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.

And just as we've seen over the past few years, more cord-cutting means more new streaming services, along with better devices on which to watch. Here's the best of everything that cord-cutting had to offer this year: Roku's Streaming Stick isn't the first 4K HDR device to hit $70--that honor went to Google's Chromecast Ultra last year--but it's by far the best value. The Streaming Stick combines Roku's fast and simple interface with a new remote that includes handy buttons for TV volume and power. Unless you feel like spending more than double on an Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield TV, this is the UltraHD streamer to get. Calling the Nvidia Shield TV a platform might not be fair, since it's based on the same Android TV software as several other smart TVs and streaming boxes.