The 2020 cord-cutter awards: The best streaming services, devices, and more

While the circumstances were hardly ideal, 2020 was a big year for cord cutting. Streaming services like Netflix and Disney saw their subscriber numbers soar as people looked for ways to pass the time at home, and the temporary suspension of live sports accelerated the decline of traditional pay TV bundles. While not coronavirus-related, this year introduced two major new streaming services in HBO Max and NBC's Peacock, and we saw some bold attempts to rethink the streaming device with Google's new Chromecast and the TiVo Stream 4K. I've been writing this weekly column (and newsletter) on cord-cutting through it all, so in accordance with annual tradition, I'd like to cap off 2020 by recounting my favorite developments of the year. Here are TechHive's fifth-annual cord-cutter awards: At the start of the year, I wrote that unified streaming TV guides would be one of cord-cutting's biggest trends, and no streaming device delivers on that idea quite like the Chromecast with Google TV.