CableTV.com’s Best of the Best Awards 2025: TV Services

As TV experts covering traditional TV since 2007, we’ve kept a close eye on shifts in the television landscape over the last decade-plus. This year, we were surprised by some of the findings in our 2025 TV Customer Satisfaction Survey. Verizon Fios’ fiber TV service has come out on top of our customer surveys for the past few years, but seeing its satisfaction rating beat live TV streaming heavyweights like Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, and Fubo, really brought its quality into clearer focus.

Over half of the providers we researched have had price increases over the past 12 months. In this current economic climate, these increases will hit customers even harder than in previous years. Verizon Fios TV’s prices have stayed consistent over the past year, a likely reason why they also placed first in price satisfaction. We imagine this trend of frequent price increases will continue to reverberate in customer opinions moving forward.

While researching TV providers, we dive deep into over a dozen different services, comparing pricing, channels, features, and more. This process often leads us to one service that continually stands out from the rest—one provider that just seems to be doing everything right. That’s what we consider to be the “Best of the Best” for TV service—the most comprehensive, premium TV experience on the market. And in our eyes, that provider is Verizon Fios TV.

The Best of the Best isn’t necessarily the cheapest service out there—although Verizon Fios TV did win our bang-for-your-buck question in our TV Customer Satisfaction Survey—but it is the most top-notch TV provider out there. Verizon Fios has the highest channel count of all TV providers (60–425+) with channel quality to boot (we also awarded them Best of the Best for Channels), reasonable prices, no contracts, and no pesky hidden fees. Verizon’s transparency, with no scheduled price hikes, contracts, or hidden costs, boosted them well above all other traditional TV providers, most of who are still holding onto one (or all) of those greedy tactics.

Customers also raved about Verizon Fios TV, with Ryan R. from Kansas succinctly summarizing the high points that customers repeatedly praised across our survey comments: “I gave [Verizon Fios TV] a good review because it exceeded my expectations. The quality was exceptional, it delivered on its promises, and it provided excellent value for the price. Additionally, the customer service was excellent and the overall experience was positive. I would highly recommend this product to others based on my positive experience.”

Unlike Best of the Best, where cost isn’t a main factor in determining our winner, pricing is the primary selling point for our Best Bang for Your Buck award.

When determining the Best Bang for Your Buck winner, we didn’t automatically choose the cheapest service out there—instead, we weighed services’ values against what they offer its subscribers. I looked at all providers’ channel offerings across traditional TV and live TV streaming, along with included DVR storage, price locks, and contracts. Certain aspects automatically denied a provider eligibility for this award, namely sneaky price hikes and required contracts.

As you can see, we chose a live TV streaming service as the winner—Philo. We just couldn’t deny Philo’s incredible value alongside its super low price tag of less than $30 a month, plus the perks of live TV streaming like no contracts and no scheduled price increases.

We also took customer satisfaction heavily into account for this category, given that affordability is increasingly the most important value proposition for services nowadays.

Even with its $3 price increase back in June 2024, Philo subscribers were still pretty darn pleased with its prices, with a second-place finish (88%) in our Live TV Streaming Customer Satisfaction Survey’s bang for your buck question—just one point behind Frndly TV’s top finish, whose base plan costs $20 less than Philo’s (but with less than stellar channel offerings and features).

Simply put, we think Philo wins across all our areas of interest, with a solid channel count of for the uber-affordable price of $28.00/mo.—plus no contracts, unlimited DVR, and AMC+ bundled in at no extra cost.

Thanks to the expert insights of CableTV.com’s Sports Editor, Taylor Kujawa, we’ve determined that DIRECTV STREAM is the best provider out there for the most comprehensive and elite sports coverage.

To decide this award’s winner, we analyzed aspects of TV providers such as channel selections, add-on options, and regional sports network (RSN) availability from the perspective of a sports lover. All things considered, DIRECTV STREAM ticked every box for the highest quality sports TV service out there, with 30+ sports channels, RSN access, and sports add-on options galore.

Similar to our Best of the Best Award, DIRECTV STREAM isn’t necessarily the cheapest service out there, but it’s the most comprehensive for sports fans. For more details on other great providers for sports, check out Taylor’s detailed Best Streaming Services for Sports page.

Ah, yes, cable TV—the most traditional of the traditional TV services. For our Best of the Best for Cable award, we looked not only at providers’ cable TV service, but also their cable internet offerings. Together, our internet aficionado Eric Chiu and I collaborated and concluded that across both services, Xfinity is the reigning cable champ.

Eric and I took into account the common factors of pricing, channel counts, and internet speeds, but also considered other features like price increases and customer insights.

A curious outcome of our TV Customer Satisfaction Survey was that three of the most prominent cable providers—Xfinity, Spectrum, and Cox—all tied for second place (69%) in overall customer satisfaction among individual providers. But on that same question on our Internet Customer Satisfaction Survey, Xfinity was the only one of those three providers to crack the top five with 80% satisfaction, scoring a substantial nine points higher than Spectrum (71%) and Cox (68%).

Xfinity also had the lowest price increase for all traditional TV providers over the past four years, with its Ultimate TV plan only going up $8.51 since 2021 in its West region—in comparison, Spectrum’s gone up by $45.00. Stats aside, we appreciate Xfinity’s low starting prices for both TV and internet (although we really wish its cable services had a price guarantee, a feature that Spectrum and Cox also lack), along with its great TV and internet bundle discounts.

Xfinity’s bundles were a big draw for many customers, including Christopher K. from Connecticut, who appreciated the many bundle options offered: “I gave Xfinity the overall [completely satisfied] rating as a cable service because of the wide variety of selections and options to choose from. I like the fact that I can add to my plan and bundle many various options as I feel necessary.”

DISH, like Verizon Fios TV, picked up two awards from us this year—Best of the Best for Kids and Best of the Best for Satellite. Along with inching out DIRECTV for the top satellite TV provider, thanks in part to reasonable prices and a phenomenal DVR, we think DISH is the best TV service for kids and their families currently on the market.

DISH has won our Best of the Best for Kids Award every year for the past six years, and for good reason. The satellite provider has the channels families want from Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and local PBS affiliates. DISH’s parental controls (courtesy of a partnership with Common Sense Media) are also top-notch. Using the DISH Anywhere App‘s media filters, you can ward off inappropriate content and steer your children’s viewing habits towards what you deem valuable and age-appropriate.

Plus, the DISH Anywhere App has age filters and the option to create separate accounts for each child, alleviating any worries about unsuitable content popping up for the little ones. We appreciate this attention to detail that offers flexibility for families with multiple children of differing ages, whose content preferences likely vary.

I am CableTV.com’s resident update writer, and in my role, I update our many deals pages multiple times each month. When determining the best TV provider for promotions, I looked less at the quantity of promos that providers offered and instead assessed the quality of these deals. Do customers save money one time or every month? Do these deals apply to new customers only, or can current subscribers take advantage of them, too? Are these deals limited-time, or do providers run their promotions indefinitely?

DIRECTV checks basically all my boxes in assessing the quality of deals. Many of its promos have been running for multiple years, including its premium channels deal, giving customers access to Max™, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME^®, STARZ^®, Cinemax^®, and MGM+™ for three months. Current customers don’t get left out in the cold, either, with discounts on these same streaming services that last for up to three months.

The deal that pushed DIRECTV over the edge was the promo they rolled out in early 2024, letting customers cut local channels to save $12 on their bills each month. Saving $144 a year is a big deal (especially when DIRECTV customers can pay $20–$40 once for an over-the-air antenna (OTA) and have local channels forever). I appreciate DIRECTV’s commitment to giving customers ways to squeeze some extra savings out of an increasingly expensive TV world.