This article was written by Don VanSyckel, the club president, as a part of "The President's Pen". This article appeared in the December 2018 WYSIWYG newsletter.
Cutting the Cord part 2
by Don VanSyckel
Cutting the cord continues at my house. Last month I wrote about dropping cable TV and keeping internet. So far my wife and I have not missed cable TV. In fairness, my wife only watches a hour or so a day and the channel is available via streaming so she's all set. I have the TV on more than I actually watch. I am still finding interesting DVDs at the library and haven't even bothered much with the "free" movies that are offered on Crackle, PBS, Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Tubi TV, and Vudu all of which I have signed up for. Plus there are others that I haven't checked into yet. Popular Netflix and Hulu are both pay to play so I'll leave those until I exhaust the free channels, no hurry. Ya know, there's only so many hours in the day, just how much TV content do you need? How many hours a day do you want to be chained to a TV?
Some of the services require you to select items by clicking through what seems to be endless lists of movies which are in no particular order. At least the movies are in genre lists but still the lists are long. Some services show dates and some show ratings. I found in Tubi you can go on line and "easily" search (using the PC's keyboard) for various items by title, actor, or date. Then once you find a movie you can search for that title on the Roku/TV but this uses a select-the-letter process using the arrow keys on the remote. This sure beats choosing via the endless lists. Some services interrupt the movies with advertisements and some don't. So far the Tubi movies have played straight thorough, no ads. All in all, there's a lot of movies and other content out there, some not worth watching, but there's a lot that is and much of it is free.
End of Article