Tampa, Florida -- With changes coming to customers of both Bright House and FiOS, is it time for you to save hundreds of dollars by ditching cable and using an antenna and a gadget to stream an online video service to your TV?
Let's start with a consumer alert about your TV. On our 10 News Facebook page, you're telling us you're worried your customer service could suffer now that Bright House Networks announced it's being sold to cable company Charter Communications.
Donald wrote: The main question is simple. Will service deteriorate and rates climb even higher? The experts we talked to said rates should stay about the same.
But we found Charter's customer satisfaction numbers are near the bottom in surveys. And those surveys show that, in general, the bigger a cable company is -- the lousier its customer service.
Just weeks ago, we learned Verizon FiOS is also being sold; right now, FiOS has some of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the cable business. There's no way to know whether the new owner, Frontier Communications, can keep that up.
In your Facebook comments, many of you say you're looking at just cutting the cord on cable and going to a combo of an HD antenna and an online TV streaming gadget like a Roku, Google Chromecast, or Amazon Fire TV Stick.
What can I watch?
Netflix and Hulu Plus have movies and TV shows that have already aired. Sling TV and the upcoming Apple streaming service have live TV from around one or two dozen channels.
Why switch to online streaming?
- Your bill should be lower. But remember, if you go and sign up for a whole lot of streaming services, you may end up paying more.
- Many of you can use an HD antenna to pick up your local channels, like 10 News.
- More options for streaming services are coming out all the time.
Why stick with cable?
- You're guaranteed to get all of your local channels, like 10 News. Antennas may not work in every area, so you may want to hang onto a basic cable package.
- Hundreds more channels are available on cable. It's especially big for sports, lifestyle networks, and kids' shows.
- If you dump Bright House, you won't get Bay News 9 anymore. But it's not clear right now whether Bay News 9 will continue to exist when Charter takes over.
Even though customers tend to report more problems with larger companies, one of the country's top experts told me these companies have to keep getting bigger to survive.
Al Tompkins, who teaches about media at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, said the way for these companies to keep customers from leaving is to scale up -- with more channels, more add-ons, and more money flowing in.
"Growing is the only real way that you can continue to provide the really fast services that we're going to demand in the future," Tompkins told me.
"The files that you and I use just get bigger and bigger. And the demands that we put on the system just are just going to get greater and greater."
