Best Live TV Streaming Services

Which streaming service do you use? Tell us about your experience! Here are the top streaming picks right now…

How does Clark get the NFL Sunday Ticket if he uses YouTube as his cable provider?

He can add Sunday Ticket to the You Tube package but it only gives out of network games on Sunday afternoons

On a local post in Hawaii, they said the NFL games start at 8 AM here so you can start drinking then and still make it onto the beach for the rest of the day. Many bars show the games so you do not have to stay home and drink :slight_smile:

Sports are big here. In fact I hear even High School sports Friday nights are very popular.

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With AT&T DirecTV via internet you can have unlimited streams/screens at your main address and still have 3 streams viewed outside of the house. You also get a remote you can select channels from that has numbers to select from instead of scrolling alphabetical to your desired channels. And every show transmitted in HD or 4K shows that way provided you have that type of TV.

I’d love to see a review of streaming services that talked about how the user interface actually works on each. For example, we use a Roku stick, which we mostly like, with YouTubeTV for live news programs, and several others with the as-free option for entertainment shows.

We use YouTubeTV for “cable TV news,” usually on a somewhat delayed basis, and network news, recorded for watching later. YouTubeTV does this very well, but it’s totally forgotten how the FF, Pause/play, RW, and instant replay buttons are supposed to do on the Roku remote, unlike every other channel we use, which all understand this basic function. It maddening to have to remember which channel you are using before you press the forward/back controls.

We tired Hulu LiveTV, which uses the buttons correctly, but doesn’t let you fast forward through commercials when you are watching delayed live TV (it now does if you have recorded a show, but not live). So watching live channels delayed is impossible.

How about it reviewers, why don’t you explain such details?

SiliconDust has a solution that lets you record any OTA or cable program that you can watch on your TV. It records in MPG format and be edited and/or played back via their native player or any video app that will play MPG video recordings. You can also FF or jump commercials with almost any player you use. Their cable/OTA tuner will also let you watch live programming and recorded video on any PCs, tablets and phones that attach to your home wifi network.

Once you buy the hardware the yearly fee is just $39.

Thanks, H200h.
There’s no such thing as OTA here. There are mountains between us and every station.
We dumped cable a year ago and have no interest going back. We enjoy streaming the entertainment shows we like with no commercials to skip through. But we’re still addicted to cable and network news and are looking for ways to get that in the most hassle-free way we can.

There are several solutions for recording video from web-originated video, PlayOn Home is one that I use.

Once you get the video in-house a robust all-around player is VLC media player.

Thanks again, H200h,
I guess I wasn’t clear about what I’m looking for. We want a TIVO-like experience that deals with two tasks:

The first is to stream one of the cable news outlets all day, with the ability to pause, rewind, and forward with properly functioning controls. YouTubeTV does this except they have no idea how the pause/replay/FF buttons are supposed to work. Hulu-Live does this but won’t let you FF past the commercials (when you are watching delayed, of course).

The second is to a few record “live” programs, like a cable morning show and the network evening news, the play them back at a later hour, with pause/replay/FF functions and the ability to FF past commercials. Again, YouTubeTV does this, but with mal-functioning buttons. As I recall, HuluLiveTV will do this, but we don’t use it because it fails at the first task.

There are a couple of other channels that will provide some of both these types of content, but few seem to offer all of it, and I’ve not explored their record/delayed viewing capabilities. It’s the lack of detail on the record/playback functions on reviews of streaming channels that was the point of my post – with all these reviews out there, why do I have to subscribe to all the possibilities to learn how they work?

I’m aware of VLC media play, in fact have it installed on my PC. But I don’t understand how I would use it or something like it to do what I outlined above. A system that requires dealing with multiple tools and manual steps is not of interest. The minimalist remote for Roku stick is perfect, when the streaming channels program their apps in accordance to Roku’s (and common sense) standards. And it’s all the complexity we are willing to deal with.

With those requirements I’d look into a DVR with HDMI input & output ports.

The problem with a turnkey solution is high cost and short-term obsolescence the providers are always trying to sell you up once you commit to them.