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CBS All Access Goes Commercial Free (for a Price)

Posted by Matt Birchler
β€” 1 min read

CBS announced that they are adding a new tier to their All Access service today. For $9.99 per month, you can stream all your CBS shows totally commercial free.

My wife an I are cord cutters for over a year now and we're still going strong. We use Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Now for a lot of our television needs, but there is one major network who doesn't play ball with those services: CBS. We begrudgingly subscribed to CBS All Access last fall for the few CBS shows we watch. At $5.99/month it didn't break the bank, which was critical because this was subscribing to one channel's content.

And while the service was mostly reliable and served its purpose, the ads were insufferable. Watching a few ads here and there is fine, but All Access had more commercial breaks than I've ever seen in 42 minute shows, and the ad breaks consisted of at least 120 seconds of ads. The result of this was that shows sometimes took longer to watch on CBS All Access than they would have to see them for free over the air.

It's the end of August as I write this and we're closing in on the new TV season staring up. I will probably be signing up for All Access again, but it's frustrating that my options are to pay $6 for a service that drives me crazy or $10 for a service I'll like better, but seems a steep price to pay for basically 1 or 2 shows.

NOTE: While we have an antenna, CBS simply does not come in for us, so just catching our shows live OTA is not an option.