The reasons for this aren’t complicated. Most popular cable channels are owned by a small number of media conglomerates, which make more money by distrubuting all of their channels in bundles to TV providers. Because live sports are so popular, the networks have plenty of leverage to make sure those bundles command a high price. As a result, the cost of those packages keeps going up, even as viewership declines. While I do think we’ll see an unbundling of sports over the next five years or so, for now it’s bundle or bust.

All of which hinders sports fans’ ability to save money while cutting the cable TV cord. Although live streaming bundles are generally cheaper than cable and satellite TV packages, the savings potential with cord-cutting is much greater for folks who don’t care about sports and can abandon bundles entirely.

Having said all that, you can still employ a handful of tactics to stretch your savings further. For all the possibilities, read my full column on TechHive.

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While Comcast knows this will only cause more people to flee pay TV, it also knows those people still need internet service, and its continued growth on that score allowed the company to still increase profits by 26% last quarter. Besides, those cord-cutters might also end up checking out Peacock, the NBC-based streaming service that Comcast is launching in April.

It’s similar to the pattern we’ve already seen from the likes of Disney and AT&T: Invest in new streaming services like Disney+ and HBO Max, respectively, and in the meantime put the squeeze on legacy TV customers with ever-higher prices. The result will be a quickening collapse of pay TV bundles, but a lot of pain for the folks who can’t quit due to sports, cable news, or specific TV channels.

Tablo DVR updates: The folks behind the Tablo over-the-air DVR have their own newsletter, which is how I learned of some helpful new updates. On Apple TV, you can now schedule manual recordings based on date and time, VCR-style. (The Tablo apps on other platforms have offered this for a while.) And if you’re using the Tablo Preview app for Fire TV or Android TV, you can now turn off the full 14-day view in the grid guide. (You’d want to do this on older streaming devices that struggle to load the full guide.)

Prime problems on Roku: It’s a slow news week, so let’s talk about this wild conspiracy theory that says Amazon is deliberately causing problems with the Prime Video app on Roku devices. Because Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV are rival streaming platforms, the idea is that Amazon is degrading the Roku experience so that people will switch devices. Over at Interesting Engineering, Marcia Wendorf has put together an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence in the form of dozens of complaints on various web forums.

Of course, there’s also a more innocuous (and, I think, more likely) explanation: Streaming just inherently has a lot of potential failure points, from buggy software to login system issues to a lack of redundancy in content delivery networks, and any one of those things could cause problems with one service and not others. Besides, if Amazon was sabotaging its own streaming service, people might just as easily stop using Prime instead of paying for an entirely new streaming device. It’s a fun theory to think about, but I’m not buying it without some real proof.

Also, Amazon is currently offering a modest discount of roughly $5 off the Roku Streaming Stick+, bringing the price to $44.31.