Since then, cord-cutting has gradually gotten easier, with more shows to watch on streaming services, and many more streaming services overall. You can even replace your cable or satellite TV bundle with a live streaming one, and get a similar experience with many of the same channels.

While this shift has been mostly positive for consumers, it’s also led to some false assumptions that ditching cable TV doesn’t require sacrifice. That’s why we constantly hear nowadays that cord-cutting is a failed experiment that was fun while it lasted, but has now become just as bad as cable. It’s easy to draw that conclusion if you’re unwilling to give anything up.

As someone who’s been doing this for a long time, I can say that cord-cutting has never been a magic solution. It has always been a set of choices and trade-offs you could make in service of saving money. So consider this a reality check: The more you’re unwilling to bend, the less money you will save, which means cable might still be a better option for some folks. Read the full column on TechHive.

The two companies didn’t announce specific timing, but the end of their video impasse is still good news. Google pulled YouTube support from Fire TV devices in early 2018, which meant users had to access the site through a web browser instead of a dedicated app. At the time, Google said it was retaliating against Amazon’s longstanding refusal to offer Prime Video on Chromecast and Amazon’s more recent refusal to stock certain Google products (including Chromecast) on Amazon.com.

The Prime Video-YouTube treaty doesn’t resolve all the companies’ issues, though. Google has said nothing about bringing proper YouTube support back to Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays (users currently have to access the site through an on-screen browser without voice control), and Amazon still isn’t selling certain Google products on its site. In fact, when you search on Amazon for Google’s Nest doorbell camera, you get a listing for Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera instead. Doing right by customers without undermining one another’s businesses is a tight rope to walk.

Tablo’s ad-skipping arrives: A new firmware update is rolling out now to Tablo over-the-air DVRs, adding the commercial-skipping feature that we first heard about in January. Once enabled, Tablo will mark up commercial breaks in its video player and automatically fast forward through them. This will usually take about 10 minutes after a recording is finished.

The update (version 2.2.26) is rolling out over several weeks, and ad-skipping still in beta, so you’ll have to enable it through Tablo’s settings menu once you get the latest firmware. You’ll also have to be running Tablo’s latest apps for Roku or Apple TV, or the Tablo Preview apps for Amazon Fire TV or Android TV. One other caveat: To detect commercial breaks, Tablo sends some video data—about 100 MB to 200 MB per hour—to its servers. That shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re on a really tight data cap.

I’ve previously written that the Tablo Dual Lite is the best over-the-air DVR for most people, though I’m still reviewing the new Tablo Quad, which can play or record up to four channels at once instead of two. Ad-skipping will be available for both models, along with all of Tablo’s previous networked tuners.