Author: Justin Pot / Source: howtogeek.com
Cord cutting is picking up steam. Forecasters are predicting a 33 percent increase in people dropping their cable subscription this year over last—faster than analysts predicted.
You might think this is all about the money, and that’s certainly a big factor.
Cable TV bills, after the first year lock-in deals expire, can easily climb above $100 a month. Replacing a cable subscription with Netflix, which costs $14 a month at most, is a quick way to save a little money. And sure, part of that $100+ per month you’re still going to have to pay if you’re keeping your broadband internet. But, even with that, you can still save money cutting the cord.RELATED: Cord Cutting Only Sucks If You’re Trying to Replicate Cable
But cord cutting isn’t just about the money. Depending on how many streaming services you pay for, cord cutting might even be more expensive than cable (especially since you still have to pay for internet access), but people are doing it anyway, because streaming services at this point are better than cable. Here are a few reasons why.
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Streaming Services Offer Better User Interfaces
I haven’t had cable since college, back when woolly mammoths roamed the US and Slashdot’s traffic could take down web-servers. Things were straight forward then: you turned on your TV and changed the channel until you found something you wanted to watch.
Modern cable setups are not like this. For one thing, the advent of digital channels has made channel changing slower. Try to flip through channels these days, and you often have to wait a few seconds before each channel actually pops up on the screen.
And yes, modern cable set top boxes try to offer features like interactive guides and searches, but those are often more frustrating than they should be. The guides and other features can be slow to work with, and most show channels you don’t even have access to with no way to filter them out.
Take Verizon’s FIOS offering, for example. One of my coworkers with FIOS reports that it’s so slow that just about every button press takes seconds to respond. Fire up their On Demand interface, and it can take up to 30 seconds to load. And even then, the thumbnails for shows haven’t popped in.
Now, to be fair, some providers do at least try. Comcast’s Xfinity service, for example, actually has a pretty slick interface and a nice feature set—guides that fly in from the right, for example, and let you filter to just the channels you want to see.
Xfinity also has apps that add some functionality, even though they are very few at the moment. You can tie in your Netflix account (but not Hulu or Amazon), pop up a window with sports scores, and that sort of thing. And their voice remote is surprisingly good. You can use it to…
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