Spectrum TV Stream vs. Philo and 2nd Home

Channels DVR Server
#1

We are about to buy a beach home and will be needing to use Spectrum for internet for the first time in several years. At our main house we have AT&T Gigabit Fiber and use Philo plus antenna for service (also Pluto, and a few others) with Channels DVR of course. We've tested Channels in beach rentals and it works fine.

While looking at Spectrum options, I see that they have Spectrum TV Stream for $25 (+ 12.95 fee, and I'm sure probably tax too). It has similar channels to Philo. I'm wondering if I could just drop Philo and pickup Stream which would give me the local channels at the beach too, which I'd like to have. I could use it via TVE for my own use and let renters at the beach house use the Stream app and not have to have them going into my DVR and such. I'd probably use Apple TVs for our personal use and give them the Stream app on a Roku TV for guests maybe.

How is Spectrum TV Stream with Channels? Reliable and work well?

Has anyone setup something similar for a rental house... Vrbo or Airbnb?

#2

Spectrum works fine usually. Not sure if they still have essentials. It's basically Philo with a couple extra channels, no locals. They also have Choice which I believe it's up to 15 channels you pick plus locals for $29 and the $12.95 fees. They also have specials on premiums. I pay $7.50 for HBO max

1 Like
#3

We got this setup with Spectrum Choice and man are their prices expensive! On the plus side, you don't need to log into anything for the Spectrum app to work. Each time you open the app, it verifies that you have service because you are on the Spectrum home network. This should work great for renting and using the Roku guest mode. They will get simple TV channels, no DVR, and can then log into whatever they want.

#4

Expensive? What are comparing it to. Hopefully not Philo, which is all low cost channels.

#5

I'm talking about overall. I have a 1 year rate of $70 for 400mbps going to $95 after. I pay $59 regular price for AT&T gigabit up/down and it comes with HBO Max. For the TV, I'm paying $43 and its not clear if that is going up after a year from my bill. There are some more expensive channels in there than Philo has, so I guess its not crazy pricing for the TV. Just a lot more than I've been paying. I don't know if I can drop Philo with what I'm getting because Spectrum is missing a few that we watch. In which case I might have been better to just go back to regular Spectrum TV. The real question is if I really need this at the rental house. I would love to be able to setup a TV with Channels and configure it to just be TV without DVR.

#6

Interesting. I pay $55 for Spectrum 200 going to $80 in November. Might look into Att. Just don't trust them as a company.

#7

Competition has a lot to do with it. Where I have AT&T, we have AT&T and Spectrum competing. I have my issues of "trust" with both of these companies, but I've had excellent service from AT&T and it "just works". Spectrum has been the opposite as I've had plenty of experience with them too. AT&T, at least in this area, I guess decided to go hard on the internet service and lowered the gigabit normal price down to $59... not promotional. They did that right when we dropped the TV service so our internet charge went down when we dropped the TV service from the bundle, much to our surprise.

At our 2nd Home (at the beach), Spectrum is the only game in town. So I am not likely to see any good deals and will be paying over $100 for just 400mbps internet. I don't need that speed for download, but their upload speed is so slow that I've had problems working from home when on their 100mbps plan.

This is one area I would like to see this industry be regulated. When they have a monopoly, they jack their prices way up. With a monopoly, they are like a utility, and other utilities are regulate to avoid this monopoly pricing stuff.

#8

I'm trying to figure out what Att is doing in my area. 5 years ago they dug up my street and offered fiber. Now I can only get their 50, which is useless.