I really felt "meh" about YouTube TV when I used it. To make matters worse about a 5th of the things I asked it to record ended up being the wrong thing. No idea how they managed it. All I got back when I reported the incorrect recording was a "whoops, sorry".
I had the same question after reading the email from Youtube this afternoon, looking at Verizon's offerings they have monthly tiers at $50, $70, and $90. Ignoring any first time user bundles, incentives, etc. I don't know what the overlap between the base tier and Youtube TV's base offerings is, but it's for sure covered by the middle tier.
I was happy with Youtube TV at its initial $40 price, lukewarm with the first price jump, and now I'm really questioning it at $65. I travel quite a bit so the on-demand capability is valuable but that's starting to be a stretch.
YouTube TV's value proposition includes DVR and, if you're in your home area, the ability to fast forward through commercials for DVR'd content.
The tricky part I'm noticing is how traditional providers are bundling. Mediacom provides internet, cable, and phone service in the Midwest. My parents got a better total price for the same service by bundling it all together. When I look at pricing, the marginal cost of basic cable TV would be a few extra dollars per month.
I'm definitely switching away from YouTube TV, but need to decide if I should go with basic cable (which won't have everything my household desires) or Hulu.
If they keep increasing the price every time they add more channels pretty soon it’ll end up being the same as the old cable subscriptions. What happened to a-la-carte channels?
It’s disappointing. I’m guessing the problem is they are one of the few players with any financial muscle so the status quo is going all out to make them look bad.
None of which explains how I went from grandfathered in at $35 to this is a year or so.
> If they keep increasing the price every time they add more channels pretty soon it’ll end up being the same as the old cable subscriptions.
It's already ahead of many cable plans.
> What happened to a-la-carte channels?
Most of the cost isn't per-available-channel (and having more freedom to pick and choose increases costs), so per channel charges would be much higher than current package charges divided by channels, high enough that even though people like the idea in the abstract, they'd flee from it in concrete form.
Comcast is $10 per TV (unless you’re cool with Roku) and the cord-cutter apps have good support on a bunch of different devices you can plug into your TV. I think Hulu still wins unless you want all of the channels.
Well, it’s not like nobody predicted this. We’re back to cable, but even more expensive. Somehow even a company with a monopoly on the internet eyeballs still bows to the old barons.
I wonder what the cheapest way to do so would be? Something through YouTube would allow easy account management, consistent interface people are familiar with, no concern regarding bandwidth and scaling - but I'm entirely unsure if there's a way to do so within the TOS and YouTube structure.
Same here, I cancelled immediately. I swallowed the previous price increases but this is getting close to regular cable TV. I switched to YTV to avoid cable to begin with.
I was already on the fence at $50, as I don't watch many of the channels. Primary use was for local, and just a couple of other channels. I'll keep it for July, and then use that time to get an attic antenna setup, and then look at an antenna + Sling option, or some other setup.
Overall, they need to split into multiple offerings so they can still present some value options. I don't watch sports, so that was already a waste of money in the subscription for me. These new channels do not add anything I'll be watching either.
Definitely get an antenna for local OTA channels. Cheap and great picture quality. Does not even need to be a complicated antenna. We have some plastic square thing draped around a clock on a wall and it works perfectly. We only have one TV hooked up to the cable box in our house because antenna + streaming covers 99% of our TV needs. If I could stream the in-market NHL team, I’d ditch cable.
The site streams San Francisco affiliates and local stations of NBC/CBS/ABC/PBS/FOX/CW as part of a university study on video streaming algorithms -- it's essentially a big A/B test to try to reproduce or clarify some of the findings in the research literature. We're now posting all our data and analysis each day. Research talk here: https://youtu.be/63aECX2MZvY
The content is... well, it's U.S. network television and associated daytime programming. But some people like it! And it's free (for people inside the U.S.).
I'm no lawyer, but it doesn't exactly seem legal. Streaming free local network broadcasts was definitively ruled as illegal by the Supreme Court in 2014 -- remember that was Aereo's entire business model. [1]
It seems like the Stanford service is trying to justify themselves by being an academic study and limiting to 500 concurrent participants... but it's telling they don't list any legal justification on the site, and merely generically claim:
> Stanford respects the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe your copyright has been violated on a Stanford site, please notify puffer-copyright-notices@cs.stanford.edu and give notice as stated under Reporting of Alleged Copyright Infringement. [2]
I'm honestly shocked this ever passed Stanford legal review. Maybe it never did?
I never understood what the business interest of the tv stations was in preventing streaming online. They already give away for free the stream over the air. What gives? Do they make money on the antennas or receivers or something?
The rights to distribute a program on different media and in different geographies are sold separately. The broadcaster itself is likely not authorized to distribute the show online, so they can't authorize you to do it either.
The advertisers don’t want their content available everywhere. They often do regional promotions they don’t want the rest of the world to have knowledge of.
They get paid by the cable companies (or YouTubeTV style equivalents). It’s not too much (~$0.40/subscriber IIRC) but it obviously adds up.
They don’t get that money if you use an antenna, but that’s a small market compared to the internet. Most people who use antennas won’t pay anyway, and broadcasting gives them access to the network.
But opening up streaming will draw a lot of people who would otherwise have a cable subscription. Which will lead to much more cord cutters and cut into the carriage fees from the cable company.
I have heard that small cable companies pay upwards of $11 per month per sub in retran fees. This article from the industry says..."According to Kagan, the average retrans fee charged by a broadcast station will reach $2.93 by 2022, putting it behind only ESPN ($11.08) and cable channel TNT ($3.09)." [1]
This increase by YTTV is driven by the leverage that ViacomCBS has because of the CBS locals then own. They are forcing YTTV to take these network. Until retransmission consent is changed, we are stuck paying the local station holders despite the fact that their content is free OTA.
One would think that the improved ad performance analytics should make up for the loss of $0.40 to $3.00 a month. But maybe they know ads don't work as well as they say and don't want the proof to get out...
Many of them charge cable operators for the right to carry them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retransmission_consent - so having the channel available free online diminishes the value of the retransmission consent.
Also, the copyright licenses the station has for their programming usually specify limits on redistribution - e.g. geographical, types of carriage, amount of customers reached (with a wider distribution costing more, as it provides more value to the licensee and reduces the licensor's ability to sell licenses to other entities).
The cable operators are the only "broadband" ISP for most people in the US. Cable operators want income as both ISPs and as channel providers. The TV channels want income from cable operators and advertisers. Losing one means fewer avenues of revenue.
The reality is cable operators are no longer need to be anything but a dumb pipe. And TV channels are no longer as valuable as they once were due to multitude of other sources of information.
> I never understood what the business interest of the tv stations was in preventing streaming online. They already give away for free the stream over the air. What gives? Do they make money on the antennas or receivers or something?
Pretty simple. They money using a tried and true model, why would they bother innovating or rocking the boat. It's much easier to collect the check for most of the money on the table than to bother innovating and collecting a slightly higher percentage with signicant potential downsides.
I think that they broadcast over the air for free only because they are required by law. Otherwise they would probably only be available on cable, Netflix, etc...
I can't find it now, but could swear I read somewhere that educational institutions are specifically allowed to redistribute TV signals. My high school, for example, had a system where a single cable box / VHS / DVD player in the library could be made to present as channel 3 on all the classroom TVs.
If there is such a rule I highly doubt it's intended to cover distribution to the public, more like within campus facilities, but that could be what Stanford is trying to exploit.
They don't actually check your region either, you just have to check a box saying that you're in the U.S. It seems to be flying under the radar, at least until now
An interesting aspect of Aereo's model is that they attempted to circumvent these regulations by leasing each customer an individual antenna which they could access remotely. They maintained "antenna farms" full of tiny antennas.
But there's no good reason that it's legal to buy a server and stick an antenna on it, but it's not legal to rent a preconfigured server that has an antenna on it.
There wouldn't be loopholes if the law was consistent, and I would argue there is no 'spirit' in such a confusing set of rules.
always wondered if netflix couldn't have had warehouses full of dvd drives to avoid licensing fees. wouldn't work for new releases with a lot of peak demand but maybe it would be more feasible for the back catalog of older titles.
Zediva did this for a while before they were shutdown. I guess this is a lesson on the risks of disrupting an industry through a loophole that can be shutdown by a single ruling.
When you buy a consumer DVD, that DVD only has a license for home viewing. Video stores require a special license to rent out videos. So, I assume netflix would have to pay that fee at least (which they probably already had for their mail order DVDs).
> Video stores require a special license to rent out videos.
First sale doctrine covers rentals, but having good relations with studios to get supply of new releases often influences rental establishments to avoid buying discs at retail to rent out. (But, RedBox will sometimes do it)
They agreed to stop a few years ago. Redbox used to break the "buy only" window of DVD releases. Meaning you could rent a movie from Redbox before it was available to rent on any streaming service.
They buckled from pressure from studios and agreed to stop for the reason you gave.
It kind of seemed at the time that they used their right to do this as a negotiating tactic in getting better prices from distributors.
They're maybe trying to use the same law that Locast[1] is: there's a specific carve-out in the law about rebroadcasting for nonprofits: "an exception in U.S. copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 111) for retransmission of television programming by non-profits without charge or any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage (besides the costs needed to cover the operations and maintenance of the retransmitter), which was originally intended to cover over-the-air translator stations" [2]
That's not commercial advantage as colloquially known. Commercial advantage would roughly translate to direct profit taking.
And they aren't doing it to become world renowned for their rebroadcasting, they're doing research and publishing results first and foremost. Big difference. Unless you want to start couching every type of university research as commercial advantage now, which seems pretty harmful to the university research landscape to me.
They addressed the law in a previous post, but basically there is a carveout for non-profit research that allows the retransmission of over the air signals to people in the US.
If you slap an "academic" label on it, no one will bother you. Same like how PredictIt is run by a university so they're allowed to be a casino that takes MasterCard and Visa.
PredictIt has letters of non-enforcement from either the SEC or the one that regulates commodities trading or both. It’s more than just saying “academic”.
Isn’t it true that in all cases of copyright violation the party who believe their rights are being infringed has to first ask the other party to stop, usually called a cease and desist notice.
Wow. How can this be SO much better than even my cable box!
Seriously, clicking up down with channels, there is very little of that slow feeling blank out / blank in thing that is so annoying.
I'd love to have an OTA receiver go into something like this at my house with this simplicity and speed (I did HD Run or something once and the hoopjumping was high and quality low).
While hoopjumping is still rather high (I did need to configure a MySQL database and read through some rather cryptic docs for SchedulesDirect), it was much easier to get running using MythTV than it was a couple years prior (last time I had tried).
It's definitely a nice weekend project if you are serious about cutting the cord and are in an area with decent OTA signals.
I will say though, that MythTV does have the annoying "slow channel switch" issue, since it literally needs to buffer some video data before it begins to play.
Ah, takes me back. I ran a MythTV box ages ago. What is the I-frame interval on ATSC streams? Is it all still MPEG-2 or are there more advanced streams being broadcast now? Presumably you have to wait for an I-frame, or show garbled video until you get one.
ATSC 3.0 is starting to show up in some markets, which brings with it newer than mpeg-2 codecs. I haven't yet started to pay attention to that, but it looks like it's h.265
They skipped ATSC 2. There were a couple broadcasters experimenting with newer codecs on ATSC, but I think that mostly fizzled out.
OTA channel surfing is slow because before you can see a picture, first you have to tune the digital signal, then you have to wait for an I frame, plus whatever decoder delay and output image processing. In order to make it better, you really need to three tuners, so you can process the streams of the up and down channels. Random access would still be slow, but oh well.
I imagine cable is pretty similar, but I suspect most cable boxes are more capable than tuners in tvs, so they may be running multiple tuners, and I think there's more of a chance of subchannels being useful, too.
Comcast's newer IPTV/X1 boxes are somehow worse, as they have 100x the processing capacity of the old Motorola/Cisco boxes, but use it to run a slow as molasses JS SPA. The Netflix app runs at probably half the speed of the Apple TV (or the Fire TV Stick) and even Comcast's UI can sometimes take upwards of 1-2 seconds to respond to a button press.
This was the first time I've watched live broadcast US TV since leaving the country ten years ago. Are there any shows on, or is every channel besides PBS just advertisements all day?
> And yet YouTube videos themselves are approximately 30% non-content.
That's "non-useful" content rather than "non-content", those 30% are intro and filler which you might also find in non-youtube content. And obviously it also depends strongly on what kind of content you're using youtube for. Skipping the first 30% of a recital is probably going to skip interesting content.
I really wish YT would drop the 10 minute cutoff for mid-roll ads. It's a destructive incentive to the platform. Let creators put ads wherever they want on whatever length video they want (within reason and with abuse checks). Then you won't get 7 minute videos with 3 minutes of added fluff just so they can be better monetized.
And we can ignore creators who over-monetize if we want (or buy Premium or use adblocking).
> The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content.
I heard about this a few months ago, and have since checked when the actual content starts in the videos I watch. I certainly can't agree with 30%, usually in 15-minute videos, the introduction is 1-2 minutes before they go into the meat. The bigger problem is all the filler, sponsorship breaks, "remember to ring the bell" etc., that occur at seemingly random points, though I don't think it adds up to 30% filler even if you count all that. Maybe I just skip over most of the garbage.
Try listening to a music radio station sometime. I turned one on for the first time a 10 years a couple weeks ago and in a 45 minute drive heard approximately 2 songs. The entire rest was station identifiers and commercials.
The non-commercial band in the United States is 88-92FM. All the best (many college) stations will be in this band: KFJC, WFMU, KEXP... Radio is alive and well in the U.S., its just not commercial radio.
88.1-91.9 MHz is reserved for noncommercial educational (NCE) stations, so only they can use those frequencies. However, there's nothing that disallows NCE stations from operating on unrestricted frequencies (so long as they are licensed, of course). It's not very common, though, because radio spectrum is expensive.
One of my fondest "one of these days" project ideas: duct-tape a correlator to an RF front end, along with enough storage to "Tivoize" the local FM band. Record everything, recognize and redact any content that reoccurs within 30-second windows, and rebroadcast it for household/car consumption.
An even better idea, if you're preferential to radio DJs: have a recording setup and Shazam-like recognition system where a Spotify playlist or queue is made from what's being played. I was considering doing that as a project. The song choice by the radio DJs is the real value, and I sometimes prefer their playlists over my recommended daily mix playlists or whatever Spotify selects on the generated radio stations. The highest streaming quality option on Spotify is superior in audio quality to regular radio and the digital streaming options from radio websites. StationHead has been trying to do something similar, but they still include the social live host aspect.
Long before home computers were affordable, in a magazine for electronics hobbyists, I saw a design for an analogue circuit that could, it was claimed, remove advertising and DJ waffling from radio broadcasts. I think it just looked for the frequent short periods of silence that occur in speech so it can't have been very reliable. But it had a certain low-tech beauty.
I once had an ‘Intempo Rebel’ radio[1], about a decade ago, which had the selling point that it would record songs, from radio, as MP3, without any ads or DJs. It actually worked, from what I remember. It was magic to me at the time, and …still is.
Edit: it appears that its original name was PopCatcher [2], by a company with the same name
This is something modern AI could easily do. And it could go further: It could have 20 or so tuners built in (FM tuners are cheap) and constantly be scanning/listening for non-commercials/non-talk and songs in the genres you like.
Yeah, that's what I mean -- snarf up the whole 20 MHz-wide FM band and decode/analyze/edit/rebroadcast each channel concurrently in nearby unused channels. I'm sure there's a GNU Radio block somewhere that does the capture part already.
I built something like this, but, only for commercials, using RTL-SDR dongles and intel NUC's.
I never did figure out a way to monetize it, but, the thought was to that if you were pepsi, you could be alerted for coke's new commercials on a per-market or per-station basis, depending on how you wanted to pay for it.
I ended up turning the hardware into my P25 decoder for Hamilton County (currently running at https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz ), but, I would kinda love to get back into that space again.
Very cool. I did something similar for SmartNet trunking years ago, only it used a dedicated fat client. I stopped working on it when people were getting serious about rebanding and encrypted P25 in my area. Several years later, that still hasn't happened.
And yes, to be perfectly clear, what I had in mind was for removing commercials automatically. I was complaining about mindless DJ patter in my post, but that's not an issue on FM anymore. It's either not that mindless in the case of stations like KEXP, or it's nonexistent thanks to the Clear Channelization of everything else on the dial. In any case, I have no idea how I'd go about removing it reliably. Skipping repetitive commercials is a rudimentary DSP exercise, but skipping random DJ diarrhea would be an open-ended ML problem.
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the obvious solution would be to keep repetitive segments lasting at least ~3 minutes, and discard the rest. If I did it the way I was originally thinking about, I might still hear the commercial the first time it aired. But if I did it this way, I'd never hear any commercials at all, and would only miss the first appearance of a new song if I happened to be listening at the time.
$5/month is just an introductory price, after the first year it goes way up, to $16.99/month. A cheaper "Mostly Music" is $10.99/month with a reduced 80 channels (looks like nothing I'd miss) that is satellite only, no streaming over the Internet.
I've liked listening to a handful of channels on Sirius XM when it's already been enabled in rental cars but it's not worth the price.
AM radio stations work for me, none of the twaddle and blather that you experience on FM stations. There's also a lot more productive content on AM radio.
Even PBS has ads nowadays. At the beginning of a show, "sesame street was brought to you today by support from viewers like you, and..." (ad for abcmouse, some minivan, etc plays)
That’s how public broadcasting works in the US. A number of other countries manage to have public broadcasting without any private advertisements or sponsorship. (For example, Australia’s ABC.)
No, it used to be where they would mention the name of the company on a still image and a quick blurb, like the other poster's youtube link. Now the company gets a whole 30 second ad like any other channel.
I was thinking the same just days ago after watching a live broadcast since the shutting down of analog TV (never bothered to install an antenna even after buying a new HD TV) i said to myself, no wonder cord cutting is a thing, for every 2 minutes of content you get 15 of mind numbing ads.
Only if you 1) live in the US 2) own a TV and 3) live close enough to the broadcasting stations to pick up their signals.
I live in the US and own a TV but I don't live within 50 miles of any station broadcasting TV signals, so I can't pick up any signals with a TV top antenna.
Not a mod but please don't do this as it'll litter a thread with mechanical, generated comments, like it did with "linkback" blog post comments in the 2000s and early 2010s.
Facebook brings up the dregs of humanity, so I am not surprised when I see worthless comments. I would hope for a slightly higher quality of comment here though. At least we don't have
I love listening to another Countries radio or watching their television. It just so interesting watching their commercials or listening to their local news and events. One of my favourite things to do is ask my google home to stream random radio stations, so I’ll ask it to stream whim and see what happens, most of the time it’ll find nothing, neutral sometimes it come up with a radio station in Bakersfield, Or Detroit or Memphis. Even randomly asking for radio Toronto brings something up.
Thank you so much for mentioning this! I didn't know about it. And, it's great to have alternatives. I've been looking to diversify my viewing away from YouTube and am interested in viable alternatives.
YouTube TV is nowhere near good enough to demand that high of a price. The shows are limited, the DVR interface is terrible, and the DVR barely even works. It's nowhere near as good as Vue was.
Or this one (I'm on android): Tapping the "cast" button to send to a Chromecast while in the middle of a show causes a random jump. On a good day, it would start playing at the beginning of the show, on a bad one it would jump to an entirely different network.
I assume my experience was unique somehow because it's too egregious of a bug to ignore (it basically gave me a choice of ditch the Chromecast or ditch YoutubeTV, in the end I did both), but I was using an android phone and a gen 3 chromecast so I can't imagine why this only affected me. Never got fixed in the ~1 year I had the service.
It's actually still a great value if you can go in on it with a few friends/family members. They allow up to 6 different accounts. I've got 6 households using my account, so essentially it's like $10/household.
I had the opposite experience. Fire TV was painful to use Vue on. I had such a bad experience with every streaming app that when I did use Youtube and it actually worked smoothly I was amazed.
Disagree, and I doubt you're a regular user of YouTube TV given your comments. "The shows are limited" doesn't even make sense; you get access to the live feed of all the channels in question. The DVR works perfectly in my experience over the last year or so; it has never failed to record what I wanted it to record.
I use it every day. It's just now getting Comedy Central. I tried to DVR an episode of Atlanta and it just didn't do it. It did record an episode later on though.
Their youtubeTV support pages also have a banner stating:
"We are experiencing high contact volumes and longer than normal wait times. If you have feedback about our updated price, we encourage you to fill out this form. Find information about our updated price on this Help Article or on our blog post."
Probably because those who made that feedback page are the same people within the YouTube team that actually use the service and feel the same as we do.
I like the service in general ok, but YouTube TV has the worst DVR interface I've ever used. It's worse even than any of the shitty one-off cable company boxes.
For $65/month, it would be nice to at least have a decent interface. Google pls buy Tivo and incorporate that.
While this price change is certainly impactful, I wanted to see if my experience is universal.
Does the swipe behavior in the iOS Youtube TV app (and only the Youtube TV app) drive you crazy? It's the only app where it will consistently move two tiles with the same force any other app requires for one. After about a day of the free trial I gave up because it was that frustrating.
That cost is nearly double it's original price 3y ago, and looking at the recent channel additions -- I'm not sure the users will be convinced it's worth the extra cost. I wish someone would have a selection like:
$5 - one channel
$7 - two channels
$10 - five channels
$20 - fifteen channels (you pick)
$50 - 40 channels (we pick)
$50 + $15 - 40 channels (the $50 package), plus <package B>
When (for example) ESPN charges like $9 per household, there’s no way to get 5 channels for $10 that includes ESPN. Sure you could get the shittiest 5 channels for $10 but what’s the point of that?
Until networks change their pricing model this a la carte option is not going to work out the way people hope.
ESPN is an outlier. Among normal mainstream cable channels, nothing else is more than $2, only a few are more than $1, and the cheap ones are $0.10 or less.
Even paying extra in lieu of bundling, prices like that could work out if you make ESPN a separate $5-10 option.
All I want is CNBC and baseball. I can subscribe to MLB.tv which covers baseball, but as far as I can tell there is not a reasonable way to get CNBC a la carte. Paying for CNBC Pro is $30/month and that seems more than I'd like to pay.
CNBC averages around 250k primetime viewers (under 200k during the day). Its top show attracts fewer than 400k. Imagine how much lower viewership would be if it wasn't a "free" channel. There's essentially no economic model that allows them to stay in business in an a-la-carte world. But if they are guaranteed to be in 80 or 100 million homes via bundling, then yes it can (and does) work.
According to wiki CNBC has the highest income audience of any cable station and made $300+mm on $600mm+ in revenue. I’d watch it but I don’t have cable, I bet they are missing a bunch of Ad revenue from people who cut the cord.
Get a TD Ameritrade account. Can stream CNBC for free in the app, the desktop application, and (iirc) can push to Apple TV from iPad/iPhone if you want it on the TV.
YouTube is not the content producer, rather strikes deals with content producers. The reality is there is consolidation in the media world, with a few mega corporations managing most channels. They typically bundle a few channels together for vMVPDs/MVPDs, for leverage - “you want channel X, you must also get channel Y.”
Source: I head a Product organization at a mega media org.
Honest question: why do big organizations do this?
I mean, I get it: you're making people pay for stuff they don't need. You can charge a higher price despite users not actually watching everything they buy. Clearly, this tactic must work at some level, or else they wouldn't do it.
On the other hand, there are users like me who take one look at that and say, "ew", and walk away from TV completely. And it's not like I'm unwilling to pay for content, I just want to get what I want when I want it and not pay for the privilege of wandering through this ridiculous maze of content that no one cares about.
Maybe I'm being naive, but it just seems to me like this is a strategy that's going to kill the cash cow on the long run. Am I wrong?
I'd imagine they've done the studies and found that they'd lose more money overall. The gain in new customers who only want a specific channel must not outweigh the revenue they'd lose by customers downgrading to less channels.
It's also possible that it would produce the secondary effect of killing channels that are more niche and not quite as profitable (maybe not profitable at all). Maybe there are channels that people would never pay for individually if given the choice, but would watch if given them as part of a package, and the aggregate value of which provides enough additional benefit to justify paying for the package as whole.
Subsidizing new content and making it easily discoverable are the primary reasons for bundling. When new content comes to you for free with your existing purchase, the only thing stopping you from trying it out and potentially getting hooked is your willingness to commit time to it. If every piece of content had a price associate with it, people would be much less willing to try new things. This same principle applies at both the individual show level and at the channel level. The people selling you this content want you to consume as much as possible so you don't associate your purchase with a single show and end up canceling HBO once Game of Thrones ends.
You can see how this lack of bundling might impact content by looking at movies which are traditionally more a la carte. Movies are produced under the assumption that they all need to be financially self sufficient. The end result is that most content produced is either blockbusters based off big budget IP (which tries to address discoverability) or low cost and easy to produce content that can potentially be hugely profitable if it hits. The mid-budget TV (traditional TV mainstays like sitcoms would generally fall into this bucket) would likely disappear if everything was purchased a la carte.
It is also worth considering that most of the streaming content providers all do the same bundling as the traditional powers like Viacom. The difference is that the Netflixes of the world don't organize their content into channels. However there are definitely different verticals within these companies. Netflix has one for comedy[1] that is the equivalent of Viacom's Comedy Central, they just don't actively separate this content from the rest of their catalog.
That’s exactly right. I can’t talk numbers, but a consumer is more likely to stick with a channel/app by X% (where X is a significant number) if s/he watches Y shows. Y increases as X increases.
Bundling needs to die. Let the channels sink or swim like every other consumer product. This "logic" is just industry PR that's been accepted and normalized.
This is the business model that sunk the cable TV and opened the market to netflix, hulu etc. The fact that a Silicon Valley company made a fancier app with smarter DVR capabilities will not save this doomed business model.
yeah but in this case they brought on these extra channels and are spinning it as "continuing to innovate". they didn't need to bring these additional channels on. without these channels like for the past year or so, wouldn't the price have remained the same?
Or are you saying that these channel additions were part of an agreement or condition that to continue to offer some of the existing channels they needed to take the additional channels and charge more?
People always fantasize about this but it's not remotely workable. It's a complete fantasy. Different channels differ very widely in value and in how much they cost the provider.
If you're going to make suggestions, think of something realistic, at least.
That's nothing, and in my mind - doesn't bode well for the long-term prospects of the service.
I've been a subscriber for about a year, but with the price increases, and the interface on AppleTV that seemingly wants to always show me Tennis when I turn it on, and suggest I resume programs which were recorded 3-6 months ago, it's got a very long way to go before it's got the usability of TiVo.
At this price, they're pushing me back to cable TV with a locked promo rate.
I could've sworn I was doing something wrong with my math give your the parent comment to yours, so I'm glad I saw this -- my math was right, after all!
> doesn't bode well for the long-term prospects of the service.
Although i understand the strings that viacomm is pulling, I wonder if this is google's way of trying to shed users in preparation for service retirement.
I was on the fence and about to cancel, since it's the media subscription service I pay the most for and get the least use out of. This makes the decision easier...
I was on the fence at $50 and will be cancelling as I don't care anything about these new additions. I can think of many things I would prefer to spend the $180 price hike on. Seems like they should be doing these expansions as add-ons if they don't want to see people like me churn.
This is certainly CBS Viacom flexing their influence. Youtube TV without CBS and their sports coverage is dead in the water. That gives them leverage to force feed the other Viacom junk. Even the official blog post announcing the changes sounded like more of a resignation.
Unfortunate. Too much money for me and I won't be continuing my subscription.
When I first signed up it was great value at $35/mo. It’s dramatically been increasing since adding little value. I literally just want CNBC, ESPN, ESPN2, CNN, FOX NEWS, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, TBS, and TNT. I have gotten zero value from my nearly doubling of monthly price.
Original signup June 2017 - $35/mo
Price increase June 2019 - $49.99/mo
Price increase August 2020 - $64.99/mo
For any YouTube TV PMs reading, I just added an event to my calendar marking the day I'll cancel my account. Thanks for the helpful reference to the exact date my current rate expires. Spectrum is offering more channels for $45/month and you don't even need a cable box if you're using an Apple TV. YouTube TV is an OK service that is very rough around the edges and I won't miss it a single minute after I cancel.
"This new price reflects the rising costs of content, and we also believe it reflects the complete value of YouTube TV"
Your price does not reflect the complete value of your service, but happy churning.
Yeah, when I first saw the email I put a reminder to cancel before August billing, but I've been using it much less recently anyway so seeing this thread I decided to just cancel immediately. Hopefully in the future there will be a basic option back in the $40 range
A road warrior VPN setup running on a Raspberry Pi 4 and placed in your home costs less than $50. There are 1000 reasons to have one anyway, and watching TV while traveling is also one of them. I know for a fact the Spectrum TV app works quite well under this setup.
The average Joe isn’t subscribed to YouTube TV in the first place, are they? They’re usually paying their cable/telco for TV service. (Which, as it happens, already comes these days with mobile wi-fi streaming of the same content via the provider’s apps.)
Not sure that's a given. Anecdotally, quite a few people on my friend circle hate cable and have YouTube TV for sports and a few minor things.
No data but I'd assume YouTube's biggest pull is people young enough to hate cable but old enough to use YouTube often and have $$ to pay for the convenience
I have an Amplifi device but never tried this Teleport thing which looks like a toggle-and-forget thing. Seems simple enough, I’ve seen regular Joes and Janes go to surprisingly more convoluted lengths to access content they feel entitled to.
Btw, some routers have built-in VPN—I think ASUS has it, for no particular discernible reason. For dynamic IPs, it also can ping a couple DynDNS providers.
Can't speak as to whether the performance of a router's hardware is enough for VPN together with two streams of video.
This OpenVPN[0] setup works very well and uses certificates for auth. It's easy to use and you just need to set up port forwarding in your home network so you can dial in from remote.
These days all the cool kids are using WireGuard[1] though. I don't have a link to a handy installer and setup guide for that but they do exist.
Using a Pi 4 with gigabit ethernet makes a big difference over older Pi hardware.
I see you commented below that you used OpenVPN for implementing this. I tried using a self-hosted Squid proxy with the Spectrum website, but was unsuccessful at getting it to work. I also tried routing the traffic over SOCKS5 (using ssh -D) and it still didn't work. This was a while ago, but I recall that the website was using Flash. I'm just assuming that the website was using Flash to do some local network checking outside of the tunneled traffic and that's why it didn't work, but I'm uncertain if that makes sense. Sounds like I should have tried a full traffic solution like a VPN...
Routing through where? If you put your proxy in the cloud then it definitely won't work as most providers block known cloud host IPs like AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. I placed my Raspberry Pi inside my home network so that when I'm traveling my traffic still appears to be coming from my home, which is what Spectrum and others are looking for to determine whether to show you the entire channel listing or just a small slice of available channels. If you're not showing a residential IP in their network then it doesn't matter what setup you use, it still won't work.
"you can enjoy up to 250 live TV channels and up to 30,000 On Demand TV shows and movies when you're connected to your Spectrum Internet WiFi network at home. Plus, when you're on the go, enjoy up to 150 live channels and up to 20,000 On Demand titles anywhere you have an internet connection"
Just cancel now. You still get the rest of the current month you paid for and there's no need to worry about forgetting. I just cancelled mine. "Rough around the edges" is a nice way of describing an app that doesn't play what I click on but random shit it feels like.
You don't think announcing this rate hike on the morning of the last day of the Q2 is coincidence? Sounds like most people's accounts are scheduled to renew in August, which would be much more impactful if we all waited until then to cancel. The knee-jerk cancelations today are fully expected and accounted for.
I paused today. My sub will continue until my next bill date (13 days) then it ends until November. YTTV will save all of my existing settings and recorded events should I decide to come back. This gives me plenty of time to evaluate alternatives or for YTTV to rethink this price hike.
In fairness, at $45 a month you’re not getting any the unlimited DVR service YouTube TV provides, which is a big feature for some.
If anyone is in a similar boat I can strongly recommend the Channels DVR app: it’s $6 a month or less per year, runs on most platforms (raspberry pi included) and lets you record to anything you want.
You might be on to something there. In the email they sent out to subscribers, they are actually provided directions for if you wanted to cancel...I thought that was quite odd
I've noticed that regular Youtube has been cranking up the ads quite a lot lately.
I view most of my youtube on the TV, via their crappy HTML-based Apple TV app. So many ads to suffer through, suddenly.
On the desktop, it seems like they've suddenly started work against that one chrome extension I've loved the most: The one that blocks the ads from youtube.
I can't see myself subscring to youtube red or whatever they call it. Just not going to happen.
I've noticed a significant uptick in ads as well. The ad quality is akin to ads on streaming-specific apps.
It's not uncommon to only have ~4 different ads shown to you on something like CBS Mobile. They have the potential to target ads, they have an app installed (and all the privacy implications that go with it), but somehow they're showing the same 30 second ad 4 times in a row to make up a commercial break.
Others are far better. For a time, ESPN's app would simply show the logo and repeat the same ~4 second music loop until the commercials were done.
Yeah, the ad quality is horrible. I'm in Sweden; I've seen/skipped through all of the local ads like 200 times each by now. At least it feels like that.
Sometimes you get something new - it's always some poor american local company that made their own ad (often some construction company targetting home owners) but messed up the geotargetting, I presume.
https://try.philo.com/ is $20 a month is great. It is missing some news stations, but Pluto tv is free and has a lot of news and a mystery science tv 3000 station.
Thanks for the suggestion; I'm trying it out now. Looks like Chromecasts aren't supported, but they do have a Roku app. The Roku interface seems to be much better than Youtube TV's!
I signed up for YouTubeTV quite recently (at the beginning of last baseball season) at $40/month. I'm pretty surprised to see in such a short span of time it has gone up to $65.
If things were normal right now I'd probably just shrug it off, but between no sports and quarantining with family instead of at my apartment I have basically been paying for nothing for 3 straight months now. This is definitely pushing me over the edge to cancel.
Maybe next spring I'll reconsider, but this doesn't seem like a great move to me right now?
Unless you must have live sports/CNBC or can’t have your internet slow down, how are YouTube TV or cable packages attractive? We have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Even when the free/promotional periods are over, they would still end up costing less than a semi-decent cable package, but with way more useful content (in fact, more than we could ever hope to watch), and little to no ads.
My guess is live sports is a big part of the market. Depending on what sport/team you are a fan of the league-run streaming services are a huge pain with blackouts, lag, etc. YouTubeTV was the best cost+convenience option for me to watch my local MLB team when I signed up originally. Now it isn't.
Their strategy makes no sense to me if a lot of the market is indeed live sports though, so maybe I'm an outlier.
In my case, I get 1 Gb/s (symmetrical, no data cap, and they gave me the modem/router) internet from CenturyLink for $65/month, and we decided YouTube TV was the best choice that gave us local channels (not their subchannels, darn it, and CW is still "on demand" rather than live from the local affiliate), which is important to us because the apartment we're in is the worst possible place to have an antenna. Even with the YouTube price increase it's well under what Mediacom was socking us for after the first year for 60 Mb/s down, 10 Mb/s up, tightly data capped internet and an admittedly wider choice of TV, so for now we'll stay (but start researching alternatives). (Sports? I have the Rhett Butler attitude towards them.)
We only have Netflix and YouTubeTV. That's $75 for content/mo. Much cheaper than cable in our area (adding in the hardware + DVR services). We have a handful of shows we watch plus a handful of NCAA basketball and the Olympics (this year isn't working out at all..). We've looked at this very objectively (spreadsheets!) and with what we want from our TV service YouTubeTV is the best deal.
Really not surprising that old media still has pull like this.
I enjoyed using YouTubeTV during this past college football season, but I won't be renewing this year. It was already iffy at best with Coronavirus, but now with this price hike YouTube can forget it. Probably exactly what old media wants from us anyway so we go back to cable. Forever a cable cutter.
If needed, I'll go back to Sling despite it going up as well when it first got started, but not as dramatically as YouTubeTV. Sling Orange + sports package will be $40, which is good for the few months I need it. At-least we still have some other options out there instead of having to go back to cable.
The whole streaming platform war is beginning to resemble the Stone Soup parable. At some point, no platform will have enough content for anyone to care to subscribe (arguably now). Someone needs to come along and convince them all that sharing is in everyone’s best interests.
Didn't even know people still paid for TV but reading this thread surprised me. I would say this industry is dead with the upcoming generation but guess I'll be surprised again
So what are the statistical chances that you don’t know anyone that pays for cable? Those numbers are somewhat skewed lower as far as cable TV because I don’t believe it counts OTT providers like Youtube TV, Hulu Live TV, etc.
I'm 29 and I haven't had TV for...8 years now? We only watch Netflix/Amazon prime or watch movies on blu ray. Every time I go visit my mum and she has the TV on(she's literally the only person I know still paying for satellite TV) I have no idea why you would. Constant ads, shows which are being interrupted by ads, no freedom of selection when it comes to content....I honestly don't understand why people still watch TV at all. I can maybe understand the argument about watching live sports, but it inevitably comes with watching all the other shit as well.
Have they figured out how to play the show you click on yet? No. $50 a month and the basic functionality of the app doesn't even work. With a Chromecast, it's even worse. Eventually, after clicking back and forth, disconnecting and reconnecting, it may play. Then you have to turn off the closed captioning for every single show even though it's off in the settings. Then it randomly stops at times. The ui displays the wrong show. And they have the gall to charge even more for this shittiest motherfucking app I've ever had the displeasure of using. This engineering team should be fired. They should be ashamed of themselves. They can't even make the app play a single video without problems. I've been putting up with it for years now just because of certain channels my mom likes, but no more. Fuck this garbage app. I've submitted dozens of support requests and the only people dumber than the engineers, project managers, and others who work on this app are the idiots running customer support. Fuck them all. They can shove this fucking app right up their ass.
Sounds like you have a generation 1 Chromecast™ and bad WiFi. We hope you'll try YouTube TV again with a Chromecast Ultra™ and a Nest Wifi™ 3 pack. Take care!
Asking someone to spend $400+ just to upgrade equipment in order to support a service that doesn’t work well on the original equipment you sold them, takes some guts.
Parent comment might come off as offensive, but it very accurately represents my experience with several Google apps that I've been using recently (YouTube, Google Play Music/YouTube Music, Google Photos, Google Maps, ...). But I'm on Firefox, so I guess nobody cares.
The experience on iOS is similar - the lack of respect which Google has for basic QA testing has been painfully obvious. I’m not sure why they want to train people to think that their products are only worth it at free but they’re doing a great job.
Stop beating around the bush, come on just come out and tell us how you feel! ;-)
BTW I'm dumping YTV after this move, but I haven't had a quite the same horror show w/ the app etc. At $40 it was worth it, I felt the hike to $50 was a bit steep, but now another $15/30 pct... it's just a big middle finger. I watch news & sports, but not $800 per year.
This is so true. I've always had horrible usability issues with YoutubeTV, especially when using with a Chromecast. I was always shocked that the app/website had so many bugs, the same type of bugs OP is talking about. It was literally the buggiest piece of software I've used in the past few years. The person I share the membership with never ran into these bugs somehow, so seeing this comment really makes me feel better about my experience. Still scratching my head about how so many bugs could show up in production for so long. I'm guessing severely inadequate testing.
YouTube TV had enough channels at launch. They kept adding channels that I didn’t want and charging for it. This went from best value to worst value in three short years.
Not sure what the old media hacks are trying to accomplish here.
> Not sure what the old media hacks are trying to accomplish here.
They're trying to keep their channels artificially expensive and trying to limit the success of (previously) less expensive TV channel platforms like YouTube TV. They don't want to give ground on that, because if they do then it's a big freefall down to what the real value of their channels are.
They make an enormous amount of cartel-capture money from the high cost subscription services like traditional cable and DirecTV. In their ideal world, absolutely nothing would change about that (other than prices always going up over time).
They have lost almost 4 million subscriber this year. And streaming companies, such as YouTube TV, have also lost subscribers. So these people just stopped.
I suspect a fair number of people just don't care about TV as much as the experts thought. Netflix plus Amazon Prime and a season pass of Dr. Who is about all I can watch anyhow.
I can only assume the only remaining reason why people even still want traditional TV is live sports.
Stuff might finally be happening. I can‘t wait for Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, etc. to just come in and start getting those licenses. Imagine a FIFA world cup on YouTube live-streamed in 4K. Granted, it‘s unlikely to happen soon. But sports is really the only valuable thing the traditional content providers still have.
Wait a minute, though. AT&T and NBC both have have their own streaming services now. So why wouldn‘t they use their sports licenses to stream games on there?
Amazon is already moving into that space, they offer some Premier League matches in many countries. There's also a dedicated sports streaming service called DAZN in some European countries
American Football too. Yahoo also helps with this. I'm waiting for someone to fill the Sunday gap now that Redzone is off sling and youtube TV is no longer worth it.
I really don't expect too many people to stay subscribed, unless they're relying on the (sketchy) revenue stream that's people who subscribed once and then forgot all about it.
That’s me. I’ve been subscribing to Netflix for 7 years now despite not having watched it at all in 4 years.
I only have YouTubeTV because it’s still the cheapest way to get the BBC World News channel in the US. I used to have DirecTV but they started demanding $130/mo (without the sports channels!) minimum to get that channel - while my local cableco (Wave) doesn’t carry it at all.
I understand the bundling of channels from the same providers like Viacom and NBC/Universal that forces cable/sat customers onto higher pricing tiers, but channels like the BBC World News channel are sourced individually (as far as I know) and are offered at-cost (again, as far as I know) by cableco/sat providers - so there is absolutely no excuse for DirecTV to charge so much besides market segmentation (which they’re probably right on-the-money for (pun intended): the people interested in getting the BBC World News channel probably can afford $130/mo - and they’re right: I can afford it, but I still think it’s outrageous.
Well Netflix 4K is $16 a month. Which pretty much puts it above Disney+ let along D+ with Hulu/ESPN. Then you have HBO which still acts as if they are truly premium, if anything they are the binge a month channel.
Many made the joke when Cable companies started losing subs to internet streaming sites that people would end up paying more. The big catch is most people forget to factor in their internet cost writing it off mentally as "I was already going to have it", a sentiment the streaming services want you to have.
> The big catch is most people forget to factor in their internet cost writing it off mentally as "I was already going to have it", a sentiment the streaming services want you to have.
It reads oddly for you to present something unequivocally true as a catch, especially during a pandemic when most people are especially relying on internet service to talk with friends and family, work, and education.
Add another cancellation. This was enough for me to dig up the account info for my internet provider to see if they offered a streaming service. They do, and it's $24.99/month plus $5 for the cloud DVR. That's less than half of your new rate. Dumb move.
I love YoutubeTV, and I've been using it for years. This is probably enough to get me to cancel, though. It started at $40 when I signed up a couple years ago, they raised it to $50 last year, and now $65 for just a few more channels (and among them, only one I even want).
I wish they'd offer a more a la carte option. I'd be willing to pay $10-15 per major broadcaster's channel collection, or $2-7 for individual channels (depending on quality of programming). I might even land at $50 or more with my channel choices, but I'd prefer to pick what I'm paying for instead of subsidizing dozens of channels of programming I dislike (and quite a few that I would prefer to boycott entirely).
Yeah, it works just like TV. There are no unskippable ads or interstitials. Also with unlimited DVR and time-shifting, I rarely watch live, and I can skip all the commercials (albeit manually).
This isn't necessarily true. I don't have any behind the scenes knowledge, but I suspect that enough money or reputation can buy you unskippable ads. I've had several ads I have been unable to skip, running to as long as 15 seconds for the TV+ Tom Hanks movie from Apple. Almost every ad for a Google product has also been unskippable.
Could just be an extension of Google's anti-Apple UX design, but I would be rather surprised.
This probably depends on the client you are using - using Youtube in browser with adblockers, I have never seen an ad on Youtube, much less an unskippable one. So I take this is what the parent comment meant by "you can also skip the ads for free".
> Not all ads can be fully skipped, and skipping the ad takes at least a couple of seconds. You can also get multiple ads in a video.
You're not watching them right. All ads can be fully skipped, preemptively, at a time cost of zero. If you don't like the ads, just don't watch them. There's no reason to pay for YouTube Red.
Not watching them involves waiting a few seconds for the skip ad button to appear.
That time adds up to 30 to 60 min a month. Let's say 45 min a month in average. That means, saving 45 min of my spare time costs $12, the cost of YouTube Red.
45 min of my spare time is much more valuable than $12, so I just pay for it.
It's not the services fault. These big tv conglomerates don't want their channels optional because they know no one wants them for the most part. Or, at the very least, you won't accidentally start watching something on their network if you don't even have the channel.
You need to think about it more holistically - not just YouTube, but Google as a whole (think about all the various Google enterprise products, cloud, etc).
That's an interesting perspective, but it kind of looks like a lot of graphs saying "You should pay for stuff you don't want because otherwise it would incentivize the sellers to price gouge you for the stuff you do want"
I'm kind of confused, if it's an adversarial relationship where the seller is going to extract as much money from you as possible in either scenario, wouldn't some consumers prefer to pay specifically to starve out content they'd prefer not to see?
Maybe I'm not understanding this page, but it looks like it's "good" for me because instead of paying $9-10 for the History Channel alone I'll be paying $11.70 for History Channel + ESPN (which I will literally never watch)?
I'm not a calculus genius but I'd prefer to spend less money and only have what I want. This model assumes that I'd be willing to spend $3 per month on ESPN, but how does the graph look if I were willing to spend $0 per month on it? Or hell, since pricing is arbitrary, I'd like to pay -$3 per month as a courtesy for having to scroll past content I genuinely do not want to consume let alone subsidize?
You aren't going to be able to spend less money though. Since there's zero marginal cost to adding extra channels, you should assume that the price you're getting charged isn't actually based on the number of channels you subscribe to.
A better way to think about bundle pricing is that the channels you really want cost $50, and they throw in a whole bunch of other crap for free. Why turn down free stuff?
People don't turn down free stuff. It's just that they no longer value the content provided via TV channels at the price they are asking. The fundamental problem is content that used to be delivered via TV is no longer worth what it once was.
The parent comment lists a specific reason why they'd turn directly the 'free' stuff. It requires more effort to then access the content they want to get to when they have to navigate around the cruft.
Whether that factors much into your personal value assessment or not, that is a valid downside to having a bunch of extra channels you don't intend to watch.
If those channels are free (and by that reasoning, not actually factored into the price of my package) then why am I unable to get individual channels or create my own bundle? Either I'm subsidizing stuff that I don't want to watch, or I'm not.
Is your point that I can't spend less because... they're going to get $50 out of me either way? Except that's impossible because there is no other way so there's literally no way of knowing a theoretical cost so it's safest to assume it's going to be $50 or more?
That seems like an awful lot of assuming. Even if it's true that they needed to raise the price of their existing channel offering, and only added new channels to help justify the price increase, that still counts as bundling being used to increase the price.
The argument is not about your buying preferences as a consumer. Of course if you had a choice between (a) paying X for watching stuff, or (b) paying Y for the ability to watch exactly the same thing, but Y is overall less money because it is somehow dependent of the amount that you consume, that is the better choice.
However, the economic equilibrium of a perfectly unbundled system is not that you get to watch the same thing for less money. It is, in the general case, that you either get less content, or pay more, or both.
To take your example, realize that it is outlier behavior to be willing to pay $9/mo for History and $0/mo for ESPN. If you took History channel, with the content that it has now, out of the cable bundle and tried to sell it $9/mo, or even $1/mo, there would be way too few interested customers to make such a proposition economically viable.
In a perfectly unbundled world, content such as the History channel does not exist. You only have marquee content like ESPN, movies for rental or purchase, or (if lowercase history is your thing) highly produced documentaries, i.e. the kind of content that willingness to pay for is high enough to justify the high customer acquisition cost. You do not have content like History channel because it lies in that tier of things that many people are kind of interested in watching, but only if it comes with something else more valuable that they already paid for.
One can debate the societal value of the existence of content such as the History channel to begin with, but that's what the argument is about, not about the consumer's individual preferences in a hypothetical world where it would be possible to watch the same content for cheaper.
> You do not have content like History channel because it lies in that tier of things that many people are kind of interested in watching, but only if it comes with something else more valuable that they already paid for.
This seems like you're saying "bundling mis-serves the customer." If the History Channel would not exist if people could pay for it directly, then why should it ought to exist?
The idea the article is trying to get at is (I think) that people are willing to pay for the history channel, but as long as they're more willing to pay for some other channels, studios will just jack up the price of the other channels to the point where their funds for discretionary spending on television are exhausted very quickly. This is because it's cheaper for the studios to get people to pay more per show while producing fewer shows, as this increases their profit margins to the maximum they can get away with. The argument that this is bad for consumers is pretty straightforward, but I will point out that these incentives only work so long as consumers have no choice about their cable provider. i.e., the problem is that cable providers are monopolies, not the bundling specifically. Moreover, we've clearly seen over the last two decades that these monopolistic practices have driven huge numbers of people away from television... unfortunately, usually the competition requires the internet, and the same cable companies control internet access, so there's no particular reason for them to change their business model.
That's what I meant by, we can debate the merits of the History channel to begin with. I only took challenge to the notion that there is a world in which unbundling happens and consumers get to watch the same content for less money.
Whether or not it is "mis-serving customers" depends a bit on whether there's abuse of monopoly power, which is an argument one can make about the cable companies, but not so much about the over-the-top services like HBO Go, Disney+, Netflix, or Prime, all of which are structured as a bundle. I'm not sure Prime customers, for example, are unhappy or feel mis-served by being able to watch TV shows on top of being able to order items with fast, free shipping. Bundling can be used for nefarious value-extraction in a monopolistic market, but it can also bring consumers value, so we shouldn't conflate the two.
In many competitive markets, bundling is often a consumer's preference that does serve customers well. For example, most coffee shops don't charge for sugar, creamer, and other condiments, and you maybe have some aggrieved consumers complaining that they should get a discount for drinking only black coffee. It's likely that coffee creamer companies would go bankrupt if people had to pay for condiments at every coffee shop, and we can debate whether it's even a good idea then. But on the whole, I don't think that turns into an argument that coffee shops are mis-serving customers by providing condiments that are free of charge, that is to say, bundled with the price of coffee.
Personally I live in an almost perfectly unbundled world of content already, because I tend to buy or rent the TV shows that I'm personally interested in. This works for me because I have little time to watch, don't like ads, and have enough disposable income that I'm not thinking twice about cost, but I'm not sure that many other consumers would be satisfied with the kind of entertainment experience where they have to pay $2 per episode of their favorite show.
This misunderstands the market. I would pay for the History Channel but I wouldn't pay for ESPN. And I won't pay for a bundle because then 'analysts' will think I'm getting it for ESPN.
History Channel is cheap to make compared to sports, would definitely be able to pay for itself with cheap subscriptions.
Cable TV with bundling is just a local maxima established decades ago. The long tail of interest that drives regular youtube is the proof.
If this misunderstands the market, I'd be interested in a positive proof of a channel like History making it as an independent offering. I don't personally know of any.
That article is an absurdly oversimplified model. In the real world, the networks would find some way to diversify between the $3 and $10 channel offerings, letting them get $3 from the $3 person and $10 from the $10 person.
edit: Correction, they do mention this common and widespread approach... in a footnote. Without saying anything about why it wouldn't work.
I'm not sure about other people but I don't "think" I want a la carte, I absolutely know I do. So much so that I don't pay for anything because nobody offers what I'm willing to pay for.
At least for me, I find that unlikely. I'm paying a fee for sports channels I have no interest in (because you can't not pay it), I'm buying a bundle that I only want a couple channels in, and those are the channels most people want. I would guess that I fall into the majority that are subsidizing the minority.
It's like saying that you'd be willing to pay for a $2/month Spotify subscription for only the genres of music you want. That's not how the economics work. Going a la carte would mean paying as much as a bundle, for less content.
The problem here is that people's mental models are fundamentally self-centered. They imagine paying half or less for just the channels they want.
But in total, that would mean media companies getting half or less the revenue, for producing the same content -- since the marginal cost of giving extra channels is basically zero, they don't gain any money back by giving you fewer channels. Now, media companies aren't that profitable, the math simply doesn't work out, they wouldn't be able to actually make all that content. Many channels would simply be cut.
Spotify pays artists based on the number of times their work is played, so that comparison isn’t valid. Most people have no trouble paying $10/month for what they actually use - and if the $50/month for cable was divided similarly I’m sure there would be far less complaining.
Of course, broadcast technology doesn’t support that and we have decades of industry built around a different model, giving all of the incumbents a strong incentive to resist any sort of change.
>Going a la carte would mean paying as much as a bundle, for less content. //
You're arguing past people. Plenty have said they're fine paying the same or more for access to less content.
I used to watch about 2 shows a week on BBC (UK; 1-1.5hrs) and disagreed with paying £M to TV show presenters who just preside over long, talky adverts for Hollywood movies and mainstream media. So I don't pay (nor watch) anymore.
I'd pay to watch those couple of shows separately. As it happens though they occasionally make their way to Netflix, so I don't have to ... but I'd still pay to watch them when they're still current.
Looks to me like there's money left on the table.
Personally I'd like to see some form of legislation that requires shows to be made available to consumers if they are available to other channels - I could pay double to BBC what Netflix pay them to get the show and we'd both win; and I wouldn't mind having it on Netflix, might watch it again.
Now BBC is a special case; I can't work out why they need to compete commercially, nor why we allow showmakers to form companies to be paid through, etc.. they should work on salaried staff paid on civil service pay scales IMO.
> Plenty have said they're fine paying the same or more for access to less content.
Really? I haven't seen anyone say they want to pay more for less content. The unspoken assumption always seems to be "if I was getting fewer channels I'd be paying less", logic which works fine for tangible goods, but less so for ones with nearly zero marginal cost to produce.
I find it funny that people are arguing that you don't want this and actually want bundling services when you're flat out saying you aren't currently paying for what's being offered.
I don't even want a la carte, I'm fine with just "It's on Netflix/Hulu/HBO Max or I don't need to watch it." I'm not willing to pay more than $20 a month for TV most months, with the rare extra service to get caught up on a show I really like.
I'm not a professional economist, but to my eye this assumes that if I'm willing to pay $10 for one channel and $3 for another, I'm willing to pay $13 for both. This seems like a bad assumption especially for media, because since TV channels serve as substitutions for each other; if I watch one I'm not going to watch another. I'm not sure if this simplification preserves the results.
I’m actually more of a fan of a la carte content than channels. I typically spend $0-100/mo on TV shows and movies, which I strip the DRM from and copy into my permanent collection. In aggregate, I probably spend something comparable to what cable would cost. It’s all content I want with no filler or commercials, and I’m not held hostage by some subscription.
Anti-bundling rants based on subsidizing unwanted channels are illogical. You're annoyed at paying for cable channels you don't watch but OK paying full freight for Netflix where you'll watch less than 5% of the available content? You're subsidizing the other 95%! Or that a-la-carte channel you want, you won't be watching it 24 hours per day so why subsidize programming that's on when you're sleeping or at work? Do you listen to every genre on Spotify? Use every machine at your gym? Drive on every road in your town? Read every article in the local newspaper (if your town still prints one)? Refuse to subsidize! Demand some money back!
Its not unbundling you really want, or a-la-carte, it's just a lower price tag.
> Or that a-la-carte channel you want, you won't be watching it 24 hours per day so why subsidize programming that's on when you're sleeping or at work?
You have correctly identified the business case for cinema and DVDs.
The cinema business case is “going out” “big screen” and “new release” but this could all be disrupted. It’s not a payg model that attracts people to the cinema and many movie chains have a subscription model!
And buying DVD's is a terrible value compared to a service like Netflix, so congrats, you just reinforced their point.
Like, a single movie DVD/Blu Ray costs about as much as an entire month of Netflix. Unless you're hardly watching any TV shows or movies on Netflix, that's just an awful value.
I can get an entire season of one of my favorite TV shows on DVD at the used bookstore for an average of $15. Not only does it usually take me a month to go through the 24 episodes in a typical season, but there's special features to enjoy and I can re-watch the show at any time without paying for it a second time.
There's something about your use of "correctly" here that seems hostile, arrogant and antagonistic. This isn't a quiz, nobody was even talking about movies or DVDs, and I certainly wasn't seeking "FeepingCreature"'s validation.
There are certain channels whose content I feel causes societal damage. Namely, Fox news. Id happily pay a buck or two more to ensure not a dime of my bill subsidizes that channel.
I don't understand why they don't do that with YouTube channels too [edit: as in "sub to each channel a la cart"]. Let users pay $1 or $2 a month to disable ads on a channel (or $10 a month for "YouTube Premium"). That seems much more sustainable than relying exclusively on ads for income and loosing potential subscription customers to Patreon. They could even offer higher priced, per-channel subscription tiers that add flairs to comments and unlock emojis like Twitch.
Twitch, Floatplane, and Patreon are all proof it's a viable strategy.
Ad revenue has proven to be terribly unstable and YouTube is extremely expensive to maintain. They should be desperately trying to diversify their revenue.
Right now, every video that isn't "advertiser friendly" is dead weight and money on the table.
> Let users pay $1 or $2 a month to disable ads on a channel (or $10 a month for "YouTube Premium"). That seems much more sustainable than relying exclusively on ads for income
In your parenthesis you said, "or ten dollars a month on YouTube premium." What did you mean by that? I thought you meant that a YouTube premium subscription for $10 a month would be acceptable but maybe you meant something else.
"YouTube Premium" is a subscription service that allows users to disable ads on the entire platform (plus a few other minor perks) for a flat monthly fee. I guess it's actually $12/month, not $10/month. That subscription fee supplements the platform and creators for the lost ad revenue.
I meant that they could continue to offer YouTube Premium as a way to disable ads on all channels and support premium subscriptions for individual channels as an alternative for users who might not be interested in buying YouTube Premium just to support one or two channels.
> as a way to disable ads on all channels and support premium subscriptions for individual channels
Ah. In your comment you said "or," so I thought you meant "or." As in YouTube should offer this or that, not YouTube should offer this and that. But it seems like another poster has also brought up the relatively new channel membership feature.
You need to in the Partner program and have 30‘000 subs though (1000 for gaming content).
This is obviously very important for YouTube Gaming. They are (finally) getting into bundling one membership per month with YouTube Premium.
This is IMO the single most reason why Twitch is so successful. They should’ve copied Twitch Prime much earlier. The fact that kids can use their free sub a month from their parents Amazon Prime sub was a stroke of genius.
Interesting. I watch a lot of content through YouTube daily, but I have never seen this "Channel Memberships" thing. Thanks!
EDIT: Wow. I'm even subed to MKBHD, the example you use in your other comment, and I never noticed the "Join" button before. YouTube does a terrible job of advertising that! How am I even supposed to know what "Join" means? Thanks again for pointing that out!
> I don't understand why they don't do that with YouTube channels too. Let users pay $1 or $2 a month to disable ads on a channel (or $10 a month for "YouTube Premium"). That seems much more sustainable than relying exclusively on ads for income and loosing potential subscription customers to Patreon. They could even offer higher priced, per-channel subscription tiers that ad flairs to comments and unlock emojis like Twitch.
Complex subscription options are one of the easiest way to lose subscribers.
> Twitch, Floatplane, and Patreon are all proof it's a viable strategy.
> Ad revenue has proven to be terribly unstable and YouTube is extremely expensive to maintain. They should be desperately trying to diversify their revenue.
Source? Alphabets ad revenue is extremely stable for the company and keeps on growing. So is YouTube share in it. Ad revenue for creators tho - that's a different story.
> Complex subscription options are one of the easiest way to lose subscribers.
Source? Twitch and Patreon get along just fine. The existing options can continue as they are.
> It's far from being proven.
YouTube has already swallowed the expensive part of the deal - creating a video hosting platform. I'm just asking them to augment their monetization scheme that other platforms have already demonstrated demand for.
> Source? Alphabets ad revenue is extremely stable for the company and keeps on growing.
Source for what? Of course YouTube is expensive. It's expensive to host content at that scale. It's expensive to regulate content at that scale to comply with the law and satisfy ad partners. I don't know what else to say. I don't know if YouTube operates at a profit or not, but that's not really relevant.
What matters is YouTube's profit is almost completely dependent on their ability to sell ads. Content without ads can only benefit the platform if it drives premium subscriptions or drives users towards content with ads.
Source for a claim that selling ads is extremely unstable. Check alphabet or Facebook earning reports from last 10 years.
> I don't know if YouTube operates at a profit or not, but that's not really relevant.
How is operating at profit not relevant in a context of a business model? Especially when suggested business models of companies that lose money, like patreon, as a something that YouTube should be doing.
We’re so deep in the bubble now. Real business models and profits are irrelevant as long as they seem cool.
> It’s how human brain operates. We’re very easily overwhelmed with multiple options.
Then just present those options intelligently. Without overwhelming the user. I'm not convinced the model I'm proposing is that complex. Many content creators supplement their income with this exact model, but YouTube doesn't get a cut.
> Source for a claim that selling ads is extremely unstable. Check alphabet or Facebook earning reports from last 10 years.
Earning reports do not reflect the revenue earned from each ad. Alphabet is a massive company that serves ads on much more than just YouTube. The mounting interest YouTube has shown in "advertiser friendly" and "kid friendly" content demonstrates how concerned they are regarding their ad revenue.
> How is operating at profit not relevant in a context of a business model? Especially when suggested business models of companies that lose money, like patreon, as a something that YouTube should be doing.
You keep bringing up how Patreon isn't doing well as though it's obviously the fault of the monetization model, rather than the extraordinary cost of deploying a diverse content hosting service that has to compete with established giants like YouTube. YouTube already has that part done. They are paying to host the content no matter how they monetize it. Why do you think deploying a new, optional monetization option will result in a net loss?
I brought up Patreon, Twitch, and Floatplane because they demonstrate there is demand for that model. If YouTube offers it, people will certainly buy it. Just the a la cart, per-channel, tiered subscription model. That's it.
Whether or not YouTube operates in the black is not particularly relevant. I'm talking about augmenting their existing ad-based revenue model, not replacing it. For the overwhelming majority of users, it wouldn't change a thing, but YouTube could stand to bring in a lot more revenue from the minority who would be willing to purchase payed subs to support the platform and creators.
No. YouTube Premium is a subscription to the whole platform, not a channel. It does not allow me to subscribe to channels a la cart. If I only watch one or two channels regularly, my options are to A) buy YouTube Premium, B) watch with ads, C) watch with an ad blocker. I bet YouTube would see more than a few people switch from C to B if they supported per-channel subscriptions.
They could bring in even more revenue with subscription tiers that offer trivial rewards like comment flairs, special emojis, or early access to videos. Even if most of the extra revenue from higher tiers goes to the channel instead of the platform, it would still be extra revenue for practically no cost.
YouTube also lets you subscribe to individual channels. Go to some of the popular ones and you'll see a price next to the subscribe button. Channels can choose to publish videos to subscribers only.
Edit: depending on what your region is it might not be a thing yet. But if your region supports Premium, I‘m pretty sure memberships are supported as well.
The conventional TV channels don't allow their networks to be sold a-la-carte because they all make more money via the bundle than anyone would be willing to pay for their channels individually. Remember that most of these channels are related - for example, NBC owns Telemundo, SyFy, USA, Bravo, E!, Oxygen, etc. They sell all of those through bundles and keep $20/mo or so, but how many people would pay that much for any one of the channels, and how many people would actually buy them all?
I think everyone would love to just get their favorite channels for (let's say) $3/mo/channel with no ads... but that would be a huge loss for the media companies, so they won't sell that way.
Instead what we're seeing is disruption via alternative models, like Netflix, HBO, Apple TV+, and now even the biggest media owner (Disney) offering Disney+ and ESPN+ direct.
I'm not sure if conventional TV will still exist in its current form in a decade, but I don't think we'll ever see today's bundled TV become available a-la-carte, because it isn't compatible with that business model.
Just cancelled. The value proposition of YouTube TV was great a few years ago, for $40 a month. They've added a bunch of channels I won't watch several times, and raised the price multiple times now. I wish they had a cheaper option, with the original channels.
Now they're doing the exact thing that drove everyone away from their cable company to them in the first place. It's clear misunderstanding of their customers. I'm sure most of the HN demographic would have no real trouble affording this 30% rate hike, but it's not about the actual money, it's about the principle.
They're also no longer price-competitive with traditional cable TV, which many people rely on as their only source of wired Internet. When it costs $60/mo for Internet, and only another $40/mo to bundle cable TV, why would I spend $25 extra for YouTube TV instead? The unlimited DVR is nice, but most cable providers also offer some DVR functionality and tons of on-demand content. They also increasingly offer streaming to other devices. YouTube TV is only a marginally better experience in some ways, and worse in others, with a smaller channel selection. At $40, it was monetarily a wash; at $65, they need to offer something that cable isn't giving me, and at the moment they don't.
Yes! I noticed the next time I launched the YouTube TV app they added a screen I've never seen before where it reminded me how much value they were providing (basically the DVR) and showed me a list of shows to add to my unlimited DVR.
I agree the "unlimited" DVR is nice but even then it's not truly unlimited and it doesn't give me the part of unlimited that I'm interested in. I don't need unlimited shows saved for a year, I want to save a few things until I get to them or the odd rare special thing I want to save forever.
Starting to remind of Amazon Prime, which started out at $79 a year for two day shipping and is now $120 a year for two day shipping plus a bunch of crap I don't need or want.
Increases like this will accelerate the jump away from cable. There is no infrastructure costs comparable to physical cable, or last mile boxes and equipment. Just OTT.
I’ve recently started watching more YouTube and while the production quality might not be where people like, you can certainly find meaningful content for non-fiction.
I was already considering cancelling but this is the nail in the coffin. We don’t care about the added channels. Also, the recordings are usually messed up. It will be a new show but think it’s already been watched. So we typically turn on the show in between its air time just to catch it. The iOS app makes it easier to choose which to watch. We mainly watch on Apple TV and the UI is not very good... good bye.
Started at the beginning but all things come to an end. What was once a sports centric + news service has become more and more bloated. Is the audience really cord cutters? As it is probably far cheaper to get a cable+internet package than just internet + yttv.
In honestly, was probably gone once baseball started as they recently dropped YES network. Same goes for many friends in the north east who were also using yttv.
Think this may have an effect of pushing more people to get adblockers and Netflix subscriptions than anything else. Or they just want people to get free Youtube so that they have a wider audience of ad viewers to sell to advertisers.
At least they were nice enough to include a link to cancel the service in their email about the price hike. Seriously! Other services purposefully make it difficult, so props to Google for doing the right thing there.
I liked the service but I just don't use it enough to continue. I'll re-subscribe when they drop the price again.
I agree, it was really easy. Unfortunately I first pressed the "manage my services" button which took me down a deep rabbit hole of other google services.
I've resigned from TV be it cable or online version ages ago and have never looked back. Not paying crazy price for bunch of garbage with the one or two channels I've used to actually watch. Goodbye vultures.
Disappointing, as Youtube TV's low entry price for the last several years took the wind out of Playstation Vue, which I really enjoyed. It's frustrating to see the big tech companies engage in monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior by selling services at a loss to drive out competition only to then jack up prices.
I doubt this is intentional. Google has no moat here - they own none of the content they provide, and the content owners have all the leverage over price.
It’s just odd that they bothered getting into this space in the first place and that they used their YouTube brand for this - “YouTube” was meant to disrupt and subvert established television, not become a part of it.
I guess Google’s thinking was that the data about what people are watching was worth something which would allow them to extract higher ad revenue from TV-provider-ad-inserts as they’d be more targeted than the general-audience ads you get with traditional cable/satellite TV - but Sling and PS Vue have the same proposition to advertisers.
I can't grasp paying $65/ month for all my streaming combined, let alone just one service. I could buy a season pass to 3 new great shows every month for that much.
For the few months I tried YoutubeTV, the stream consistently failed (especially for live sports) and I reported it several times. I finally disputed three months of their charges with my credit card company. Google accepted the disputes within a day and effectively gave a $150 refund. I later canceled, but important to know they’re willing to give out their crappy service for free without a fight.
Pluto.TV is free because of commercials, and it has 250+ channels. It has a TV guide for what is playing and while it has no DVR it has the ability to start a movie from the beginning so you don't miss it.
I've never heard of this before now. It looks legit. How are they able to remain free? Do they inject more ads than the already existing ones? It's not like TV doesn't already have ads.
EDIT: Okay, looked at the channels. Looks like they just don't have the expensive ones (ESPN, etc). So it doesn't have the sports people want.
Personally I might keep it at $65 if they had just value added youtube premium with it. I was hoping they would do this at some point as an option. But will most likely not happen.
There are so many free alternatives now days... PlutoTV, Locast, Plex & Tubi. These combine with Netflix or Prime Video or even TV+ is more than enough.
The distinction that needs to be made is that people aren't typically looking for things to watch, they're looking for a specific thing (generally live sports).
Price hike aside I cannot support a company that abuses creators. It used to be such a great source of knowledge and content but now it’s been gutted and has become just as mind numbing as daytime TV.
At $20 they were disruptive, at $65, they are dead to me. I will be interesting to see how many others leave. The "teaser" cable package is more channels and half the cost.
I think it is just a continuing trend in Google getting squeezed harder and harder by the falling search advertising margins and no replacement or even side hustle to compensate.
Just before Google winks out of relevance I expect to see them try to charge people to use maps.
I don't disagree, but how much of that pricing authority is directly related to market share? The billion dollar question is, if Google charged $9.99/month for access to Google Maps, what would that do to their market share if OSM, Apple, and Microsoft/Bing were still "free" ?
I've observed that as the other search services have improved their free offerings, it has negatively affected what Google can charge to advertise on their search results, which has put pressure on their profitability. So at what dollar cost do the free alternatives become "good enough" and everyone switches?
As an aside, I've already switched to Apple maps because it lets me continue to save favorite places and addresses without having to turn on privacy eroding options (web and location history in Google). But I recognize I maybe unique in that I value that aspect highly.
Honestly, I'd be happy to pay for Google Maps if it meant my recommendations would be free of sponsorship bias. Google Maps is hands-down my favorite app.
But, I'd feel pretty bad if everybody had to pay for Google Maps, since so many people rely on it.
I agree, but to charge for it would be an admission from Google that their profitability is under siege. It also opens the door to competition from Apple and Microsoft who could continue to offer free maps (their side hustles* (phones and Apps/OSes) continue to cover those costs).
The challenge I think for Google would be to charge what supporting maps actually costs to have the unit be revenue neutral. Street view fleets, satellite imagery, and 100,000+ machines with multi-petabyte data sets cost a bit, not to mention the engineers who work on massaging the data, developing the hardware, and operating the equipment.
Would you pay $25/month for Google Maps access? Or would you switch to Open Street Maps, Bing Maps and/or Apple Maps which were still free.
* In theory everything is a side hustle to the business of collecting data on people but Microsoft and Apple have revenue streams that aren't as threatened by increasing data privacy efforts that Google's are.
Still a good value. Comparable cable service in our area still hovers around $95/month, plus this has better recording and works on many devices (simultaneously!). We've had it for two years and no complaints -- we recommend it.
I paid Google for Google One and it doesnt include Youtube Premium, their own video service. Whilst Amazon Prime gives you Prime Now, Prime Video and Prime Delivery. Much better value.
You get the same ads as when the show is airing live and if it’s a local market slot you get a dark screen with text saying it’s taking a commercial break.
When watching shows you recorded as a DVR you can skip them by fast forwarding.
When watching shows YouTube tv has offered that you didn’t record you get preroll and in-line ads that are usually unskippable just like Hulu.
Having really only watched TV, in my university years through piracy, or later through dvd, streaming services etc. I have become so sensitive to interstitial advertising that I can't stand it.
I have recently returned to watching golf by subscription to sky sports golf. They often mirror the NBC/CBS advertising schedule instead of using the clean feed. Totally ruins the golf tournament. I have to pause 45 mins before I watch and use an app I've written to quickly jump the two minute ad breaks.
I've spent much time in American hotel rooms. Watching TV there is like entering an ADHD simulation.
Yeah, I thought this was referring to YouTube Premium at first (which doesn't seem so bad as it would let me download videos to my phone to watch when I don't have connectivity)
This YoutubeTV thing just seems awful - frankly I'm amazed it has lasted this long.
They seem to be making a fundamental mistake in calculating their prices?
It seems when they add a new channel that costs say 100M pa to broadcast they divide the cost by their existing number of subscribers and mark up accordingly.
surely everyone else does it by "in five years i will have all the subscribers so divide by that number"
Over and over, customer surveys showed people want a la carte cable. They perceive their high bill as paying for 100 channels they have no interest in to get 3 they want. And yet, no provider will offer it that way.
It's the endless cycle between bundled and a-la-carte (regardless of medium).
Cable TV was already priced optimally and digital versions are just catching up. People want more channels from a single source, but each person wants their own selection. Bundling brings down overall cost and provides many more channels, especially smaller ones with more niche content. A-la-carte can be cheaper (not always) but is limited in content.
Add in licensing and rules by content producers and there's no escape. Something fundamental needs to change beyond just the delivery mechanism of video. Many people now watch Youtube creators as a replacement for TV so maybe that's the future altogether.
These OTT retransmission of mostly FTA broadcast channel services haven't caught on at all anywhere globally except the US, and that seems to have been mostly a focus of unsustainable pricing.
It's a shame the US sector is so badly regulated. Must carry obligations and effective competition mean many of these bits of structural weirdness didn't happen elsewhere.
When I ditched cable TV my bandwidth usage skyrocketed. Now that the prices are closer, there seems to be almost no benefit to streaming TV. My Internet will be faster and Xfinity's apps are as good if not better than YT.
I still don't understand, and refuse to pay for, basic TV in the United States. Bunny ear is now a digital receiver with even more local broadcast options. And yt brings no value add, imho.
I don't get how everyone was in the "cut the cord" movement not too long ago when all we really have done is create another cord. $70 a month is way too much for a bunch of channels included with basic $30 package in my area:
You have to watch Comcast, though. Does the quoted rate include their local station rebroadcast fee? Their "sports fee"? These two together were something like $14/month -- and not disclosed in the price of any package -- when I finally dropped their scammy ass about 16 months ago. PLUS any boxes you may or may not have to use.
Couldn't YouTube TV at least do what other providers and cable companies do- have different packages with different sets of channels? That + the DVR functionality/etc just might be enough to make it worth it to enough users instead of only having this noncompetitive high price-point.
I can't stand any normal cable TV other than sports, so both YTTV and cable are not for me at all, but my local cable company offers enough channels at less than $65 that even if I did decide to pay for cable TV, YT TV is a tough sell.
10 years ago I imagined online live tv would become 100% alacarte, pay just for what you watch... but unfortunately we continue to pay for tv like we always have, we just got rid of the box (in some cases not even the box).
I have tried Sling and have used all service's free trial, but at the end of the day I am not willing to pay full price to watch 10% of the content. I do miss watching live sports... and thankfully, we are getting more streaming options now.
I was thinking the other day: if you replace the word "commercial" with "ad", it somehow seems much more ridiculous to be spending $50+ month for a video service, only to still have to sit through countless ads.
It seems obvious, but for some reason, I accepted that TV will have "commercials", but I always associated "ads" with computers. Maybe it's a regional/language thing...IDK.
So you want me to pay for the privilege of watching a mind numbing stream of psychologically manipulative advertisements interspersed with the toxic, propaganda laden death throes of the legacy media? No thanks.
YouTube Premium may already be censored by a paranoid AI taking personal kickbacks from Jimmy Kimmel Show, but at least I can still find good content with a little effort.
The amount of money I would pay monthly for ALL the TV shows I care about delivered at mp4/mkv files that I can stream to any of my devices without commercials/tracking and with good subtitles is probably close to $150+/mo.
Unfortunately there is only 1 way to realistically do this and it involves piracy and costs somewhere from free to <$15/mo (+hardware which can vary greatly).
If you are on Spectrum, check out the TV Choice package as a decent option for a la carte. It's $28/mo (including the broadcast fee) on a 2-year promotion. I get all the local channels as well as 10 channels that I pick (which includes ESPN/2/FS1). They have decent app support, and while the app blocks certain channels (like ESPN) while not on the home network, the subscription allows you to use the ESPN app anywhere.
I was planning to start using YTTV when sports start up again. We were using Hulu Live before and, while it wasn't terrible, I wanted to give YTTV a try.
This price hike kills that option. I will go back to Hulu or, more likely, just add TV to my monthly Fios package.
I'm 31 and I find this totally insane! Why would you pay $65/mo for something that has 8 minutes of commercial for every 22 minutes of content? Regular TV is dead to me now that we have streaming services. I'll pay for the content, but don't waste my time trying to make more money by showing me ads. I haven't had a regular TV connection since leaving for college.
I really felt "meh" about YouTube TV when I used it. To make matters worse about a 5th of the things I asked it to record ended up being the wrong thing. No idea how they managed it. All I got back when I reported the incorrect recording was a "whoops, sorry".
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