A lot of video streaming services cost as much as a regular cable subscription, which defeats one of the main purposes of ditching cable in the first place. Lifestyle and entertainment-focused service Philo, on the other hand, is very affordable. It charges only $20 per month for access to 58 channels of live and on-demand content. Philo is not in the business of creating original content, like Netflix and Amazon Prime are, however. Nor does it aim to replace live cable entirely, as YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV do, as evident by its few news channels and complete lack of sports content. Still, Philo performs well across platforms and might make sense for you if you enjoy its lineup of channels.

Channel Lineup

Philo now only offers a single $20 plan. Previously it offered two tiers: one for $16 per month and one for $20, so the minimum price has increased for new subscribers. Existing subscribers will still be able to stay with the cheaper plan. For $20 per month, you get access to 58 channels including AMC, Animal Planet, BBC America, BET, Cooking Channel, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, IFC, Lifetime, Logo, and the Travel Channel. Other channels include Cheddar Big News, Hallmark, OWN, PeopleTV, SCI, and Tastemade. Note that Philo's entire lineup works regardless of your location in the US; none are subject to location restrictions. On the flip side, that means that you don't get any local channels as you would with competing services such as Sling TV, YouTube TV, and Hulu + Live TV.

Philo focuses on entertainment and lifestyle channels, so you won't find sports networks in its lineup—one way it keeps costs low. For example, CBS Sports, ESPN, FOX Sports, NBC, and league-specific channels, such as the NFL Network and NBA.TV are not available. If you are interested in a sports streaming service, fuboTV offers an excellent range of local, national, and international coverage. Additionally, news content is sparse on Philo, with the exception of BBC News and the Cheddar streams. ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, and PBS are all missing.

Many other cable streaming services, including fuboTV and Hulu + Live TV, offer the majority of the channels that are missing from Philo. To be fair, those video streaming services cost $54.99 and $44.99 per month, respectively—significantly more than Philo. YouTube TV and Sling TV's Orange + Blue plan both offer a more complete channel lineup as well, though, again, for at least double the cost.

It's hard to recommend Philo on its own, unless you are specifically interested in its content mix. Philo is cheap enough that some might consider combining it with on-demand services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, which offer on-demand movies and TV shows (including originals) across a wide range of genres.

Getting Started With Philo

Philo is unique in that you can sign up and log in to your account with either your phone number or email address. However, Philo oddly does not require a password for your account. Instead, it will either send you an SMS text or email with a six-digit code (depending on the method you used), which you enter to gain access. This is slightly more secure than a traditional sign-in method, since it requires you to have access to the secondary method, but it's not quite true two-factor authentication. Traditional implementations require you to sign in with a username and a password first, before sending an additional login token to a linked account.

Philo is available on a variety of platforms. For mobile, Philo now offers dedicated apps for both iOS and Android. Additionally, Philo has an app for Roku players, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV. Philo supports up to three concurrent streams, which is about par for the course. Note that there aren't any apps for the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 consoles. It doesn't offer a desktop or store app for either Macs or PCs either, but instead recommends using Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari.

Philo Web Streaming

Philo uses a dark design with blue, white and dark-gray accents. Across the top, the interface displays four top-level header items: Home, Live, Guide, and Saved. A search bar and the User section are accessible from the upper-right-hand side of the screen, as well as a gift icon (a link to Philo's referral program). The search tool is powerful; when you enter a query, it searches for the names of channels, movies, shows, and episodes as well as their descriptions. Searching for the word "cat," for example, brings up the Cartoon Network shows, CatDog, the movie The Dark Knight Rises, and an episode from Animal Planet's Animal Cribs, entitled Condo Cat Creations, among other results. The User section is broken into two sections, Settings and Account, but both are a bit bare. From the Settings page, you can edit your name, email, or phone address as well as register a Roku device, but the account section does not offer any options at the time of publishing.

The Home section highlights a couple of noteworthy shows in a top-level slider, while side-scrolling lists of different categories of shows populate the page below. For example, one row contains new content from any shows you've saved and another displays trending series. The Live section lists all of the shows currently airing; you can either save or watch them directly from this screen. One cool visual trick is that the play button shows the progress of the episode. So, for example, an episode that is a quarter of the way over will show a circle around the play button with a quarter of it highlighted.

You can browse all of the channel offerings for current, past, and future programming in the Guide section. The organization of this page could use some improvement, though. Philo lists the complete lineup of channels in alphabetical order across the top of the screen and time intervals down the left side. However, you need to scroll quite a bit to see all of the columns of channels. Furthermore, Philo does not clearly indicate the date on the schedule. This makes it difficult to determine what airs when, especially since there's no way to jump back to the current day, either.

This section would look cleaner if it switched the orientation of the channels and schedule (channels going to the side and times across the top), added a jump back to today button, and generally made the elements more compact as to fit more in one view. That said, I like that Philo includes the ability to favorite channels (via the heart icon), which moves those channels to the far left of the screen for easy access.

The last section, Saved, groups together all of the shows and programs you save in one area. When you click on a show, as in any other section, it displays all of the content available for viewing. Philo works differently than other services when it comes to DVR content. Instead of adding a single episode or program at a time, you add entire shows and Philo makes all of the available content ready for binge watching. Philo does not impose any storage limits on your DVR content, but it only keeps items for 30 days, so be sure to keep track of when you added each show. Note that Philo does not currently allow you to download saved shows for offline viewing. Many on-demand video streaming services support offline downloads, including Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and HBO Now, but I have not tested any live TV services that do.

The number of available episodes and seasons varies with each show; sometimes you can only watch the current season and other times Philo has the full run. You can save shows and movies from as far back as two weeks, but previously aired shows are only available for playback if they were broadcast in the past 72 hours. In any case, saving a TV show or movie makes it easier for you to find out if and when it will air again.

For comparison, PlayStation Vue lets you record an unlimited number of episodes of up to 500 shows and keeps those recordings for up to 28 days. YouTube TV imposes no DVR storage limit and keeps shows for nine months. fuboTV records only 30 hours' worth of content, but it keeps them indefinitely.

Features and Impressions

The playback interface is clean and simple. Keep in mind that when you launch a live stream, you either need to start at the very beginning or jump to the live broadcast; you can only select a point in between once you reach it through normal playback. Philo does implement a Start Over and Live button on either side of the screen. Note that because Philo is based on live television, you have to watch all the ads that come along with live broadcasts, though you can skip them in any of the programs you save. For example, I saved the 2014 action-drama movie, Fury, to my account. The movie's actual run time is only 2 hours and 14 minutes, but the playback bar showed a total run time of 3 hours and 3 minutes. That's a lot of ads to skip.

The representative from Philo I spoke with outlined the company's plans to make build Philo into a more socially oriented streaming experience. One of the coolest ideas they floated was the idea of synchronized streaming with friends. We will revisit Philo when it receives updates, especially since few if any other streaming services make an effort to innovate in this area. Currently, the only social feature is the Copy button under each show. You can send this link to anyone you want, but recipients need to sign up for their own account in order to watch anything.

Philo recently added information about a referral program in the Settings section. Basically, if you share your referral link with your friend, and they eventually sign up for the service, you get a $5 credit. Your friend also gets $5 off their first month's bill. Philo does not limit the number of people you can refer per month and extra credits roll over to the next month, so theoretically, you could use Philo for free forever if you can convince enough people to subscribe. Note that credits expire after six months, so make sure to apply any discounts sooner rather than later.

Smooth Performance

Philo does not list any network speed requirements for streaming purposes. According to a company representative, it supports all common browsers and should run fine on most internet connections. If you do plan to use Philo from a mobile device, make sure to connect to a Wi-Fi network, since data streaming costs could add up quickly.

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I last tested Philo's performance over PCMag's Wi-Fi connection (which gets 50Mbps download speeds). For reference, I recorded my internet speeds with Ookla's internet speed test tool (Ziff Davis, PCMag's owner, also owns Ookla). When I selected a live broadcast of Planet Earth, the stream launched quickly and continued without any stutters. Switching channels did not trip up the service, either. I went from Planet Earth to a pseudo-science-heavy train wreck of a show called How the World Ends to an episode of The X-Files, all on different channels, all with no lag. Similarly, after I saved The Walking Dead series to my account (nothing can actually save this show, though) and launched one of the available episodes, playback started up without delay.

Philo and VPN

If you're concerned with privacy and security, you should use a virtual private network (VPN) on all your devices and at all times. Unfortunately, some video streaming services don't work if you are connected to a VPN, sometimes due to content licensing deals or geographic restrictions. Philo, for example, is only available to users in the US. You could try to find a VPN that works with all your favorite services, but keep in mind that access may be inconsistent. Some video streaming services are strict about blocking VPN traffic and may implement new policies that break workaround methods.

Notably, Philo says its service should work with a VPN. I tested Philo with the free version of Editors' Choice TunnelBear and did not have any issues launching live streams or watching saved content. Again, your experience may vary.

Accessibility and Parental Control on Philo

Philo offers a Closed Captioning (CC) toggle on its playback screen. On the web, you can't change the size, color, or positioning of the text. Other platforms do include some customization options. YouTube TV and PlayStation Vue offer more consistent options across platforms. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix go one step further with their respective Audio Descriptions feature, an audible narration option that relays scene changes and other on-screen actions.

Despite offering the ability to create profiles for each user, Philo does not have any parental control options. Sling TV is among the few live streaming services to offer parental control tools for restricting content by rating. Many on-demand streaming services, including HBO Now and Starz, implement such features.

The Philo Mobile Experience

While Philo offered an iOS app the last time I reviewed the service, it was missing an Android app. Now, the service is available on both platforms. I didn't have any trouble downloading or signing into either app. I tested Philo on both an iPhone 8 running iOS 11 and a Google Pixel 3 running Android 9.

Philo's Android and iOS apps are nearly identical and maintain the web interface's attractive look, sporting the same dark background with blue and white elements. The apps perform well and I did not experience any lag or stutters when navigating its sections or when streaming content.

A navigation bar at the bottom houses five icons: Home, Guide (Live on iOS), Saved, Search, as well as one for your account profile. All of these categories are functionally identical to their web counterparts, but the account section is pretty bare and you need to visit Philo's website to update your subscription settings. One of Philo's most useful features is the visual scrubbing interface, which also carries over to the web interface. In addition to dragging the progress bar at the bottom, you can drag across the screen during playback to bring up thumbnails of playback points. This interface even shows which thumbnails are from advertisements, so that you can avoid them.

Entertainment on the Cheap

Many live-streaming services claim to offer the best selection of shows or networks, but few cost as little as Philo. For $20 per month, you get access to 58 entertainment and lifestyle channels, along with on-demand content from those providers. General audiences looking for a replacement to cable should note its lack of news and sports channels. Still, its price may be low enough to justify subscribing to it in addition to an on-demand option, such as our Editors' Choice streaming service, Netflix. If you truly miss the variety of content offered by a traditional cable subscription, Editors' Choice winners YouTube TV or Hulu + Live TV are better-rounded options.

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