Year 3 of cord cutting ended on 10-31-16 and how did we do? Â Pretty well!
We spent $354.61 or $29.55 a month on TV entertainment and we made no real changes in how we watch stuff.
In year three there were some changes in the cord cutting landscape. Â CSB all access did begin offering a commercial free version, its we’ll worth the up charge.
The CW network removed all their content from Hulu and launched there own app on all the major platforms. Although inconvenient to keep up with another app, all the shows are free but you have to sit through commercials.
The Playstation Vue service launched in wide release and its pretty excellent, but we didn’t keep our subscription past the trial.  Its ahead of Sling right now and offers a limited DVR like on demand functionality.  The service would have cost $10 more a month then the average we spent last year.  Sure we would get a bunch of extra channels, but streaming services like Playstation Vue & Sling just are not interesting to me until they offer DVR functionality or an equivalent.
On the platform front there have been some changes. Â The latest AppleTV supports apps and has been embraced by streaming services. Â Roku in my mind continues to be the leader in this category just about anything you want to watch will be available on some app on Roku. Â With that being said if you’re already entrenched in the Apple ecosystem and AppleTV will work just fine. The Amazon Fire TV platform is coming along and pretty equal to Roku but I just hate it. Â The Amazon content is just too much in your face, in fact I just took the Fire TV stick we have out of service for an older model Roku. Â I just really do not like the platform.
On the personal hardware front we just upgraded our living room 32″ TV to a 50″ 4k Roku TV. Â I have been very pleased and the 4k content looks pretty amazing. As a nice bonus the OTA experience on the Roku TV is the best I’ve seen and even allows you to pause & rewind live TV. Â We are fortunate where we live we get about 50 OTA channels and being able to use the Roku TV to watch them in a nicer way is a sweet upgrade.
As always you can learn more about cord cutting from my guide here.