This in turn required a conversation about why I wanted to cancel, a warning that my internet price would return to the “standard rate” (despite it never having dropped to a lower rate), and a pitch on wireless phone service. When Spectrum’s representative started asking me what kind of phone I was using and whether I was locked into a contract with AT&T, I lost my cool.

“Do I really have to answer all this?” I said. “I just want to cancel TV service.”

In fairness, the Spectrum representative quickly relented and went ahead with the cancellation. But in 2019, when people have more streaming TV options than ever, and nearly all of those options let you terminate service online by clicking a few buttons, it’s preposterous that cable and satellite providers haven’t caught up. We should no longer accept that cancellation remains an annoying, intrusive process. I say enough is enough. Read the full column on TechHive.

Dropping the on-demand price will help Hulu take on the likes of Netflix and Amazon, and will fortify the service against Apple and AT&T, which plan to launch their own on-demand offerings later this year. On the live TV side, Hulu is likely dealing with higher carriage fees from TV networks, especially after adding Discovery channels to its lineup late last year. As always, it’s the on-demand services that offer the most savings potential, provided you can live without live sports and cable news.

Cracking open the Fire TV Recast: Over at AFTVNews, Elias Saba wrote a thorough guide to opening up Amazon’s Fire TV Recast DVR, along with a separate guide to pulling the recordings off its internal hard drive. Neither process is for the faint of heart, as you’ll need to dismantle the Recast to access the hard drive, use additional software to read the drive in its Linux ext3/4 format, and deal with a file format that most media players won’t recognize. And all that’s assuming you have a Torx T10 screwdriver and SATA-to-USB cable on hand.

That said, dismantling the Recast could be a a worthwhile endeavor if you want to grab its recordings in their native broadcast quality. (When streaming to Fire TV devices, the Recast converts 1080i broadcasts to a lower resolution of 1280-by-720.) You could also put the videos on a Plex server or load them onto a phone or tablet for offline playback. Someday, an intrepid hacker might figure out a software-based solution instead, but for now, cracking open the Recast is the only way to liberate those files.

Sling TV isn’t the best option if you want a lot of channels or complete local broadcast coverage, but its starting prices beat any other bundle with sports and news channels, and it pairs nicely with an over-the-air antenna. Now’s a good time to check it out.