IPTV vs Cable: Why I Cancelled My $200/Month Bundle

Last August our household was paying $237.41 per month to Comcast Xfinity. Itemised it broke down like this: $89.99 base TV (Preferred Plus, 220+ channels), $35 Sports Lite Tier (NFL Network, NBA TV), $25 HBO Max premium tier, $20 Showtime, $11 broadcast TV fee, $9.95 regional sports fee, $8 set-top box rental for the living room, $8 set-top box rental for the bedroom, $7 DVR service, $4.99 4K equipment fee, plus state and local taxes that came to $18.48.

The introductory rate, in case you're wondering, had been $84/month for the first 12 months. The $237 was what it grew into after the contract reset — exactly as the contract had warned us it would. We hadn't added a single channel during that year.

I tracked this for three months hoping to negotiate. Comcast retention offered a $40 monthly credit if I committed to a new 24-month contract. I declined and we dropped cable.

Three things, totalling $35 per month before annual savings:

IPTV subscription — $20.99/month (Signature plan, monthly billing) for 40,000+ live channels including ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, ESPN 1-8, NFL Network, NFL RedZone, NBA TV, MLB Network, NHL Network, HBO, Showtime, Starz, AMC, FX, and the full prestige cable lineup.

OTA antenna — one-time $30 purchase. A flat indoor antenna in the living room window picks up our nearest ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX local affiliates, plus PBS. Local news, local weather, local sports — all in 1080i over the air.

Existing internet — $79/month Spectrum Internet (we already paid this for working from home). No change.

Annual switch: $21 IPTV * 12 = $252 for the year. We then moved to annual billing at $89.99 for 12 months ($7.50 effective per month). The OTA antenna is a one-time cost.

Cable for the year would have been $237.41 * 12 = $2,848.92.

IPTV plus antenna for the year was $89.99 (annual ITS IPTV) + $30 (one-time antenna) = $119.99.

Year-one savings: $2,728.93. We paid the antenna off in 4 days.

Year-two onwards: $89.99 vs $2,848.92 = $2,758.93 saved per year. By year three the household had banked $8,246.79 in saved cable bills — enough for a complete kitchen renovation.

I built a spreadsheet of every channel we actually watched on cable and checked it against the IPTV lineup before cutting the cord. The results:

Network broadcast (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, PBS, The CW): IPTV carries the major-network feeds. The OTA antenna picks up the local affiliates with strictly local news and weather.

Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, Starz, AMC, FX, Cinemax, Paramount+): all present on IPTV. Same channels, same shows, same broadcast schedule. HBO's Sunday-night drama airs at 9pm Eastern just like it does on cable.

Premium sport (ESPN 1-8, Fox Sports 1, NBC Sports, NFL Network, NFL RedZone, NBA TV, MLB Network, NHL Network, Tennis Channel, Golf Channel): all present.

Cable news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The Weather Channel, Bloomberg, CNBC): present.

Kids (Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr, PBS Kids): present.

Lifestyle (TLC, Discovery, History, A&E, Animal Planet, Food Network, HGTV, Hallmark): present.

What was missing: a couple of local public-access channels and one regional sports network we never watched anyway. Net loss of about three channels we'd actually used in the prior year.

Honest reckoning. Cable has three remaining advantages.

Internet outage resilience. When our Spectrum internet went out for six hours during a thunderstorm, IPTV obviously went out with it. The cable bundle at the same address would have kept the TV running on the coaxial line. For households with frequent multi-hour internet outages — common in rural areas or near major construction — cable wins this category.

Native local news affiliates. The OTA antenna fix is great, but it requires a clear line of sight to the broadcast tower and stable signal. Some apartment dwellers in concrete buildings don't get good OTA reception. Cable's coaxial delivery to local affiliates is more universally reliable.

Phone billing for the inevitable problems. Cable companies have phone support. IPTV providers like ourselves have email and WhatsApp. Some households genuinely prefer being able to call a phone number when something goes wrong. We can't fully replicate that experience even with a real human reading every email.

For the other 95% of households, IPTV plus an antenna is functionally identical to cable at 10% of the cost.

Living room TV: a 65" LG OLED running IBO Player Pro natively. Power on, the TV remote launches IBO Player Pro automatically, the live grid loads. To watch HBO's Sunday-night drama I press 4-2-OK (the channel number for HBO West). It feels almost identical to channel-surfing on cable, because functionally it is.

Bedroom TV: a 50" Samsung running Smart IPTV. Same channels, same workflow.

Kitchen iPad: GSE Smart IPTV runs the live grid for breakfast news. AirPlays to a small wall-mounted screen in the kitchen.

iPhone in the bag: GSE Smart IPTV runs in the back pocket — used twice a month for catching the second half of a Sunday football game on the train home.

For local news, the OTA antenna feeds straight into the LG OLED's built-in tuner. We press the Source button on the TV remote to switch from IPTV to OTA — a one-button workflow.

The whole household — three adults, two kids — adapted within about a week. The kids actually prefer the IPTV interface because the channel grid loads faster than the cable box used to.

A short list of small things I do miss about cable. (1) The DVR was excellent. We had three weeks of network TV stored on it. IPTV DVR (TiviMate Premium) works but the discovery interface is less polished. (2) Pause-and-rewind on live TV. IPTV apps support this for VOD content but not always for live TV. (3) The set-top box never updated itself in the middle of a Sunday game, which IPTV apps occasionally do.

But none of these are worth $200/month. We've had IPTV running for 18 months as I write this. The household has not asked to go back to cable.