Cutting out TV package and TV licence, what do the family think?

honeybee1234

I'm doing a huge spring clean of my finances to focus on paying off my car finance early by the end of the year (18 months to go on paper.) 

I currently have Sky superfast broadband and a standard TV package with multiroom in my bedroom as well as the living room. I'm debating scrapping the TV package and cutting out my TV licence altogether, and just paying Netflix. Then either cheekily negotiating the broadband down, or taking a social tariff from one of the providers. 

I do like some of the Sky exclusive films, but I can't honestly justify it for the amount I use it. Kids never watch regular TV, but do like Netflix for family film time. They do however use broadband for gaming (two teenagers.)

Does anyone else only use Netflix/Amazon Prime/etc in place of 'regular' TV, and how do you find it suits you? What do the family think? Also, which broadband do families with 2+ kids who game use, and what's the best/lowest speed you can happily operate on? 

Username03725

It's a big drop from having a large part of the Sky package to cutting it out completely, but only you can gauge how important that is to you. You'd be losing news bulletins (across all of the main broadcasters) and local news. Again, that's your decision of whether it's important. 

I find that Netflix & Prime are good for fill-in progs or the occasional thing that I'd actually seek out but fails badly (for me) as a regular 'something on' viewing source, and there's always that idea that putting something on on Netflix or Prime is an active selection. In our household my wife doesn't like the things I tend to like, and I'm not so keen on her preferences. There's no arguments but if we're both in having an evening slump a compromise type of prog is often a better choice than one of us having to put up with the other's choice. Maybe you have a more cohesive view on what you like to watch. The user interface on Prime and Netflix is something I find to be somewhere between 'poor' and 'awful'. Ymmv...

As for speeds, I found that a basic BT 150Mb fttp service is more than adequate, with us two + two adult sprogs who still occupy the house more often than not. I watch 4K vids, they consume video etc on their devices, wife is often working from home in the evening. 150 meg is more than fine; never stutters, never misses a beat (never being 99% of the time). 

And, with thanks to Newcad who posted this info (below) on a different discussion in Hobbies & leisure, speed isn't necessarily the primary consideration. I'd agree; my experience is that having a decent speed just moves the bottleneck from us to the server that I'm downloading from whether that's films, audio, installer packages, Windows Updates or catch-up tv on the Sky box etc.  Having a faster broadband connection doesn't speed up the other end. Web servers are configured to share out resources at their end to balance their load, so having a 500Mb package at your end is irrelevant if the remote server throttles traffic to e.g. 20Mb. 

Anyway; Newcad's useful input...

The thing to remember about broadband 'speed' is that it isn't actually speed. (Blame advertising for the misconception).

Other things are measured 'per second' not just speed.

With broadband it's capacity per second, and many people are paying for capacity that they don't need.

When you work out what you do actually need, ie. how much broadband capacity you actually use then you can save money by only paying for what you need.

eg. A sports stadium may have 100 turnstiles, with a capacity of 100 persons per minute.
Whether there's 1 person, 20 people, or 100 people they still take a minute each to get in.
The rest of the turnstiles are not being used.

The 100 per minute is capacity not speed.

It's the same with broadband, especially for home use you don't usually need 'high speed' broadband.

Unless you have multiple people using it at once then the extra capacity (speed) you are paying for is going unused.

I previously had 150mbps broadband, I halved the price by switching to a 40mbps package instead.
I don't notice any difference in everyday use.

As someone said above even Windows Updates etc. only run at 15-20mbps no matter what capacity broadband you are paying for.

Watch it in Task Manager next time you do a Windows Update.

honeybee1234

@Username03725

Thankyou so much for the detailed reply, certainly the technical stuff is very useful! I'll digest it and have a think. 

We very rarely watch anything on TV. It's Netflix mainly, and Amazon Prime, and as you mentioned, a measured decision on what to watch. We have an ongoing shortlist of films and series on those so I'm not worried on that score. 

Username03725

No probs. 

As a guide, 4K video requires between 14-40Mb/s depending on source. YouTube, Netflix, Prime and iPlayer all state different min speeds. 

HD vid is about half that, and if you’re into hi-res audio single digit speeds are fine.

Marvel1

I dont have a tv licnece, as dont need one, i dont watch or watch live TV.  Dont watch BBC i player.  If you want to watch something on iTV there is ITV player catchup (same with Channel 4 and 5).

powerful_Rogue

350Mb broadband and phoneline from Virgin Media - £25 a month.

Youtube premium - £2 per month

Disney +  - £1.50 per month

Netflix - £4 per month

Been TV licence free since 2017. You can also use all the catch up TV services such as ITV,CH4, Ch5 etc, just not BBC iPlayer.

shiny76

"powerful_Rogue said:

350Mb broadband and phoneline from Virgin Media - £25 a month."

Wow!  thats some deal!  I'm paying more for less.  Elderly relative paying > £50 for phone and basic TV - can't get them to drop Virgin Media

lika_86

Keep in mind that if you find yourself missing Sky, there's always NOW TV which you can pick your package for (entertainment, films etc). We dont have a working TV aerial and rely on apps for our TV. I don't know I'd want to get rid of the ability to watch terrestrial channels via their apps, sometimes you do just want to watch the news or whatever.

jimbo6977

I went through a similar thought process when moving house fairly recently, and am going through the same now. The issue I have is this:

At present I have a Sky dish, Sky Q box and a Sky mini box, along with a Sky router from the Sky ISP. All I need in order to watch Sky TV is an HDMI cable (Sky supplied these in fact) and a couple of monitors (or TVs) each with an HDMI input. If something goes wrong such that I can't watch Sky TV, I can easily swap out the cable and monitor to check they are not at fault, and beyond that everything is Sky's responsibility. 

The alternative is to have internet access from an ISP, a Chromecast from Google, a Firestick from Amazon, (... and/or or a Roku, or whatever other alternatives available), and a plethora of Apps from a multitude of providers. Imagine that one day I can't watch my chosen programme on a given app. I would have no idea where I would start in trying to find where the fault lies and what to do about it. It seems that it would be all too easy for each of the suppliers in the chain to pass blame to another, leaving me without a service I've paid for and nowhere to go. 

So I still have Sky, and it costs a ton of money.

Lavendyr

We have 1000Mbps through Lightspeed broadband - one of, I think, many smaller companies rolling out full fibre broadband. We are paying £40 a month. No landline. We have an LG smart TV with all the apps we need built in. 

So we pay £40 a month for 1000Mbps full fibre broadband, £14 ish a month TV licence which gives access to iPlayer and all the live channels. About £50 a month further on streaming subscriptions (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, YouTube Premium). At around £100 a month it isn't cheap, but we get our money's worth across 2 adults and 2 children.

Bluebell1000

We have Disney plus and Virgin Fibre broadband and phone (£26 per month). Our children are totally happy with it, but then we don't have it on very often, and they've grown up never having TV services, so it's not a new thing.