If it only was that easy. I’m a techie and a network guy and for many, you have to do the basics right before you can do streaming (cut the cord).
Basics: what are your requirements? What shows do you watch? How many shows can you record at once? How long does your recordings last?
Shows: I try to cut the cord every year and by the time we add up all the services we like (YouTube tv falls way short in content), we are subscribing to many services with a cost equal to what you can get from 1 vendor. The last time we cut the cord, we went with YouTube tv and had to get 3 other services to get the equal we had before. Now, we had to know that to watch this particular event/show, we had to get out of YouTube tv and get into another service. After a while, it’s confusing to know where everything is at. If YouTube tv has everything you want, then that makes it simpler. Some of the extra services didn’t have recording capabilities.
If you take a snapshot during the day, we might have 5 or 6 channels recording simultaneously, how many can your service provide?
My recordings go to 3 different hard drives and they will stay there forever, whereas streaming services offer a couple months online before they delete them. And it’s a fallacy that I had to show 1 vendor, not everything that a channel airs is online forever. I asked some salesman to find if this show or this concert is online so I can see it. Multiple times he didn’t have it available so my recordings on my hard drives attached to our receiver are available forever.
Another basic: networking:
If you’re cutting the cord, your 1 router per house won’t do. You will either need to wire every room or install a mesh network. Don’t fall for that fallacy that you can get a repeater to help. That’s like putting lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. I have ma y friends that I rebuilt their internal networks (which no isp has knowledge on how to do not the geek squad) with wired and wireless bridge using the latest mesh 6e or newer technology. I use 4 mesh routers in my designer home, my buddies house I just did used 5 mesh routers. If you have a tv in the bedrooms, outside in your lanai, maybe the garage, outdoor cameras, you need more routers to decrease latency and give you Gb bandwidth.
Roku, firestick, chromecast devices are cheap but do ok if all you want to do is stream tv. I use many Apple 4K tv devices that gives me thousands of apps (Netflix, paramount+, etc are apps), streaming music from Apple, Roon, Qobuz, tidal to any system in the house, gives me a pnp popup to show me who is at my front or back door, it is a hub for my whole house automation system, and much more.
If you were to cut the cord and go streaming and your back bedrooms have TVs without a wired network or mesh network, you might want to use the moca technology for lower latency and increased bandwidth. Everybody has an rg6 cable in every room
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