This week on TechHive: How to pick a bundle (or not)

Jared Newman
|
January 21, 2022

One of the biggest decisions to make in cord-cutting is whether to include a pay TV channel bundle in your streaming lineup.

While live streaming bundles such as YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, and Sling TV offer many of the same channels you get with cable, they’re also much more expensive than standalone services such as Netflix, which don’t offer traditional cable channels at all. If you’re okay with sacrificing those channels, you can save a lot more money.

That’s why MyBundle.TV is such an interesting resource. Similar to other bundle pickers such as The Streamable’s Matchmaker and Suppose.TV, MyBundle is a free website where you pick your favorite channels and get a list of streaming packages that match. The difference is that MyBundle also suggests a la carte alternatives based on your preferences.

I first wrote about MyBundle.TV a couple of years ago, shortly after its initial launch. Since then, the site has become much more polished and has added some new features to help manage your subscriptions. As the cost of live TV streaming continues to rise, the unbundled approach is worth another look. Read the full column on TechHive.

Weekly rewind

Netflix price hikes: You know I hate being the messenger on this stuff, but Netflix has unfortunately announced another price hike for U.S. customers. Here’s the breakdown:

  • Basic (SD video, 1 stream at a time): Was $9, now $10 per month
  • Standard (HD video, 2 streams): Was $14, now $15.49 per month
  • Premium: (4K HDR, four streams): Was $18, now $20 per month

The new prices apply immediately to new customers, and will gradually roll out to existing ones. The last time Netflix raised prices in the United States was in October 2020, and the time before that was in January 2019. (Prices are also increasing in Canada for Netflix’s top two tiers.)

Hiking prices now is a bold move given how much competition Netflix faces, but as my TechHive colleague Ben Patterson points out, subscribers are just as likely to reconsider their other streaming services as they are to jump ship on Netflix. If neither option seems palatable, you can always downgrade to a lower price tier for a few months to absorb the impact. You may not even notice the difference.

Verizon’s home internet push: Verizon is expanding its 5G home broadband service to 900 U.S. cities, up from just 65 cities in December. The service costs $50 per month—or $25 per month when bundled with certain Verizon mobile phone plans—and advertises average download speeds of around 300 Mbps with no data caps. A wireless modem-router combo is included at no extra charge. You can check availability on Verizon’s website.

The impetus for the expansion is Verizon’s new “C-band” 5G service, which is faster than the 5G that’s been broadly available so far. (You might have heard about it due to recent controversies around airplane interference.) AT&T also launched C-band 5G this week, albeit without a home internet component.

I haven’t used Verizon’s service or T-Mobile’s competing option, but I’m always glad to see more choices for home internet. Cord cutters have long feared that a decline in cable TV subscribers would lead to price gouging for internet-only service, but that’s less likely to happen when customers can take their business elsewhere. If you do have experience with either service, I’d love to hear about it.

An odd Roku outage: On Wednesday evening, Roku devices suffered a major outage that prevented some streaming devices and smart TVs from working, The Verge reports. Although Roku resolved the issues later that night, a small number of Roku TV users reported that they couldn’t even use external HDMI devices in the meantime, at least not without factory resetting into a demo mode.

I’m surprised that an online service outage would ever interfere with basic TV functionality, but it’s not the first complaint I’ve heard of this nature. Following a rocky launch for Roku OS 10.5 last fall, several users told me they experienced issues with over-the-air TV reception and HDMI signal quality on their Roku TVs. Even if these problems are rare, they underscore a potential downside of smart TVs that I admittedly hadn’t considered before.

More catch-up

Save more money

YouTube Premium logo

Hate seeing ads on YouTube? You can currently lock in a year of YouTube Premium for $108, which is $12 off the annual plan that YouTube quietly introduced in recent weeks. It’s also a savings of $36 over YouTube Premium’s monthly plan, which costs $12 per month.

YouTube Premium removes all ads from YouTube videos and lets you download videos for offline viewing. It also includes access to YouTube Music Premium, a Spotify-like service for streaming music. Just head to this page and click the “save money with an annual, family, or student plan” link to see the deal.

Meanwhile, YouTube TV is running its own promo for new subscribers that brings the price to $55 per month for the first three months, down from a regular price of $65 per month. Compared to YouTube Premium, this is a completely separate service that aims to replace your cable bundle, with dozens of live TV channels and a cloud-based DVR.

Lastly, the Roku Express 4K+ is on sale for $29, which is $11 off the regular price. Here’s my review.

Thanks for reading!

Notice anything different about this week’s TechHive column? The site launched a major redesign this week and now has a much cleaner, less-cluttered look. As a regular contributor to the site, I’m obviously biased, but I think it’s a major improvement.

Once again, thanks for taking a look at Advisorator (and for subscribing, if you’re already on board)! If you have any questions about that newsletter—or this one, for that matter—I’d be happy to answer them. Just reply to this email to get in touch.

Until next week,

Jared

Cord Cutter Weekly is a labor of love by tech journalist Jared Newman. Say hi on Twitter, and spread the word that there’s a better kind of TV out there.