Cutting the cord with Sky TV

Plus TV licence. There's no way on earth I'd spend anything like that amount a month on TV. If I used it enough to make it worth it, I'd be telling myself I needed less screen time. As it is we watch a program a night on average and a film at the weekend and that's about it. Too busy usually.

There's that I guess. Thankfully I used to follow arsenal, so I'm no longer a football fan and I gave up on F1 a couple of years back.

F1 was getting dull so I was losing interest the move behind a pay wall was the nail in the coffin. The only other stuff I follow are a lower league football team (never on Sky,) the NHL (not on sky & have thwir own online watching solution,) and England football matches for major tournaments which are free to air.

I'd have to watch an awful lot of sport AND it be the sport that Sky have the rights to for me to consider them now.

Solutions like Emby & Plex have had for years what Sky Q only brought in recently, like pausing in 1 room and picking up in another. They'll also both record live TV. Rip your DVDs/Blu Ray's to a drive and you have a full self contained system as good as SkyQ without doing anything illegal. Obviously if you're not worried about piracy you can extend their capabilities still further.

Job done, Sky has been cancelled.

Gave them a chance to offer some deals, but the cheapest they’d get to was £77 with TV, multiroom, broadband and Netflix sub. Still seemed a bit excessive considering the alternatives.

This is a new world…

I had a look yesterday to see what price I could get. Cheapest for the lot in UHD was £79 for content alone, Inc Netflix.

Indeed. If you go for nowtv at any point, you shouldn't pay more than 5/6 quid for entertainment or movies. Plus wanky boost of course.

Last time I missed cancelling it, paid one month and then when I cancelled they offered me half price for 6 months. On the entertainment pack I cancelled before my previous deal ended and they still offered me 6 months for 6 quid. Not tried cancelling the boost mind you.

That's shite. In fact, their device support all round is pants.

Radar/sonarr/lidarr linked to a newshosting provider, all on a NAS with a Plex server is a surprisingly user friendly system, with the caveat that the initial setup is a bit of a bitch if you are new to it all. But after that first few hours of work, I can now just tell it what show or movie I want to watch, at what quality level, and it just gets it.

My monthly running costs for that is about £15 (plus internet, Nas is extra if you don't want to use a pc) and I have access to basically everything on the day of release. I still have Sky and some streaming services, basically because I'm lucky enough to have the disposable income, but I could definitely just use this system.

You can do the same setup with bitorrent instead of newsgroups to reduce the costs. Apparently.

I'd also recommend Emby or the open source Jellyfin over Plex, which for me has got too controlling.

Only things keeping me with sky is sport in uhd. Any way to get premier league matches etc? Happy to pay but would really like to have access to all pl games without faffing with dodgy streams

I bought a lifetime Plex pass in one of their sales a couple of years ago, when they introduced their link with Tidal. Don't use tidal anymore but still have the lifetime benefit.

I also like their Plexamp these days, for playing NAS music on my phone.

But yeah, most things can be done almost-free, for some reason I'm more comfortable with NZBs and the Plex library format.

Thanks, I'll look into it. Any Usenet recommendations? Every review site I look at seems to be an ad for one of them eventually so I've stuck with newshosting.

Actually I overestimated the cost. 9.99 euros a month not GBP, plus 20 USD per year for nzb. So about half what I thought, heh.

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