OT: Xfinity has dropped NFL Network and RedZone channels

[Joey007]

Don't go the dish route. If you have decent internet, do YouTube TV. You can pause the service whenever you want (I turn it off from mid-Feb through August), and it's less invasive.

Prior to that, I had DirectTV. When they came and installed it, they said if I ever moved or canceled, they'd come back and take the dish down and make the roof "like it never happened." They refused to come back when I did cancel, and I had to go up there and deal with it. At least with that, you have control, and you can buy a Roku for each TV for like $60, and it works great, better than the smart TV app. Super easy. And if you want, you can cancel/pause without having to call anyone.

No one in 2026 should be signing up for a dish/satellite unless you have some really oddly specific programming you want to watch year round.

 

[203Pat]

Warning about YouTube TV if you watch the Sox or Bruins you will need to pay through the nose for NESN's garbage app (or sail the high seas).

 

[mgteich]

Don't go the dish route. If you have decent internet, do YouTube TV. You can pause the service whenever you want (I turn it off from mid-Feb through August), and it's less invasive.

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I've done them "all": Comcast, other cable, DISH, DirectTV, and now YoutubeTV.

To me, there is no comparison. I really like YoutubeTV and have a Roku in each room that has a TV set. I have the "usual": Prime, Netfilx and Disney+ as do over 50% of households.
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BTW, to me picture quality is a high requirement. Internet services that accommodate 4K, 4K+ and 8K are important to me.

 

[Bill Lee]

I've done them "all": Comcast, other cable, DISH, DirectTV, and now YoutubeTV.

To me, there is no comparison. I really like YoutubeTV and have a Roku in each room that has a TV set. I have the "usual": Prime, Netfilx and Disney+ as do over 50% of households.

I value the input from someone who has tried them all.

I did a bit of googling because I was curious, not to push back on what you wrote.

It suggested that if a household already has netflix then the odds of it also having prime and disney are over 50%, yet the overall number of having all three is somewhere between 30-40% depending on whose info you believe.

It also suggested the average household has around four streaming services, but this allows a pretty broad definition of streaming service (i.e.yours plus hulu, max, apple, peacock, paramount, etc).

Bottom line is that there are a lot of services out there, and there is a lot of overlap.

I'm not saying there's anything bad about carrying a bunch of streaming services. People can and should buy what they like.

Clearly I'm an outlier. I have Amazon Prime but almost never look at its video content, I bought it for free shipping. I have u2b premium just to watch u2b content without ads, but do not have u2b-tv. That's it, so I'm under the 'four streaming services per household' data point.

I've tried Hulu for a while during COVID and wasn't using it enough to justify it so I turned it off. Also it's 'no ads' teir was a rip-off, pretty much any content newer than five years old was loaded with ads. These days I turn on Netflx for a month once a year to watch Drive To Survive. In that month I binge-watch DTS then I watch a few other things then I'm done. I literally cancel the service a minute after I turn it on. Since its billing period is one month, I get what I want without having to go back to the Accounts page.

I have my own home. I decided to invest in the HDTV antenna and the TiVo a long time ago. They've definitely paid for themselves already. The ongoing NFL scheme to put everything on streaming bit by bit will mess that up, but that's OK too. I'm finding the viewing experience is so enshittified I am watching it less and less. As above, I'm an outlier.