This is an ongoing story.
In late 2014, my wife — the primary person on our Comcast account — got a call that we could get new cable boxes, more channels, faster internet, and phone service, all for less than what we were paying at the time. A technician came to our house and hooked up a primary X1 box in our living room, a smaller X1 box in our bedroom, and a new combination modem/router. The X1 interface is a vast improvement over what came before it. Our internet speed went from 25 mbps to 100 mbps. Things were good. We even added two digital adapters.
Fast forward two years, and I watched as our monthly Comcast bill got larger and larger. It got as high as $236.43 on May 1, 2017. Our two year contract had ended and the steep discount with it.
In that two year span, Google Fiber had announced plans to bring its service to Atlanta, and more specifically, Brookhaven. It’s not available at our home as I write this, but I operate under the assumption that it could become available at any moment.
So I don’t want to sign any contracts. But that’s the only way to get a discount with Comcast.
So I started looking at streaming tv providers. I went in thinking I might go with DirecTV Now — I already have AT&T cell service. But Sling had the features and channels we wanted. I tried it out, bought a couple Apple TVs (and an antenna and a Tablo) and turned in our cable boxes at the local Xfinity office.
Of course, to stream anything, you need internet. I didn’t cancel our Xfinity internet service, but I did drop the speed from 100 to 25 mbps. That alone cost $65/month.
Everything was going fine. Between Sling and the antenna, we got every channel we cared about except two: Ion, a channel that shows Law & Order reruns that broadcasts over the air out of Atlanta but not with a strong enough signal for us to pick up; and HBO. I was leaning toward HBO Now because getting HBO on Sling was the same price — $15 — but lower video quality.
But I noticed some weirdness when I logged into my Comcast account. It showed that we had made an automatic payment on May 21, 2017 and that our next automatic payment was scheduled for May 22, 2017 — which was in the past.
I talked to Xfinity support via browser-based chat. The rep told me not to worry about the bill – we would be charged the correct amount — but that hey, we could get faster internet — 75 instead of 25 mbps — for less money — $40 instead of $65. And oh by the way, we’d also get Stream TV — including HBO. Great!
So of course the first thing I tried to do was log into HBO Go. Couldn’t do it. The next day I talked to support chat again. No HBO Go.
A day or two later I did some research and found this Xfinity support article. Among other things, it says that Stream TV customers get HBO Go.
A few days later I called Xfinity support. I spoke to four different people. Each of the last two told me I couldn’t get HBO Go, gave me the link to the Stream FAQs article, and then was surprised when I pointed out that the FAQ article says I should get HBO Go. The last person said the article was in error and would be updated.
About two weeks after that I looked at the Stream FAQ article again. Some text and formatting had changed, but it still said that Stream TV customers get HBO Go. So I tried to log in … and it worked.
HBO was the final piece of the puzzle. By eliminating (mostly) my Xfinity TV service, I had saved around $135 per month.