I made the switch from Roku + Sling to Chromecast + YouTube TV. Why? Well, the Roku was behaving strangely. Sound and video would get out of sync and the unit would need to be re-started. Experience tells me that when electronics start to do things like that, they do not get better. I gave up Sling for YouTube TV because YouTube TV has a better channel selection and while it is a bit more expensive, it is not so much more expensive now that Sling has increased their prices. An economist would say I was on the margin and the $5/month increase pushed me across the margin.
The other reason I did this is that while doing perfunctory research I came to the conclusion that both Chromecast and YouTube TV are best-in-class right now.
The downside to all this is that Google (Google, er…Alphabet owns Chromecast and YouTube TV) now has an even larger claim on my life than before (he typed into Google Docs to post on Google's Blogger). Ah well, one thing I need to internalize is that these streaming services can come and go as fast as you want them to. Canceling one and adding another is maybe a 10 minute operation at most. If I get fearful or frustrated with Google I can snag an Amazon Fire TV device and switch to Hulu + live in a trice. Maybe persistent and randomly spaced rotations through the services are the best way to keep our tech overlords confused.
Against all odds, I have actually found interesting things to watch. I won't call them good, just interesting or entertaining.
- Tulsa King -- I'm a big fan of Stallone, but whatever he did to get himself in shape for Rocky Balboa he has clearly abandoned (7 years makes all the difference), also, he's 76 years old so... Mob legend gets out of prison and his "family" relocates him from Brooklyn to Tulsa OK where he will be free to do as he pleases. Standard mob guy stuff, but leveled up by really fine acting and writing that doesn't overplay the fish out of water angle. Highly entertaining.
- Derry Girls -- we follow a group of potty mouthed high school girls in Northern Ireland during the Time of Troubles. Myguess is that it was supposed to be a view on the clash of kids living a standard high school life in the midst of violence. The message here is that the violence really did not have a big impact on them because it's just a high school comedy with the occasional hint of military in the background. Irish people are inherently funny so it's good for a laugh. It gets more hacky and tone deaf as they run out of ideas, but it has a good run at the outset. Worth a look.
- Letterkenny -- Season 13 now is it? A short, 6 episode slate of the classic of stupid Canadian humor. I suspect it suffers from creator Jared Keeso's attention to his new series -- the excellent Shoresy - but it still has its moment or two, and it's still very Canadian. One scene is about 5 minutes of nothing but plays-on-words of hockey player names. Probably not worth it unless you're already a Letterkenny fan, and even then, it's mostly a hash of tropes from previous seasons.
