How to watch TV these days...

[stupet11]

My Virgin Media contract is due for renewal in January, so rethinking how to get best value for our TV habits.

Kinda feel hooked into Virgin, as need Broadband, and then you seem to have to have line rental, and it's not much more to add on TV... except by time you've added on Sport and Movies you are over £70+

We subscribe to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime - seems to be something each has we want to watch, but not great value as packages really...

Are people using freeview / free sat - is the quality good, do you get enough content?

[Pumpkin Pie]

We would never pay Sky prices. I admit that we don’t watch a huge amount of telly though - an hour or two at most each night. We have Netflix at £5.99 a month and between that and free view that’s enough.

We have got a years subscription for Disney+ but that is for the grandchildren as we look after them 3/4 days a week. We won’t be renewing it though as we find they watch more on Netflix (and they rarely watch TV in the summer). We have watched nothing on Disney+ ourselves.

Never watch BBC output but that’s another topic!

Edit: I have considered Amazon Prime to watch This is Us but have resisted because that’s all I want it for (rarely buy anything from Amazon).

[SussexFamily]

I have SKY, Netflix and Amazon Prime, more than enough to cover my televisual requirements. I also get 'lost' in YouTube too!

[duchy]

You could shop around for your broadband . If Openreach fibre is available in your area you’d get decent speed for less money. If you aren’t gamers anything above 30 meg will be more than fast enough. Remember if you lose the internet completely your mobile data use will increase so home broadband is probably more economic overall.
Sky adds on Netflix for an extra £5 at the moment so cheaper than direct from Netflix (you can migrate an existing account ) so that might be cheaper . Signature (which includes Boxsets) with Ultimate is the package you would need , HD and UHD are optional add ons.

It’s really a case of working out the must haves and the would be nices but Virgin are usually one of the most expensive options so you can get better deals . I’m not a fan of the TiVo box compared with the Q box.

[DisneyDaffodil]

We have Sky including Sky cinema, we also have Netflix, Prime and Disney+. We pay £46 pm for Sky and Netflix and Prime is student prime (DD is a student) so half usual price and paid for annually and we paid for Disney+ on the introductory annual offer price too.
I’m not sure we will renew the Cinema part of the Sky contract as we currently have it as a special offer but don’t think we watch it enough to be worth the price even at the reduced price.
Netflix I’m still not entirely sure on. We pay £8.99 for the HD version but I don’t think we watch a lot on it. Prime is more useful as it’s half price and it also includes the Prime delivery and we watch quite a few things on it. Disney+ is enjoyable and I think we may keep that for a second year when this one runs out.

It seems as if we have a lot, but a lot of the tv subscriptions we have are special offers so I don’t feel we pay too much for it all and we do use them all to varying degrees.

[stupet11]

Unfortunately we have heavy games, media and art student, so I am not confident about moving from Virgin's Broadband speeds...

Happy to go to my dad's to watch the footy - I think we need to downgrade the Virgin TV services to basic, and use Amazon Prime and Netflix.

[BevS97]

We used to have Freesat which requires a satellite dish. I found this great except for one channel I couldn’t get. I was offered sky for £10/month so we moved but our sky has now gone up and to be honest we should have stuck with freesat.

On top of that we have Apple TV which came free with an iPad. We watched one series and won’t renew.

Netflix which gets watched quite a lot.

And Amazon prime which I ordered by mistake ! I have enjoyed this is us but will probably cancel after Xmas as I don’t watch anything else on it.

We did have Disney + but ran out of things to watch.

[enjibenji]

We have netflix and prime but tbh my lot watch youtube most of the time.

[wanye]

i have a tv aerial/freeview, but it's plugged into the tv on the wall which never gets used (the projector screen drops down in front of it... we use it maybe once or twice a year)

we ditched the landline and cable tv when we moved in here 5 years ago and don't miss it one bit. we just have 200mbps virgin broadband and an amazon firetv we watch everything through

subscription-wise, i have a tv licence (support the beeb!), amazon prime, netflix, disney+ and britbox. probably wont resubscribe to britbox, and unless they start adding a lot more stuff to disney+ i'll be considering my options when the year is up. possibly a year on appletv or hbo max instead depending on content at the time. especially now hbo max announced the warners cinema release deal

on top of that, the free apps... iplayer, all4, uktv play, tvplayer, and a few others

on top of that, most of my content is downloaded and managed by sonarr with a usenet subscription ($16.99/quarter) and access to an nzb indexer. this saves it to my NAS after it airs so it's ready to watch the next day - most of the stuff i watch is US-based so it's on live tv around 3am so its ready waiting for me to watch through kodi/plex when i finish work the day after

this is my library...

and heres the calendar, watching for new episodes of the shows i like...

[stupet11]

Draw Barrymore!