add-on). I have subscribed and quit Sling several times because I keep wanting to like it but I do not. (Sling does not include local channels. That may or may not matter if you can get good over-the-air reception where you are.)

I have found YouTubeTV to have the best interface and I liked the unlimited DVR. I'll probably be going back to this after baseball season. (I quit the last time because I was annoyed with the price hike but ... nothing is that cheap anymore.)

I have no experience with Hulu with Live TV. I was going to sign up but there didn't seem to be way to sign up just for it without Disney+ and ESPN+.
posted by edencosmic at 2:45 PM on July 23, 2023

I've used YouTube TV periodically the past few years to watch the NBA playoffs. Using the web-browser interface only (Chromium, on Linux), no experience with phone/smart-TV apps.

User experience has been really good, actually, better than I was expecting. It's enough of an improvement over plain cable/satellite that I've actually considered paying for it year-round - and this is from someone who cut the cord 20 years ago.

The DVR works great, basically I just set one alert 5 years ago for "NBA" and it has automatically captured every game since, without me needing to do anything else(!). Recordings seem to stick around for a long time too.

Playback is pretty smooth, and skipping commercials is fantastic. I don't think I've ever encountered an unskippable commercial. Commercial comes on, Alt-Tab over to the browser window, hit the right arrow key a dozen times (skip 15 sec each time), commercial break is done.

A few years ago I initially had trouble getting it to verify my location for local broadcast channels. There were a couple times I got blacked out and couldn't watch a game until after it was over locally. More recently that seems to have magically gone away, but I don't understand why. Hasn't been a big enough deal for me to try and find out, but I guess that could be a caution, if you care about broadcast channels.

Cancelling/restarting subscription is really smooth, they don't make you jump through hoops to cancel, I appreciated that.

The price is the only drawback - and IMO it's a big drawback if you only care about one sport, or one channel, or whatever...
posted by equalpants at 3:06 PM on July 23, 2023

Sling does not include local channels.

Depends on your market. In a number of majors, you can get several (but never CBS, if that matters to you). They'll also send you a free HD antenna to pick up the locals if you can get the reception.
posted by praemunire at 4:01 PM on July 23, 2023

Response by poster: The price is the only drawback - and IMO it's a big drawback if you only care about one sport, or one channel, or whatever...

The highest price for premium YouTube is less than half of what we're paying for DISH right now. So finding a way to step down and not lose what we love while dropping a lot of what we don't care about, like 20 shopping channels, might be a good move.

We just need to learn more about what's out there, and this feedback so far has been great. I hope to get more.
posted by hippybear at 6:40 PM on July 23, 2023

We dropped YouTube TV because of the price but I really liked that you can adjust the channel guide to whatever you want. Don't want to see news channels? Make them go away. Same for shopping channels, etc.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:30 PM on July 23, 2023

I've been getting YouTubeTV during college basketball season. I agree completely with what others have said about it. Regarding TCM specifically, on rare occasions movies scheduled on TCM will not be shown, and I would see a message on screen that says something like "This movie is not available for streaming." I don't have experience with other live streaming platforms, so I don't know if this happens on those as well.
posted by JonathanB at 7:44 PM on July 23, 2023

I cut the cord to YouTube TV for 3 years. I went back to VZ fios (cable) because with YouTube TV dropping the YES network (NY RSN Yankees) and all the discounts Fios gave me that the difference was $20 / month and I get like 350 channels (I watch like 10, but...). I also have access to my gf's DirectTV streaming login which I use whenever I am out of the house bc it will let me stream YES and SNY no matter where I am which is a huge plus.

Either YouTube TV or DirectTV stream really well. The only issue is channel selection vis a vis cost. If TCM is on either service I would not hesitate to subscribe if the cost v value is right for you.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:20 PM on July 23, 2023

We use YouTube TV here. The services are more or less interchangeable except a few things.

• Which channels are available. That's pretty easy to determine from the site offering.
• The quality of the user interface. Somewhat subjective, but YouTube TV is better than Hulu at least. DVR UI is surprisingly complicated. YouTube TV's biggest drawback is it's easy to accidentally watch a VOD instead of a DVR recording. VODs have unskippable ads.
• The quality of the video streams. YouTube TV has struggled with 4K and with surround sound, but is fine at 1080p stereo.
• How they handle local TV, particularly if you are not at home.

That last point is subtle. The companies all want to show you your local TV broadcast stations but have contractual requirements to ensure you really are in the market they think you are in. YouTube TV has a very generous implementation of this: as long as you log in from your locale every 3 months they'll believe you are where you tell them you are. Hulu used to be spectacularly bad at this, if your IP address changed more than a couple of times a month it broke everything. Which caused a big problem for users on Starlink and some other ISPs. They may have fixed it now.
posted by Nelson at 6:27 AM on July 24, 2023

The cheapest streaming platform that offers TCM is Hulu, which starts at $8 per month. but I think that's not the live channel. I'll admit I don't watch TV anymore so this is mainly from Googling.
posted by kschang at 10:32 AM on July 24, 2023

Response by poster: Yes, we have access to the TCM catalog of movies through other services already. The actual TCM channel stream is important to us, and we'd like to reduce costs while retaining that.
posted by hippybear at 11:00 AM on July 24, 2023

Response by poster: So we've bought a month of YouTube Live and we're going to try it out and see how it goes for us. An interesting thing will be to see how often we're turning to DISH for programming we can't find you YTL. I'll report back afterward. Thanks for everyone's input on this question!
posted by hippybear at 1:15 PM on July 26, 2023

Response by poster: So we've tried out YouTube Live for a month, and they block too much of the TCM stream for no apparent reason. Like, the movies they block, you can't see them anywhere else, so why blocked? No idea.

So for now we're going to cancel YouTube Live. We might try another service, but this one attempt to get away from DISH has proven less than adequate.
posted by hippybear at 12:37 PM on August 23, 2023

Sorry it's not working for you. But this is the first I've heard of parts of a channel being blocked. Can you say more? Which movies or shows?
posted by Nelson at 1:13 PM on August 23, 2023

Response by poster: I'd have to get mr hippybear to tell me which movies, but it's the channel he cares about the most is TCM and he says there have been many movies that are blocked from streaming for no apparent reason while the DISH stream continues unabated, and these blank parts of the schedule ruin the wallpaper for him, if you know what I mean. I've only played around with the service a bit, I don't watch the live tv stuff as much as he does, and I found it to be a clever interface albeit a bit opaque at first until I'd clicked around a lot. A tutorial could have been helpful. The times I used the service it worked fine. But blacking out entire movie-length blocks for no real reason, some black and white movie from the 30s, and breaking the viewing stream means this isn't a viable service for people like mr hippybear.
posted by hippybear at 1:23 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the extra info. FWIW I found a bunch of other reports of the same problem with TCM and Youtube TV on Reddit: here, here, or here. I'm not clear reading these if it applies to VODs, DVR recordings, or both. The interesting info is this claim on the cause:

a lot of TCM’s contracts are so old they don’t cover any sort of streaming and in a lot of cases, there’s no clear rights holder to renegotiate with.

If that's the case it suggests TCM might be particularly hard to watch on any Internet service. Here's a similar complaint about Hulu.

TCM does have an app for Roku, the Internet streaming hardware. But "In order to access WATCH TCM, you must get TCM at home through either a cable or satellite TV package." It does sound like maybe it's unfiltered though.

Again, sorry it's not working out for you. I wish I had some better solution. Even unlicensed copies of older movies are hard to come by sometimes.
posted by Nelson at 2:23 PM on August 23, 2023

Response by poster: TCM does have an app for Roku, the Internet streaming hardware. But "In order to access WATCH TCM, you must get TCM at home through either a cable or satellite TV package." It does sound like maybe it's unfiltered though.

We have the TCM app on our TV units, but using it is indeed tied to our DISH subscription. So it's more an add-on than a standalone service.

It also does not have the actual TCM channel stream, which is the thing we are wanting to get while getting away from the DISH subscription tier that is ridiculously expensive. Also, these blanked out things mr hippybear is observing is not for VOD or DVR content, but is actual blank screen on the channel stream.

FWIW, the TCM app has a medium size catalog of streaming content, which is larger than the catalog available on YouTube TV. It isn't the entire TCM catalog, which would be amazing. Include all the shorts and in between stuff, too.

[What I do understand is that a good quantity of TCM broadcast stream stuff is actually being shown via modern telecine technology, so it's literally being run on film out for broadcast. So this is partially a problem of things just not being digitized.]
posted by hippybear at 2:47 PM on August 23, 2023