Our thoughts on Season of HtS, Why Birdman disappoined us all differently and yet we all loved it, ’Sall Good Man, How smart is Frank, really? and the perfect ending to The Shield Season 4.
02:20 – Hacking The System
05:40 – Birdman
20:55 – Better Call Saul
27:50 – House of Cards
38:13 – The Shield
How the housing market is bad news for cable and Hungary shows why cable could boost YouTube viewership.
CordKillers: Ep. 60 – Crying Over Buffering
Recorded: March 2, 2015
Guest: Alex Hanna
Intro Video
Primary Target
Signal Intelligence
Gear Up
Front Lines
Under Surveillance
Dispatches from the Front
Dear Brian & Tom
Just thought I’d share how much I pay here in the UK & talk a bit more about the TV license;
TV License is £145 annually ($223) – but it’s quite nice that all of the BBC channels (TV and Radio) are advert-free. The iPlayer is superb. It’s almost worth it for the kids TV channels alone.. the quality of those programs is really high, and you know the kids are actually learning something most of the time (and aren’t getting bombarded with ads).
BT for fibre broadband; £23 a month (38 Mbps down, 10 up, unlimited data), with an additional £17 a month line rental that includes the phone line.
Freeview HD OTA.. no monthly fee. I use a Humax Freeview HD DVR box I bought years ago.
Total = £52 a month ($80) for TV and unlimited fibre broadband.
Keep up the good work on the show,
Mat
Leeds, UK.
I know Brian uses At&t for his internet connection, but I wonder if he was aware of all the “free” stuff bundled in to the Standard (we’ll spy on you) package that make the difference between the plans $66 if you have both TV and Internet or $44 if you only have Internet.
John
Hey Tom and Brian!
Listening to Spoilerin’ Time 59 while Brain’s talking about how hard it is to see The Walking Dead.
I have a Quick Tip: I don’t have a cable package JUST Time Warner Cable for Internet. I can still use my TWC account to log into AMC.com to watch the live stream of their channel, even though I don’t pay for the channel. It appears their authorization system doesn’t differentiate between cable packages. So I can watch Better Call Saul and Walking Dead live with no trouble at all.
Mike
Brian,
I think that Better Call Saul is set later than what you thought (late 80’s -early 90’s). In the first episode when he is ordering flowers for his potential clients (right before he runs into the kid on the skateboard), he is reading off his credit card and he says that the expiration is 11/04. So, I would estimate that the show is set sometime between 2000-2004.
Your boss,
Alex
Hi, Tom and Brian. In the last few episodes you’ve been asking people how much they pay for internet, and I thought I’d chime in. I’ve been a cord-cutter for 2 years UNTIL about two weeks ago!
Previously: 50mbps for $67 including taxes and fees.
Now: $70 for 105Mbps PLUS cable
I originally contacted Comcast (via support chat) to see how I can get my bill lowered. I have NO other broadband options for my apartment. You know the game. They told me they couldn’t give me a better price unless I was a new customer, so I went to the fabled customer retention. THEY said if I bundle, they could save me money. Great! “What are your bundles?” “Oh, we don’t have one for 50mbps anymore. But for $3 extra we can give you 105Mbps but only if you bundle cable.” What?! While I’m ideologically opposed to that crappy practice, why would I not double my internet speed for $3? I asked them to not bother sending me the cable box and they waived the setup and shipping fees, and tried to send me the box anyway. I told them, “Seriously, I don’t want it. Count me as a metric if you want but I don’t care about cable at all.” They offered to waive the monthly box rental fee if I just took box anyway. Fine. I guess it shows how desperate they are to retain/add cable subscribers in certain markets. Of course, I kept the transcript of the whole thing so there’s no funny business. ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, now it’s much easier to watch National Geographic’s Hacking the System. You should watch it sometime…
Your very pleased boss <>,
Cory
Hey guys, love the show. I was pondering on the nature of youtube and convenience. As in introduction: I am a 25 year old, second generation cord-neverer. My parents cut the cord before I was born and I grew up on broadcast and P2P file sharing. I use (in descending order) Netflix, Pluto.TV, Amazon Prime, and Hulu(free).
The fact is, I never really mastered YouTube when I was younger. As such, I do not use at as a media consumption platform. I use it pretty much only for tutorials or archived videos. Now that I am so stuck in the routine of hands off viewing YouTube, frankly, seems as antiquated to me as DVR, brodcast, DVD, or torrents.
So, Brian, Tom, riddle me this, am I crazy in thinking we are a few years away from a world where pirated media, ripped and uploaded to youtube, would be so inconvenient to seek out and watch that you would be as likely to choose to watch it as you would daytime broadcast TV? That content available on YouTube might as well be sitting in a Blockbuster? I promise you this, if SnapChat made a TV and I missed it, I sure as heck wouldn’t go try to find it on YouTube.
Thanks guys,
Anthony in San Antonio
Hey Tom and Brian just wanted to pass along another assignment as one of your bosses and let you know you should give the BBC show Broadchurch a chance. While I say you should do it before the Fox version comes out, they BOTH have David Tennent as lead so makes it interesting enough to watch both. My opinion is it has been a great murder mystery show with perfect character development.
Keep up the great work,
Nick from Austin and cord free for almost 15 years.
Links
patreon.com/cordkillers
Dog House Systems Cordkiller box
The Walking Dead misses a step, Saul calls the past, The Shield spells doom for the Captain and Hacking the System faces off against a rattlesnake.
Walking Dead – 01:26
Better Call Saul – 14:43
The Shield – 20:42
Hacking the System – 23:40
Amazon green lights all our favorite pilots, why we don’t need a universal remote, and how cable can actually be for Cordkillers.
CordKillers: Ep. 59 – Critically Acclaimed
Recorded: February, 23 2015
Guest: None
Intro Video
Primary Target
Signal Intelligence
Parental Controls:
– A Timer
– Sound settings (turn off bg music and sfx)
– Turn off search
-Feedback section for parental opinions
Gear Up
Front Lines
Under Surveillance
Dispatches from the Front
Hey Brian and Tom,
Thanks for splitting up the show into two feeds. I picked the Cordkillers only Audio Feed. as you guys spoil shows I haven’t seen yet.
anyway,
Thanks for doing that.
Tim, Minneapolis, MN Patreon member.
As a Cordkillers fan from day zero (Frame Rate days), I always find it interesting that Brian sometimes feels guilty for having cable, even for the duration of his Hacking the System show. I have no intention of getting rid of my cable at this time or in the near future. In fact, I’ve just upgraded my FiOS bundle with a 2 year contract. I’ve gotten so used to the combination of having so many channels at my fingertips to adapt to my variable viewing tastes throughout the year and the time-shifting convenience of the DVR service. Then there’s not having to worry about what service has the show I want. There’s no shame in paying for what you want, albeit on only some of the devices you want (no Amazon Fire TV FiOS app just yet).
Here are the details of my service:
I have FiOS TV Quantum service, which has a new cable box with 1TB of storage and records 6 shows at once (no more DVR conflicts on those heavy primetime evenings). The service includes the highest tier of TV packages (Ultimate HD). It’s particularly useful because it includes the sports channels like (beIN, Universal Sports, etc.). They’ve also given me a 3 year price guarantee (no price hikes) and 2 years of all premium channels free.
The bundle includes the FiOS 75/75 Internet service, which almost always gives me the total bandwidth whenever I need it. I can even downgrade that back to the 50/50, if needed, to save another $5/mo without breaking the bundle.
My bill comes out to about $158 after taxes and government fees, which is about as much as I was paying before the upgrade, and that price is guaranteed (minus the free programming expiring) for 3 years, even after my contract expires.
Hope that wasn’t too long-winded for you, but I thought I’d share my service info in response to the email you guys read on episode 58.
One of your many bosses,
Curtis from MD
Man guys,
It sounds to me like you guys spend a ton of dough on TV/Entertainment. This is my set up, I’m using a knockoff leaf antenna I got on Amazon for $39. That gets me all the broadcast networks. I have TWC internet access 50mps down that I get for $29.99 plus tax (I recently got them to get me another 12 months promotional rate by calling them up and telling them I wanted to cancel my service. I told them Earthlink was gonna get me 30mps for $29.99 then the TWC rep was all like well we can get you 50mps for $29.99.) Anyways then I pay $7.99 a month for Hulu, I basically use Hulu as my catch up service. Instead of paying the cable company $10 to record a bunch of stuff, I can watch whatever I want and don’t have to worry about setting up a recording. I watch The Walking Dead for $1.99 an episode on Vudu though that expense is going to be getting wrapped into one of my new favorite services. Finally I now pay $20 a month for Sling TV and every few months I sub to Netflix when House of Cards comes back and now Marco Polo. So anyways all in all I spend about $60 a month to watch exactly want I wanna watch when I wanna watch it. I feel like I’m doing pretty good after hearing you guys are spending hundreds of bucks a month.
One of your 2000 bosses,
Ken
First: thank you for making a Cordkillers only feed.
Secondly: we don’t pay anything for TV, apart from the mandatory £12.12 per month ($18.61 aprox.) for the TV License as I watch live TV *
For Internet/Phone calls, our bills come to about £30 ($46.06 aprox.) but I did a little chicken challenge a couple of times with Virgin Media, and have managed to get a £10 discount and a secondary £5 discount, so we are actually only paying about £15 per month ($23.03 aprox.) at the moment for UP TO 50Mpbs down** and a standard landline with free weekend calls.
So in total, we pay about £27.12 / $41.65 per month for decent quality internet and the chance to watch live TV.
Anonymous
Thought I would share what I pay for Internet and TV.
I live in Northwest Indiana 20 miles away from Chicago. I pay 29.99 a month for 25mbps down 5mbps up from Comcast. Have an OTA antenna with a channel master + dvr. I also have Prime and Netflix. If there is a cable show that I want, I get a season pass on Amazon.
Basically less than $50 a month for TV and Internet.
Jeff
Links
Is Better Call Saul a sequel after all? The Shield goes international, Marco Polo ends, Walking Dead elevates.
01:10 – Better Call Saul (Ep. 2)
09:46 – The Shield (411)
15:45 – Marco Polo (Ep. 10)
21:07 – The Walking Dead (Eps. 7-10)
Spider Man is coming from Sony and Marvel knows who he is. Also CBS’s online efforts are exceeding expectations and Sling TV gives away hardware.
Best Shield episode yet? Is Saul breaking bad? Marco Polo gets in trouble and being nice at restaurants is a great idea.
The Shield (410) – 2:08
Better Call Saul – 8:21
Marco Polo (Ep. 9) – 20:25
Hacking the System – 25:25
Will AMC help Sling TV win, Why Cable is suffering from its own retention policy, Would you want a Star Wars channel?
What Milo was thinking in Mad Dogs, Hacking the System travels well, Marco Polo finally has us and The Shield chess game ramps up.
Mad Dogs – 1:34
Hacking the System – 22:45
Marco Polo (Ep. 8) – 27:19
The Shield (409) – 29:55
Playstation Vue is from Mars and Sling TV is from Venus. Plus how much is 1 billion Chromecast Sessions really?
CordKillers: Ep. 56 – The Vue Looks Good from Here
Recorded: February 2. 2015
Guest: Roberto Villegas
Intro Video
Breaking News
Primary Target
Signal Intelligence
Gear Up
Front Lines
Under Surveillance
2014 Winter Movie Draft
draft.diamondclub.tv
Dispatches from the Front
Hi Tom & Brian,
From this fans perspective I would say split the feed.
Thanks keep up the good work
Sean
I’m firmly in the doesn’t matter to me camp so long as you let us know about it. I use BeyondPod for my podcatcher and have a smart playlist that I can control what order things play in so I always get them in aired order.
Amber
I vote to split the spoilerin’ time episodes to their own podcast. In addition to the reasons Brian mentioned on the show, the main podcast is much more time sensitive, so need to keep those in my stream. I can always go back and listen to spoilerin’ time when I finally watch the shows you are spoiling.
Love the show, cutting the cord as soon as my Sling TV invite arrives!
Matt, Atlanta, GA (aka future site of Google Fiber! )
P.s. finally became your boss today, just signed up on Patreon
Hey guys as always thanks for the great weekly entertainment, was just listening to this weeks episode and Brian was doing his thing ranting about lack of bandwidth when in the sky and wondering why he can’t do any form of streaming video.
I am kind of an authority on this as I worked for Northwest Airlines subsequently Delta Airlines for 8 years and one of my job functions was to work with the aircraft engineers to install/maintain the In Flight Entertainment systems. I now work for a Major retailer and help consult on GoGo installs for the fleet of aircraft they operate.
The TV service is in fact satellite tv provided by Dish Network. That is how you are getting live tv.
The inflight wifi on the other change is provided by Aircell (Parent company to GoGo). Aircell was originally developed to provide in flight phone calls, remember the phones on the back of the head rests that you swiped a credit card to make in flight phone calls? Yea that is Aircell. When that didn’t take off (pun intended) they re-branded and changed their name and services to GoGo inflight wifi.
GoGo is an Air to Ground connection. GoGo has their own CDMA 3G towers that covers coast to coast of the lower 48 and parts of southern Canada. These towers and antennas are pointed to the sky which provides the wireless data connectivity to the aircrafts.
Each tower has very limited bandwidth, most of them are fed by a single T1, some maybe 3 T1’s. Then on top of that the actual bandwidth provided to each aircraft is also limited, at most 3mbps to a single aircraft.
3mbps that is then shared between all the users on the plane, so say you have 50 users all on a plane trying to use the inflight wifi, and sharing that single 3mpbs pipe so then you’ll start to understand why they proxy the connection and prevent steaming services.
Right now GoGo is in the process of upgrading their infrastructure to support CDMA EVDO Rev B and provide dual modems as a retrofit to aircraft, this could then provide up to 9mbps to an aircraft however you are still limited by the limited/shared backbone infrastructure that GoGo has to each tower.
So what I’m trying to say to Brian is that yes you’d think we’d be able to have 100mbps or even a gigabit connection while in the sky (wishful thinking) GoGo isn’t artificially keeping it slow and preventing users from doing youtube and Netflix while using the inflight wifi. How would you feel if you paid to use the service and one user was hogging all the available bandwidth because he was streaming a movie and you couldn’t even get a web page to load?
Anyways thought I could share some inside details about how inflight wifi works.
Josh S
Hey team!
Freakin’ love this show, and I’m proud to be a Patron! Thanks for all your hard work.
Thought I’d throw out a hiccup I’ve discovered with my FireTV Stick. When I plug in into my television, I lose all of my OTA signal. When I unplug the stick from the TV, the signal comes back. My antenna is mounted outside the house and connected using the home’s existing cable.
Could be wi-fi interference. Could be the age of my TV (2008). Just curious if anyone else had this issue, or just posting as a possible solution for other cordkillers.
My AppleTV (2nd gen) hasn’t given me any issues.
Mitch
Hello Tom & Brian.
On the previous episode you guys talking a bit about Plex. Listen, Plex is fantastic, not just great but excellent. Tom brought a good point and it was that his DRM purchased content wouldn’t play.
The reason Plex is so popular is in part yes because you can have all your ripped own content (home videos, DVD/BR ripped movies/tvshows, etc,). The other reason Plex is so popular is because it provides an easy and convenient way to stream and access all your *pirated* content.
I know you guys do not support piracy, but let’s not close our eyes to it. Obviously the reason Plex is so widely loved is because a large portion of its users pirate content and use Plex as their media server. I’m not saying that’s all they do, they probably have home movies, ripped content, etc., but let’s also not pretend that the reason Plex has become so popular is any other than the massive love of its piracy-loving users.
Keep up the great show.
Franklin.
Links