How I ditched £113-worth of Sky TV and went all-in on streaming

I've been a Sky TV customer for more years than I care to remember, paying the company more than I dare count. At one point we even paid it for broadband as well, but I don't think we've ever paid it as much as we do now — £113 per month. But not for long.

Last week I canceled our subscription which means it'll end in about three weeks. You can't just cancel, of course. You have to give 30 days notice so they can squeeze a bit more out of you. Fine, that's the contract we signed. It's also one of the reasons I want out. I've never really been comfortable with the way Sky does business. Strange packages that intertwine in ways that mean you can't just ditch one without paying more for another. I can't imagine things getting much better after the semi-recent sale to Comcast, either. So we're out.

To set the scene, here's what our £113 per month got us.

• The latest 2TB Sky Q box.
• Two Sky Q mini boxes with multiroom support.
• Access to everything and in 4K where supported. Sky Sports, Sky Movies, the lot. And Netflix because we paid for our subscription through Sky.

The problem was, we didn't actually watch much of it. I've felt for some time that we were paying for content we didn't use and that's become more obvious of late. We watch Sky Atlantic (HBO, essentially) for the big-name shows that come and go like 'Game of Thrones' and whatnot. I watch the football — proper football, of course — every now and then but not as much as I think I do. The same for Formula 1. And ... that's pretty much it as far as Sky is concerned. There's the odd movie thrown in from time to time as well.

Beyond that, we watch content from other sources. We watch Netflix, of course. We're bingeing 'Vikings' on Amazon Prime Video and then there's Picard from the same source. We watch Netflix because of course we do, and we watch Disney+ because we have kids and it has some decent grown-up stuff, too. We have Apple TV+ thanks to Apple One and even though 'Ted Lasso' is massively overrated, I do like 'For All Mankind' so there's that.

None of that needs a Sky subscription. Yes, we pay for Netflix through Sky right now — but we don't have to.

So here's my plan. Or it was my plan — it's now how we live and a week in, it's working just fine.

First, hardware:

Image: Amazon

• We already had an Apple TV 4K that we can use as the main source of content in the main family room.
• We had an old, old Fire TV Stick that I'd planned on using in the bedroom but it's so old it doens't support some of the apps we need. That's been replaced by a shiny new Fire TV Stick 4K Max. I await the surely upcoming Fire TV Stick 4K Ultra!
• The old Fire TV Stick has gone into the kids' bedroom but it'll end up being replaced with a newer model. It's so. damn. slow.

All of that replaces the main Sky Q box and the mini boxes that were in the bedroom and kids' room. So far, so good. And I'm very impressed with that new Fire TV stick. Buttery smooth, all of our apps, good stuff.

Next, services.

Image: Now TV

• We've signed up for Now TV to replace the main Sky content. Yes, I know Now TV is owned by Sky but I pay a lot less, so there. It streams everything over the internet and it has Sky Atlantic and access to Sky Sports News and Sky News, so everything's covered. We don't watch Sky News, but it's nice to have it just in case. We get access to live TV and on-demand stuff and I can add a Sky Sports sub if I want to in the future. We added the Sky Movies package but can remove it any time, anywhere. And it's all so civilsed compared to the why Shky proper does things.
• Netflix has an app on everything, so we're good there. Our billing will revert to the old Netflix account when Sky finally switches us off next month.
• Amazon Prime Video — same again, apps everywhere and we get it via our Prime subscription. Nothing changes.
• Apple TV+ is paid for via Apple One and there is an app for the Fire TV stick — but only on the newer models, hence the upgrade earlier.
• Disney+ — again, apps eerywhere. There's a pattern developing here, isn't there?
• Everything else. That means access to BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and all those things that we don't use often but do sporadically. Think Killing Eve and Masterchef that we watch for a few episodes each year. Apps exist for all of those services and we're re-watching Fasier via one of the Channel 4 apps. It's fine, and we were doing that even with Sky anyway.

So after all that, where are we? Well, we've canceled £113-worth of Sky and replaced it with £25 per month of Now TV. We now also need to pay for Netflix again, so we pay £15.99 per month for that because I want all the streams and 4K support. We were already paying for everything else, or it's free. So by my reckoning we're more than £70 per month better off and have access to all the same content, bar Sky Sports. Even if I added that back in, we'd be about £50 per month better off.

And we don't have to use the god-awful Sky Q software. Seems like a no-brainer to me.