# Streaming tv help



## keeperofthesheep (Jan 31, 2021)

Hello. This looked like a place that might be able to answer some questions, so thought I would join and ask.
I am working on a project for our local church/community. We have a number of senior citizens on fixed income, and a number of families that dont make alot of money.
I got to thinking...modern technology can maybe help. 
So I want to put a program together on streaming tv, using ip phone service, utilizing a cheap celluar phone service etc.
I personally have roku with at&t.
Im needing some help tho. First is there a chart that compairs all the services...next, the cheapest provider of local networks (over the air tv is a no go, almost 120 miles or more from transmitter.)
Then would introduce magic jack for phone.
Does anyone know a better program than visible celluar ?
We are also going to talk about a low income internet service, and for computers, pc for people.
I am looking at a goal of $50 mo tv, $15 mo for internet, $3.50 mo for magic jack 

Compare that to $100 mo tv, $35 mo internet

$30 phone.....so a cost savings of over $90 a month....and on celluar at least $30 a month per line.

Thanks


----------



## WestDC (Feb 9, 2008)

You Could search for such services based on your ZIPCODE -- as well a OTA (FREE) based on your zipcode ----Google or bing


----------



## lparsons21 (Mar 4, 2006)

Look at suppose.tv website.


----------



## B. Shoe (Apr 3, 2008)

In some efforts to help you in what we can assist with on the board:

Click here to view a page that compares Top 100 channels across all of the major streaming services. (This was last updated on January 21 by CNET.)


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Doing video via anything that looks like a telephone line probably isn't feasible.

Broadcast channels are a particularly vexing problem as they typically require either an antenna or a subscription to a relatively full-service TV provider.

Watching TV all day on a wireless phone plan would likely be very expensive and there's a significant risk of bandwidth throttling.

120 miles from a TV transmitter suggests that broadband of any kind is going to be expensive.

I suspect your best shot is going to come from asking local senior aid agencies for subsidies.


----------



## NashGuy (Jan 30, 2014)

keeperofthesheep said:


> Hello. This looked like a place that might be able to answer some questions, so thought I would join and ask.
> I am working on a project for our local church/community. We have a number of senior citizens on fixed income, and a number of families that dont make alot of money.


Which company (if anyone) offers home internet service in your area? If it's Comcast, I would suggest that you check out their Internet Essentials program that offers broadband for $10/mo to low-income households that qualify:
Internet Essentials from Comcast

Charter offers a similar program called Spectrum Internet Assist:
Spectrum.net

Most cable companies offer a very basic cable TV package, which is pretty much just the local affiliates of the broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW, PBS, etc.). If you combine cable TV with internet from the same provider, you may get a discount on the total bill. You're probably not going to find an internet-streaming cable TV service (like YouTube TV, AT&T TV, Fubo TV, etc.) that will sell you a package of cable channels that includes your locals for less than the cost of the most basic locals-only plan that your local cable company sells. YouTube TV and similar services start at $65/mo. (although they do contain a lot of additional channels besides just locals).


----------



## 1948GG (Aug 4, 2007)

Several years ago I moved from a relatively close in suburban community (40-50 miles from local dma tranmitters) to a rural one some 120 miles from those same; the dma exceeds 250+ miles from one end to the other so I'm really only half way out in the boonies (!).

But 2 of the 4 'network' affiliates (cbs and fox) have low power translators in the area, but community restrictions (legal and avoid fcc rules by being in the deeds) bans rooftop antennas (the same restrictions I had in a gated community before I retired).

But there was comcast/xfinity at my current location (that was a #1 reason I moved to my current spot), and recent locast in my dma (seattle). So the 'essentials', especially with the latest 50/5 service is the way to go, although setting up a dvr system is a bit of a headache (someone needs to come out with a 'plug and play' locast solution!).

So it is doable, if one can get a low cost internet connection. No cable? Have they looked at tmobile new wireless 4g/5g service? If I was looking today, I have three tmobile towers, closest is 800' away, with 2ghz and 2.5ghz 5g (not to mention the low band 600mhz) so if there wasn't any cable then at $50 it would be a solution. Again, very rural but has an interstate highway running through it (which is why several tmobile, verizon, and att towers).

So things are improving v 5 years ago. Perhaps when Starlink actually rolls out after beta and the price stabilizes that may be an option.


----------



## NYDutch (Dec 28, 2013)

1948GG said:


> But there was comcast/xfinity at my current location (that was a #1 reason I moved to my current spot), and recent locast in my dma (seattle). So the 'essentials', especially with the latest 50/5 service is the way to go, although setting up a dvr system is a bit of a headache (someone needs to come out with a 'plug and play' locast solution!).


Take a look at Stremium for a DVR solution for Locast and other streaming providers. At $5/mo per 25 hours of recording time, Stremium does an acceptable job and has apps for FireTV, Android TV, Android, and Roku.


----------



## mjwagner (Oct 8, 2005)

NYDutch said:


> Take a look at Stremium for a DVR solution for Locast and other streaming providers. At $5/mo per 25 hours of recording time, Stremium does an acceptable job and has apps for FireTV, Android TV, Android, and Roku.


IIRC that is a rebrand of the old FitzyTV service...


----------



## NashGuy (Jan 30, 2014)

1948GG said:


> So it is doable, if one can get a low cost internet connection. No cable? Have they looked at tmobile new wireless 4g/5g service? If I was looking today, I have three tmobile towers, closest is 800' away, with 2ghz and 2.5ghz 5g (not to mention the low band 600mhz) so if there wasn't any cable then at $50 it would be a solution. Again, very rural but has an interstate highway running through it (which is why several tmobile, verizon, and att towers).
> 
> So things are improving v 5 years ago. Perhaps when Starlink actually rolls out after beta and the price stabilizes that may be an option.


For your particular location, I'd say that T-Mobile 5G Home Internet would be a better solution than Starlink. (And maybe even better than Comcast.) Being that close to a 2.5 GHz 5G tower, you'd probably get download speeds of 300 Mbps or more, with no data cap, for $50/mo including equipment on T-Mo. Meanwhile, early Starlink customers are having to pay hundreds for equipment and $100/mo for speeds around 100-150 Mbps.


----------



## 1948GG (Aug 4, 2007)

A DVR 'service' that relies on subscription storage that would be exceeded in one day is not a solution, not with as cheap as local hard drives or even silicon storage is.

The tmobile wireless 4g/5g (home unit made by Nokia-alcatel-Lucent) is a major possibility, I got a call from them a couple weeks ago. After I first retired, I moved out of the gated community (no way i could afford the house payments on retirement pay) to a duplex 2-3 miles down the main highway, and upgraded the dsl connection to a non-telco provider at triple the speed (remember, this was 2003, no docsis cable internet from the local independent cableco). Plus, I was able to put up a decent antenna so during the digital changeover I was able to maintain all my locals throughout.

But Sprint bought out this company that was doing wimax (on 2.5ghz) and as I had a sprint cell phone, could get that uncapped and very fast (better than 20mb/s) for next to nothing, the home wireless box was <$5/month on my sprint bill. What a deal!

But once sprint started turning off wimax circa 2010 or so, the local cableco got bought out by comcast and they immediately rolled out docsis 3.0, so that was the next 'go to'. When I moved to my current location, I already had 3 roku boxes and was streaming way over the caps so had business class with no caps. Expensive but nessesary. Comcast eventually extended capless service to residential service a bit over 2 years ago (for a $50/month surcharge) so switched then. Believe it or not, the price for that has steadily dropped over the past year to, after the 'free' covid months, to almost half what it was some 15+ months ago.

I think it's comcast smelling the writing on the wall, with the cell folks ramping up and then starlink filling the skies. But my monthly bill has fallen just shy of 50% in those 15 months, and I haven't even pulled the trigger on an owned modem (the wifi range on the comcast 2nd gen docsis 3.1 box is supurb, and yes I have the latest arris 3.1 unit in my amazon list so I ask myself when !?!) so there it is.

I run on avg some 5TB a month, and I do wonder how the tmobile system would handle it, to save the $30/month (buying my own 3.1 modem at $300 would only save $5/month so the pay back would be 5 years, and I've had to swap out the comcast supplied unit 3 times over the last 1.5 years, so....)

I think I'll just wait at least another year for when starlink drops off 'beta', and give tmobile some time to settle down. I think mr. Comcast will be dropping their rates some more if the recent PC mag reviews are correct in the number of folks going to satellite are anywhere near reality. All I can say is despite them being the most hated company in America, my service at two locations, the current one almost completely surrounded by farms and cow pastures, has been excellent, except for the modem swapouts, which my last unit has been working great for almost as year (my local techs have told me that the arris units, which I now have, are the best by far).

Long dissertation, but I went from my top earning to half that 15 years before I thought I would retire, and had a lot of decisions to make throughout the changes in the internet over the last 20 years, in price, speed, availability, and usability. And I was there in the beginning with (d)arpanet when they first connected to the us army in 1973/4. I cut the cord with directv 4 years ago, something I thought I'd be buried with having had it since 1994 (customer number just over 5 digits). But streaming rules. I have 2-3 times as much content to choose from at half the cost of satellite. I think I've been lucky in finding this slice of comcast out in the middle of almost nowhere, then again, two other areas I looked at were building fiber to the home by their public power districts, that have dispite all the attempts to stop them have continued to be built out. So if I had taken the chance I'd have gigabit fiber for maybe half what I pay comcast. Maybe. Maybe I'd have nothing, waiting on starlink.


----------



## NashGuy (Jan 30, 2014)

1948GG said:


> But Sprint bought out this company that was doing wimax (on 2.5ghz) and as I had a sprint cell phone, could get that uncapped and very fast (better than 20mb/s) for next to nothing, the home wireless box was <$5/month on my sprint bill. What a deal!


Sounds like you had Clearwire? I had a friend here in Nashville who had that at one point years ago.



1948GG said:


> I think it's comcast smelling the writing on the wall, with the cell folks ramping up and then starlink filling the skies. But my monthly bill has fallen just shy of 50% in those 15 months, and I haven't even pulled the trigger on an owned modem (the wifi range on the comcast 2nd gen docsis 3.1 box is supurb, and yes I have the latest arris 3.1 unit in my amazon list so I ask myself when !?!) so there it is.
> 
> I run on avg some 5TB a month, and I do wonder how the tmobile system would handle it, to save the $30/month (buying my own 3.1 modem at $300 would only save $5/month so the pay back would be 5 years, and I've had to swap out the comcast supplied unit 3 times over the last 1.5 years, so....)
> 
> I think I'll just wait at least another year for when starlink drops off 'beta', and give tmobile some time to settle down. I think mr. Comcast will be dropping their rates some more if the recent PC mag reviews are correct in the number of folks going to satellite are anywhere near reality. All I can say is despite them being the most hated company in America, my service at two locations, the current one almost completely surrounded by farms and cow pastures, has been excellent, except for the modem swapouts, which my last unit has been working great for almost as year (my local techs have told me that the arris units, which I now have, are the best by far).


Yeah, people love to hate both Comcast and AT&T but, for the most part, I got pretty good broadband service out of both (with a few really bad customer service experiences, but those were the exceptions). I switched to AT&T Fiber through their Toast.net reseller last Sept. and love it. I pay a regular price of exactly $45/mo for 60/60 uncapped with a very nice WiFi 6 router included. (Although if it fails after the first year, I have pay something like $100 or 150 to replace it.) The speed is all I need for the kind of stuff I do. (As long as I can reliably stream 4K HDR video, that's really all I need. Any extra speed is just gravy.)

Around here, Comcast offers unlimited data (i.e. waives the 1.2 TB data cap) for an extra $30/mo but they also sell "XFi Complete," which includes rental of their XFi gateway, plus extenders if needed, plus unlimited data, all for $25/mo. (The XFi gateway rental alone is $14/mo.) Are you on XFi Complete? If not, you should ask about it. Might save you a few bucks.

Given your extremely high data usage, yeah, I think it makes sense to stay put at Comcast for now and allow the new services from T-Mo and Starlink mature a bit. You can read other folks' firsthand reviews and experiences with them this year and see if either makes sense for you to switch to and potentially save some money. It's good that you have options.


----------



## NYDutch (Dec 28, 2013)

mjwagner said:


> IIRC that is a rebrand of the old FitzyTV service...


Yes it is. They've made some improvements over the old service...


----------



## 1948GG (Aug 4, 2007)

Yes, it was the sprint rebranded Clearwire; the wimax antenna was on an at&t tower a block away from my duplex. If I ever lost the signal I could look out my front window and see if the tower had fallen (!).

And yes, it's on the xfi complete, that's part of why the monthly bill has fallen like a rock after the free covid passed. I have two wifi extenders on both sides of the house, but 5ghz at 4 bars + inside. One of the extenders is in my garage tool room, so the signal has to go through at least 3 walls at 5ghz but the signal is still at least 3+ bars at that point and feeds one of my roku's on the translated 2.4ghz with no problems at 1080p (after going through yet another couple of walls). The other extender has a much easier job, only a couple of walls to get to another roku, 5ghz all the way.

I'll wait on tmobile and try and find some folks who are just outside of the comcast cable plant (about 1 mile in any direction, my fiber to coax hub is ~500' away) and see how they rate the service, and will of course keep an eye on starlink; I already have a spot picked out on the roof of my garage, cable run will be super simple.

Will be good to have options; it still pisses me off that the gated community I had to move out of in 2003 got verizon FIOS, especially as I had worked on two of the pilot plants around 1996-98 as an engineering advisor from an equipment supplier. The two county PUD's here in Washington state that started doing fiber to the home some 10 years ago are Chelan and Mason, they have both managed to avoid getting stopped by any of the incumbent providers *read: phone and cablecos* I don't know if any others have jumped at it, although Centurylink (or whatever they are calling themselves this week) are doing some heavy fiber deployment in north seattle/king county.


----------



## mjwagner (Oct 8, 2005)

NYDutch said:


> Yes it is. They've made some improvements over the old service...


Maybe you have to pay to see it? I loaded the app this afternoon just to see if the UI was different/better than the old FitzyTV UI. Looked pretty much the same and not a very good UI design IMO. Pretty much bare bones. Didn't look like they changed much except the name of the service...


----------



## NYDutch (Dec 28, 2013)

mjwagner said:


> Maybe you have to pay to see it? I loaded the app this afternoon just to see if the UI was different/better than the old FitzyTV UI. Looked pretty much the same and not a very good UI design IMO. Pretty much bare bones. Didn't look like they changed much except the name of the service...


I agree the UI didn't change much. The biggest difference I found was in the DVR usage that seems to be more reliable than it was in the past. I do like having several providers listings consolidated in the single guide, although that isn't much changed from the previous setup. I currently have Locast NYC, CBS All Access, and a Spectrum program package in the single listing, making moving from one to the other seamless. One thing I don't like, is that Stremium apparently uses the Locast geofencing I originally signed up with instead of checking it as I move around, making my location change options useless with their app. That would not be an issue for stationary folks of course...


----------



## NashGuy (Jan 30, 2014)

1948GG said:


> I'll wait on tmobile and try and find some folks who are just outside of the comcast cable plant (about 1 mile in any direction, my fiber to coax hub is ~500' away) and see how they rate the service, and will of course keep an eye on starlink; I already have a spot picked out on the roof of my garage, cable run will be super simple.


It'll be interesting to see what the pricing and features look like on Starlink when it exits beta and becomes broadly available. Given the beta pricing (about $500 in up-front equipment fees, then $99/mo for varying speeds that might average about 125 down/20 up), I'll be surprised if it's an attractive option for anyone who already has cable broadband or T-Mo fixed 5G available, much less both.


----------



## 1948GG (Aug 4, 2007)

Musk has said the #1 priority is getting the cost of the user terminal down; in the teardown videos I've seen of both the starlink dish and amazon kuiper is it appears the amazon dish is more than a couple generations ahead of what is being currently shipped to the starlink beta folks, but who really knows. If in 3-4 months from now (early summer) the design of the starlink system dish/router significantly changes, we'll know. 

If by then the launch schedule can achieve anywhere near the accelerated rate (with improved version 1.x sats) and be well on the way to full coverage or nearly that for north america (canada/us/Mexico including alaska), then coming out of beta and fielding a new/improved terminal at a much lower cost, including actual tiers of service, is paramount. Too much wide open eyes on gigabit service simply is out of the norm; just exactly how many folks on the near universal accessibility of such in most cable systems have resulted in how many subscribers? Fyi, out here in the cow pastures of comcast we have had 2gb/s service for two years, but now many actually pays or needs that? If you are the typical streamer that occasionally pulls updates for their computers/phones and such, exactly who really needs more than 100/200mb/s, where most of that is actually wasted due to artificially low upstream speeds, most of which is less than the fcc level of 20mb/s, which is actually met by some providers (the prime competitor to comcast in my area has 100/20 where xfinity has 100/5, at the same price). Both the cell folks and starlink have much better upstream than the major cablecos; it didn't look like much but I was paying almost triple just to get 10mb/s and cutting my upload times in half for a couple years. I had to adjust my schedule of things like backups and such by running a machine days on end at the low upstream rate, and it is a grind (and puts use time through the roof on the pc used).

That will be my primary reason to toss comcast and going with any competion. By this time next year the handwriting may well be on the wall.


----------



## NYDutch (Dec 28, 2013)

Don't lose sight of the fact that the US is not Starlink's primary market. The rest of the world is...


----------



## 1948GG (Aug 4, 2007)

Not true for at least the next 3+ years, until the launched sats exceed 3k or thereabouts. They need to achieve profitability at that level of investment, launching the series from 3k to 12k to service even the next tier of potential customers that can afford the terminals will, if those countries allow reception, will be the next goal. 

Figure it out: that's 9k sats, at 60 per launch with the falcon 9 that's 150+ launches. Forget the cost for a minute (!), at a launch rate they currently can't reach (2 per month), that's over 6 years. Using the Starship for launches was always the dream, but when is that going to be available without blowing up/crashing?? 2-3 years from now? 

So there's a lot of work still to be done, and north america as THE prime market will be the go to with minimal markets outside of it, highly dependent on the terminal and service cost. But until folks in Alabama, Florida, Alaska, the Northwest Territories and Yucatan can reliably recieve service, forget about areas outside of that. 

Folks point to the UK and Australia since the orbital path of northam sats fly over those countries, but both of them have had extensive government internet construction projects going on for well over a decade, and I'm sure that some foreign company coming in to skim off the top of their customer base will result in a renewed push for home grown solutions; we as already see that with the UK and Oneweb. If I was a supplier of fiber optic to the home systems (in fact an area I was heavily involved in during the 90's) I would focus my sales teams almost exclusively to the UK and Aus. And if the US states can get their heads out of their backsides, maybe here as well, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.


----------



## NYDutch (Dec 28, 2013)

Of course it will take Starlink reaching a higher sat coverage before they can reach significant penetration, but there are far more underserved areas of the world than there are in the US. The UK rural market is too small to be of consequence in the long term, but Australia has large areas that are impractical for fiber due to long distance/low density. That's where Starlink's overall market will be in many areas of the world. SpaceX will sort out the Starship landing issue, possibly as soon as the next test now that they have a handle on the failure mode and possible fixes.


----------

