Roku/Cell Phone Hotspt --- Alternative to Dish??

Streaming video eats up lots of data, so replacing traditional TV services with it is not really very practical for most RV'ers with anything less than an unlimited data plan. What kind of hassles are you having with Dish?

Maybe Verizon unlimited data for a month or two cheaper than Dish? I had an earlier post on my Dish problems. They always hassle me when I want to turn it off after an rv trip. Got some good tips, maybe can work out Dish, but just wondering if there are alternatives.

There are cell options that are unlimited but they are expensive and I don't think you can turn most of them on or off.

With a good AT&T signal you can get a unlimited Cricket phone for $65 a month on auto pay. No contract but it cost $25 each time you turn it on. No hotspot but you can mirror cast it to a TV or stick.

T-Mobile has Binge on video, I pay $15 a month for a hotspot with 5 gigs of data and free binge on and music streaming. I stream lots of you tube, Netflix and Crackle for that $15 a month.

Now the thing is I don't plan on getting a signal good enough to stream where we camp, I hope for email and forums using a dish tailgater for the TV. It's truly unlimited, always HD, no buffering and always gets a signal. At the end of the season I simply ignore the bills and they shut it off.

you can buy a ROKU stick for under $60.00 IIRC so get one and see how it works out. since I have Dish and HBO at another location I can get some of that programming. but to stream is another issue.
bumpy

You can't ignore the bill from dish anymore. Last time I did that I got two monthly bills and the third month a nasty letter. I called, they stopped the billing and told me to call to have it shut it off. That's what I do now when we get home.

We full-time right now and don't have Dish or DirecTV.

We use the OTA antenna to pull in locals, and that works fine in most places.

We also have a couple of data options. We have an Asus RT-AC66U router which everything in the trailer connects to. It will take either a Wired Ethernet connection to the Internet, or a USB connection to an Android phone or other USB device.

We can hook up to cable-based or DSL Internet services with modems for those services (which give us a Wired Ethernet connection), but those require at least a physical hookup and often they try to get you to subscribe - which is usually not practical. We have the modems, and when in one place for a long time we may go for the cable connection. We prefer to to be as mobile as possible.

We have T-Mobile service and two Android phones. The phones have unlimited data when used on the phone, and 7GB/month each of tethered high-speed data. With the Binge-On function and using a Roku 3 to mirror the screen from the phone to the TV (called Smart View on the phone and Screen Mirroring on the Roku), we can watch anything that has an app for the phone (Netflix, HBO NOW, Fox News, etc.) to watch essentially unlimited on the TV.

If we want to watch something using the Roku straight up at higher resolution, we can either hook one of the phones to the router via USB and use the 7GB of tethering per phone, or we can hookup our T-Mobile Z-917 hotspot. It has 22GB/month of high speed data, then rolls back to a slower speed after that. That's really our primary internet connection. With 22GB of high-speed on the Z-917, 7GB of high-speed on each phone (14GB total), and then unlimited lower-speed data on the Z-917, we can do a lot of data transfer.

Leveraging the unlimited data on the phone and the screen mirroring give us the best bang for the buck.

We pay about $185 for the service for the two phones and the Z-917 ($100 on the phones and $85 on the data service for the Z-917).

A two-hour HD movie streamed will consume 4 - 6 GB of data. 4G LTE is fast enough most of the time, but anything less and your movie will stop to buffer constantly. We have a "Dish For My RV" plan and, if we want to watch or record local channels with the Dish setup, just call or use chat to change the service location when we move. 200 HD channels with a Pathway X2 antenna and a hard drive on the receiver for recording for $64/month... hard to do that with a cellular data plan.

Rob

One of the second-tier cellular service companies is currently offering "free unlimited streaming" of video and music. (Can't remember which company.) I'm not sure if the data associated with a Roku would be considered video streaming or not. Might be worth a look.

Unfortunately, most cell companies will begin to throttle the bandwidth at some point even if they offer "unlimited" data. The throttling may make streaming Roku video impractical.

The Binge-On function on T-Mobile works via an agreement they have with a number of providers. They provide reduced-quality video, but it doesn't count against your usage. You can turn the feature off to get full HD video, which then counts against your usage. If you have their unlimited plan, you can stream all you want.

The biggest problem with streming video is bandwidth. Now when the Sats broadcast that broadast goes to thousands, if not millions of customers so at say 100 a pop they can afford a lot of bandwidth.. One way.

But with your cell phone odds are you have limits. It might be 10 or 20 Gigs (or less0 or it might be "Unliimited" (note the quotes) that's 5 or 10 (or 20) gig of HIGH SPEED video quality, and then you get choked Throttled down to medium to LOW quality AUDIO stream. OR with other networks, you get CHA-CHINGED (Big time overage charges)

And if you leach off park Wi-Fi, folks who stream video not much loved.. Less you stream it at like 3am like I do (Well I download and watch later).