| When people reach out to me about cutting the cord, they’re often looking not only to drop TV service, but to sever all ties with their cable company. As such, one of the most frequent questions I get is whether it’s possible to drop home broadband service and use only a phone’s mobile hotspot to access the internet.
I hate to bear bad news, but this approach remains impractical if you plan to watch any significant amount of video on your laptop, tablet, or television. That’s because every major wireless carrier limits high-speed data while using your phone as a hotspot, so even with an unlimited data plan, you’ll run into problems streaming video.
The good news is that you can still save money by dropping cable TV and keeping cable internet service. Read the full column on TechHive. |
| Spectrum’s Philo clone: Spectrum will soon offer a new $15 per month streaming service with far fewer channels than your average cable bundle. “Spectrum TV Essentials” will launch next month, and include channels from AMC, A&E, Discovery, and Viacom. It will not include any news, sports, or broadcast channels. In other words, it sounds a lot like Philo, which offers a similar mix of channels for $16 per month on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV devices. (Spectrum’s apps support Roku, Apple TV, Xbox One, and Samsung Smart TVs.)
Perhaps more notably, Spectrum says it’s working on cloud DVR service, which will be available in the “coming months.” I wouldn’t hold my breath given the glacial pace at which cable companies work, but it’s nice to know Spectrum is addressing the biggest problem with its current TV Choice streaming service. (That service, which I just reviewed over at TechHive, offers local channels plus your pick of 10 cable channels for around $25 per month.) If you can’t wait, Philo offers DVR today.
Omniverse gets sued: Last September, I wrote about the emergence of cookie-cutter live TV streaming services such as SkyStream, Viva Live TV, and FlixOn, all of which offered a similar lineup of channels for similar prices of around $35 per month. (Some of them even had nearly identical websites.) All of these services had partnered with a company called Omniverse One World Television, which was also powering the Premium TV add-on for HDHomeRun tuners. Omniverse claimed to be relying on an old cable contract, which supposedly allowed the company to resell streaming channels to others.
Hollywood disagrees. Last week, a consortium of TV studios and tech companies (Netflix and Amazon among them) sued Omniverse for copyright infringement. While the consortiums’ legal complaint doesn’t reveal much that we didn’t know already, it argues that only the studios themselves get to dictate how their content gets licensed.
For now, the services relying on Omniverse continue to operate and even accept new customers, though Amazon has already booted several Omniverse-powered Fire TV apps from its store including HDHomeRun. For now, I would steer clear of all these services, and I’d especially avoid investing in HDHomeRun hardware just for the Premium TV service alone.
A bill for bill transparency: U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo and Ed Markey recently got a round of positive press coverage for introducing a bill that would require cable and satellite companies to include sneaky fees in their advertised pricing. These surcharges keep getting more expensive, with “broadcast TV” fees alone reaching $10 per month through Comcast and $12 per month throgh Spectrum. Not advertising them seems increasingly misleading, especially when cable companies say the reason they break out these fees in the first place is to educate customers on the cost of programming.
While this bill absolutely deserves our support and attention, my cynical side knows that Introducing a bill is the easy part, and that looking good in the press is often the point of doing so. I don’t doubt that Rep. Eshoo and Sen. Markey mean well, but cable bill transparency is still a long way from becoming the law. You wouldn’t know that from some of the headlines floating around this week. |
