More honest cable pricing, DirecTV-Disney resolved

Jared Newman   |   September 20, 2024

Hey there! I’m Jared Newman, and this is Cord Cutter Weekly, my newsletter on how to save money on TV and make the most of streaming.

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This week on TechHive: Cable’s broadcast TV fee is dying

Apologies if you ‘re getting this twice! Resending with the correct headline.

A remarkable thing happened this week when I checked the price of Spectrum’s latest TV and internet bundles.

For new customers, Spectrum is currently advertising a bundle with 500 Mbps internet and its standard “TV Select Signature” package for $125 per month over the first two years. Throughout the sign-up process, I kept waiting for Spectrum to slip in a broadcast TV fee, which usually adds about $26 to the advertised monthly price. Instead, the final checkout page only added about $5 for “Taxes and Other Fees,” which I assume is mostly sales tax.

Spectrum says it’s rolling fees into its advertised rates as part of a broader “consumer-first philosophy” that it’s embracing. But it’s also getting an early jump on new Federal Communications Commission rules that mandate “all-in” price disclosures for cable and satellite TV. Other providers will have to follow in the months ahead, which means comparing the cost of cable to streaming is about to get a lot easier.

Read the full column on TechHive →

Weekly rewind

DirecTV and Disney make up: After a nearly two-week blackout, DirecTV mostly got what it wanted in a new carriage deal with Disney. The deal allows DirecTV to split Disney’s channels into separate bundles for sports, entertainment, and kids programming. It will also allow DirecTV to bundle Disney’s streaming services or distribute them a la carte.

Neither company is offering specifics around what those bundles will include or how much they’ll cost, and it may be a while before DirecTV can negotiate similar deals with other programmers. On paper, though, this sounds like the kind of shake-up that’s been long overdue in the pay TV bundle world.

Apple TV update: tvOS 18 is now available for Apple TV streaming boxes, with broader support for machine learning-powered dialogue enhancement. If you have a second- or third-gen Apple TV 4K, and you’re using either TV speakers or external sound systems connected over HDMI-ARC, you can head to Settings > Video and Audio > Enhance Dialogue to enable the feature. It’s also available from the video playback menu in some apps. I wrote about my experience with the feature while it was in beta testing over the summer.

Other tvOS 18 features include spatial audio support over AirPlay, live captions for Facetime calls, and an “InSight” view that shows supplemental info when you’re watching Apple TV+ content. Support for screens with a theatrical 21:9 aspect ratio has been pushed to a future update.

YouTube’s TV makeover: YouTube is redesigning its app for streaming devices and smart TVs, with features that will make the app feel more like Netflix. Creators will be able to divide their videos into seasons and episodes, and they’ll get to add cinematic auto-playing video reels to the top of their pages.

YouTube viewership is surging on TVs as other streaming services raise prices, introduce ads, and crack down on password sharing. In the United States, YouTube’s share of TV time overtook Netflix in October 2022, and it topped 10% off TV viewing for the first time last month according to Nielsen. I’ve posited that YouTube will play a major role in the next wave of cord cutting, in which viewers cut down on paid streaming services in favor of free alternatives.

More catch-up

Save more money

Lifetime Plex Passes are on sale this week, bringing the price from $120 down to $96. If you’re interested in using Plex to run your own media server, a Plex Pass adds a bunch of extra features, most notably support for over-the-air DVR.

Incidentally, I just published an all-new review of Plex Live TV & DVR over at TechHive. It covers everything you need to get started and whether it’s worth the trouble compared to plug-and-play solutions.

Other notable deals:

How to pick a cellphone plan

Over at Advisorator, I wrote about my process of picking a new cellphone plan after getting fed up with AT&T coverage in my neck of Cincinnati. Read it here →

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Thanks for reading!

Got questions about the new Google TV Streamer? I have one in for review and will start testing it out over the weekend. As always, you can reply to this email with your cord cutting questions, comments, and feedback.

Until next week,
Jared