The 4 glaring issues that finally made me ditch cable

• The first issue I had with my cable
• Why am I paying to be behind streaming?
• The final straw before cancellation
• Why YouTube TV was intriguing to me

I’ve kept a firm hold on my cable subscription for years. I’d thought about cutting the cord in the past, but I never got around to it. I liked the flexibility of always being able to turn the TV on and the cable was working (assuming I had power). While I did have to choose a certain cable package and wasn’t able to have every channel I wanted, it was okay because many of the channels I wanted the most I have in my package.

Even with what feels like a gazillion streaming services, I’ve kept paying for cable because it guarantees I can watch local news and whatever’s airing live, without jumping through hoops. The idea of having to potentially watch a show at a later time because it’s not available on the streaming service is not something I’m interested in.

But there came a time recently when I couldn’t take it anymore with my cable. I had multiple problems in one afternoon and the time came to call it quits. It’s probably something that should’ve happened years ago. But I finally did it and broke up with my cable and signed up for YouTube TV.

The first issue I had with my cable

The blur was just awful

I was trying to watch football recently and noticed that the screen was blurry at random points throughout the game. There was like a scrambled mess at the bottom of the screen as it would go from one camera angle to another. At first, I was wondering if it was my TV’s settings. I changed all the different modes of my TV to see if any of them helped, but none of them did.

I checked all the cables to see if maybe the coaxial cable or HDMI cords weren’t properly installed, potentially affecting how it was transmitting to my TV. Neither of those were an issue either. Once I saw that the same issue was happening on my other TV in the house that’s hooked up with cable, I knew something was up. I started to notice it more and more on channels that weren’t showing sports either. It was happening watching the Today Show in the mornings and other cable channels as well.

While it was a minor annoyance more than anything, it proved to be just the start of my major problem with cable.

Why am I paying to be behind streaming?

This made me really upset

I had Xfinity as my cable provider — it was really the only one available in my area.

Another thing that was driving me nuts was being behind while watching games. Whether I was watching baseball, football, or any other kind of sport, my friends were always ahead of me. I’d get a text message about a play before it even started. All of my friends were streaming the game, and I was using cable. Sometimes, I’d get a push notification from ESPN or another app that a game ended before I actually saw what happened.

This was so frustrating, as I was paying good money for my cable subscription and felt like I was wasting it. I could’ve been listening to the game for free on the radio and been as up-to-date on what was going on as I was watching it on cable. It was incredibly frustrating to basically have to tell my friends to wait to text me about something, so I wouldn’t see their text before it actually happened on my TV.

The final straw before cancellation

It was way too much effort

I wanted to watch two things at the same time, as two of my favorite teams were playing on different channels. I tried to use picture in picture, but that isn’t a thing anymore. You used to be able to set one channel on your cable as the previous channel option and use that as a picture inside the main channel that you were watching. There used to be a button on your remote for this exact purpose with a PIP on it. I used to love this feature, as you could watch two games at once without a problem.

When I tried to do this last week, I was met with the frustrating realization that I couldn’t do this with cable. But I was able to do Samsung Multi View, which allowed me to split the screen between two inputs. I could choose cable as one of the options and something else as the other. Samsung offered me things like channels from Samsung TV Plus, which wasn’t a help, or YouTube, which also wasn’t a help.

I could also choose to screen mirror a laptop or phone, which is what I had to do. I had to screen mirror my laptop, connect it to the TV via Bluetooth, and cast it onto the other half of the TV. While this did work, it was a gigantic pain that made me realize that YouTube TV was probably the way to go.

Why YouTube TV was intriguing to me

I’m pleased with it so far

YouTube TV has a Multiview of its own, except there isn’t the need to hook up other devices for it. Multiview on YouTube TV gives you the ability to watch four games at once. It offers you a quad box of sports heaven, or actually any channels that you want to put together. You can watch a sporting event, NCIS, CNN, and local news all at once. While it’s way more fun to watch four sporting events, in my opinion, you can do what you want.

YouTube TV had many of the channels I was subscribing to cable for and a few that I didn’t have with my cable package, making it a solid purchase. Plus, it was actually cheaper than my cable package, so I’m saving a bit by making the switch away from cable. I like that I can use it on all my devices and all the TVs in my home. I do have two TVs that didn’t have cable boxes previously, so I was using them as streaming TVs strictly. Now I can watch live TV on them again. I look forward to utilizing YouTube TV for a long time, as the proper switch got me away from being frustrated with cable.