I had similar thoughts with my comcast service. I have a cable card that's free and just keep that so that I don't have one of their cable boxes on my bill and just made my own boxes using either my firesticks or nvidia shield using their stream app. They started eliminating channels on regular cable boxes in favor of for IP only boxes, so I got that back and the image quality was way better on that app than my cable box.
I had similar thoughts with my comcast service. I have a cable card that's free and just keep that so that I don't have one of their cable boxes on my bill and just made my own boxes using either my firesticks or nvidia shield using their stream app. They started eliminating channels on regular cable boxes in favor of for IP only boxes, so I got that back and the image quality was way better on that app than my cable box.