I'm at the point where I'm ready to cancel my DirecTV. The additional rooms other than the living room are on their wireless boxes, and the DVR freezes up almost daily requiring me to restart it, and the other rooms won't work until it resets. If I'm watching a Braves game in the mancave, that's a double pain.

Cable TV isn't an option because 1) it wouldn't save me any money, and 2) when we bought the house three years ago and arranged all the furniture, we did it with an eye towards what worked best for the room without an eye to where cable outlets were. That's why we have the DTV wireless boxes, because the man cave and master bedroom outlets are in completely different locations than where we put the TVs. Running new lines (and I worked satellite/cable installs for 9 years) would be a pain in the front room, a pain in the master bedroom, and literally impossible in the mancave (without exposing it).

So I'm looking for a way to cut the cord here. Which leads to this thread.

Yesterday I signed up for DirecTV Now because they offer a free AppleTV when you pay for three months of service (which is essentially giving you a $180 box for $105). After I tried it all day yesterday on my existing AppleTV, I decided it wasn't for me because you can't rewind live TV, and if you pause longer than a few seconds and come back (like going to the bathroom), if you resume playing, it does so at the LIVE time, not at the time you paused it at. After running through some hoops due to the lack of a phone number to call, I managed to get it cancelled with a 50% refund and I'll still get to keep the AppleTV when they send it.

The two that I'm considering are Sling and Youtube TV. I haven't had a chance yet to research either that much, except to say that YT TV offers a lot of DVR features. Does anyone have any experiences they'd like to share?

My only REQUIREMENT other than the DVR pause/rewind/ff is the offering of regional sports networks. The Braves are on Fox Sports South and Southeast.

Thanks,

Not sure if this is answering the DVR part of the question or not but... here it goes.

We subscribe to our local cable internet provider for 10/1 speeds and subscribe to their "sub-basic" cable TV option for local broadcast channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CW, etc) essentially for sports (football) and local news. We subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime (we do a lot of online shopping). We also have two Roku 3. For DVR component we purchased a "lifetime" subscription to Playon and use it to record shows...especially for when the cable goes out. We are on the last tap of the last node in this area. At one point our cable connection was run up a telephone pole dangling across a road to a tree and then it ran over a field and across another road where Billy Joe plowed it over a couple times when it snowed. That said...its the only high speed internet option...

A couple of streaming services on the Roku you may be interested in are Stadium for sports and News On for local news. I really like News On because it streams a lot of local news channels from across the US. So if I want to check out what is going on in Hawaii with the volcano I can get local news from there with all the commercials taken out. Same goes for my local news if I don't catch it at the time it aired. I'm almost tempted to cut the sub basic broadcast service since we got these but if the internet goes out cable TV usually still works and we can "rough it" the big four channels plus Nat Geo, PBS, and HGTV. There have been times when the internet was down for 3 or 4 months.

Sling has a free trial period. I didn’t see the benefit to subscribing to it when the channels mostly had free streaming, or they were just as limited as their streaming services. IMO it was just not yet to the point of cutting the cord...but maybe soon.
We have an Amazon Fire and an upper level model Roku and I can’t recommend the Roku enough. Far better than the Fire, but if you need Amazon Prime streaming, you want the Fire. If you use Vudu for movies, Fire doesnt’t support that OR youtube now.

So many options out there for sure but it sounds like the best thing for you to do is what you just did with DirectTV Now, try them out.

Sling TV (7 days): https://www.sling.com/watchfree

Playstation Vue (7 days): https://www.playstation.com/en-us/network/vue/?emcid=pa-vu-111688 (no Playstation required)

YouTube TV (): https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/

Check out all of the all the free trials on the various services and see what works best for you, it could be a combo.

Check here - https://www.antennaweb.org/ - and see what over-the-air channels you can get as you can go the DVR/Tuner route ( check out PlexTV for instance: https://www.plex.tv/live-tv-dvr/# ).

Most of the Streaming content services also have free trials:

Netflix (30 days): https://www.netflix.com/signup

Amazon (30 days): https://www.amazon.com/gp/prime/signup/videos

Hulu (30 days): https://www.hulu.com/start


My setup is Hulu, Netflix and Amazon and over-the-air for the NFL games.

I feel like DirecTV was your best bet based on what you want minus the DVR function.

I only do DirecTV streaming for their NFL package though.

Hmmm....I'd call DirectTV and tell them their main box and/or router sucks.

But what it really sounds like is the WiFi in the house is being problematic. I'm thinking about putting in a repeater in my house for just that reason.

But our uVerse boxes themselves are wired together, which is great.

I suppose their router that runs the wireless boxes could have been part of the issue, but I always thought it was the dvr itself freezing.

I tried YouTube and wasn't happy that it was missing A&E (I'm a Live PD junkie) and HGTV (the wife and I watch some home shows like Fixer Upper and Property Brothers). I thought about trying Hulu, but it's missing our local ABC (not an issue for me, but it wouldn't fly with the wife). Hulu has a lot of nice feautres and the massive back catalog, but to get their cloud DVR features is an extra $15.

The NFL doesn't matter. To me, they're dead (you can guess why).

In the end, I took a deal from Spectrum that lowered what I was paying for DirecTV and I'm running Rokus in the other rooms. We'll see how it goes for a month or two, but I may hook DirecTV now back up at some point. They had the best channel package AND price. If they get their DVR function running properly like they say is on the way, then that would be a good deal.

The Spectrum Roku app also will not let you rewind or pause at all, but the Fox Sports Go app WILL let you do that. So I can still use that function during games, which was the most important thing anyway.