The future of streaming is the cable bundle? --Vox Article

Yeah, who needs all that? Certainly I don't want to deal with all the screwing around to ACCESS this content. And my wife, forget it! Really, if it doesn't have a dedicated button on my TV remote, like Netflix and Amazon, that almost kills my interest.
Now as a consumer, what I want is to stop paying $100 to DIRECTV. Especially as I'm mostly watching recorded old episodes of Perry Mason and The X-Files. Which I could probably buy on disc pretty cheap. But I want a streaming service with a DVR, if that makes sense. We rarely watch anything real-time, besides my wife watching the Cooking Channel and local news.

 

My brother has some setup like that, but the browsing is S L O O O O O W W W W W. Is that inherent to VPNs? Or depends which? Or on your connection?

 

What I meant was that if you subscribe to the sports league’s streaming platform that is supposed to have every single game available to watch, many games will blacked out because the cable network has the rights to those games, preventing you from being able to watch them on the streaming platform, and you will need to still to have cable to watch all the games. Basically, any game that is on cable will be blacked out on the streaming platform.

 

I have been using a VPN for years and cannot detect any speed deficit (and that's with relatively high encryption settings). In fact, I can't tell the difference with large file transfers either.

Is the browsing much faster with the VPN disconnected and all else being equal?

The only thing I can think of (other than if you're using a PC from 1999) is if you're connected to a server that's a long way away and has high latencies. I guess it's also possible that less well known VPNs might offer an inferior service.

 

My brothers' browsing IS way way faster without the VPN. It feels like when I tried using the TOR browser-rendering was just way too slow so I stopped using that. And if Russian hackers find out that I'm telling the Steve Hoffman Forum about this, well, I'm not too concerned
What VPN do you use? I'll recommend he try different services.

 

Speed definitely varies from VPN to VPN. I use TorGuard, which is Wirecutter's budget recommendation for VPNs, and in practice I rarely notice any speed difference between having the VPN enabled and disabled. However, if I run a speed test, there is definitely a measurable speed drop with the VPN enabled, sometimes as much as 50%. If your ISP service is decently fast to begin with, this is probably not a big deal, and you will likely not even be aware of it in regular usage.

Speed also can vary depending on which of your VPN provider's servers you connect to, because of the way servers in different geographical locations use different routes to connect to the internet. Sometimes my speed slows to a crawl with the VPN enabled, and when that happens it's typically a temporary issue affecting the server I'm connected to. Disconnecting and switching to a different server usually gets things back to normal.

 

I'd really not prefer to have Google monitoring my TV, computer's, phones...

 

...they already are...as are Russian and Chinese hackers, and El Chapo Guzman from his prison cell...

 

TOR is not a VPN service. TOR is an anonymizing tool that routes your internet traffic over a global relay network, which means your traffic takes dozens of random hops between your computer and the destination (the URL you wish to browse).

Because of all these hops (to hide your identity), the network/browsing will be slow(er). But, again, TOR is not a VPN service.

A proper VPN service is point-to-point , just like if you were connecting to your regular ISP. The way VPNs protect your online presence is not through network routing obfuscation, but through strong encryption of your internet traffic. And since it's point-to-point, there should be no noticeable delay in browsing (subject to what I said in post #54).

 

I don't watch commercial TV. My TV is not connected to the Internet. My smartphone does not have a data plan.

I use a generic inexpensive laptop, the one that I am using now, to access the Internet. I keep no files or personally identifying information on it.

They can have fun.

 

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