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.
My take is that Google in particular likes this development (though are probably trying to stay away from it publicly for political reasons) because it allows them to easily (ie. with studio blessing) pilot monetizing their vast YouTube-watching userbase by offering paid content services and user profiling far beyond what is available on cable networks (eg. by selling 'anonymized' matches of consumer viewing behaviour in conjunction with email, location, sleeping-schedule as determined by a cross-section of Google services, etc.). Existing Google projects and their recent significant investment in video (patents, new LA offices, Android 'Smart TVs', ChromeOS Google Fiber) all look like they will benefit from this type of development. With all due respect to people who work at Google, please consider protesting internally in parallel to this public effort, or leaving.
Note that this is YouTube TV, not YouTube itself. They are separate services. Google has just muddied the waters repeatedly by moving a bunch of services under the YouTube branding.
I'm in no way surprised. I thought this was a questionable idea when it debuted and it never struck me as something that could actually grow into something popular.
Part of the issue, I think, is that Google as a company fundamentally does not understand content. (YouTube is the one exception here and even with YouTube, the way the whole YouTube partner program works, the way the ad side is run and other aspects make it clear that they still really don't get content -- they just happen to have a great platform and a few people trying to convince people who make more than them to think outside the algorithm).
It was an interesting idea but marred with poor execution and a dwindling Google+ audience.
It's a great example of what both companies see as their value proposition (to users, and to Wall Street).
Roku: aggregating multiple streaming providers in a provider-agnostic way
Google: centralizing streaming through the YouTube brand (considering it comprises multiple offerings now)
I'm not a huge fan of Roku, due to data collection, but it's apparent who's on the side of the user here. Google/YouTube has finally grown big enough to be everything we hated about legacy content providers.
Slightly off topic here but I still think a large part of that is due to hostility from more traditional content providers. The promise of GoogleTV (that was mostly squashed before it had a chance to mature) was that it provided a front-end for content on more traditional satellite/cable services as well as for finding all of the free streams available on network websites and newer platforms like Youtube and Vimeo.
I think the real disruptive potential of GoogleTV was that it allowed you to search for something and have results from all of these disparate feeds show up in a single list. It put content from the web (including independent and user-generated content) on par with network programming or programming delivered via the web instead of a cable subscription.
When networks blocked GoogleTV from accessing their streams without tinkering with user agent strings, etc. it really put a dent in the whole strategy. The point was to show you everything that was available on the big screen in your living room. Networks wanted you to watch on the TV via the more lucrative cable and rental options and only use free web streams as an alternative when you're at your computer in the office or the hotel.
In this way, current tablet-to-TV options like Chromecast and AppleTV are less disruptive since they don't put web content on the same level as cable content. To watch TV you just flip through the channels. To watch web stuff you need to connect some device and push content to the TV. It's a small thing but I think it's a legitimate difference. Firing up YouTube to push a video to your TV isn't the same as searching for "video games" on your Google/Apple TV and seeing TotalBiscuit come up in the same search results as something from Viacom.
I'm skeptical that YouTube would be using this for anything remotely significant given Google's strong propensity to only use internal technologies that they fully control.
This isn't about Youtube, this is simply use of a property with a massive userbase owned by Google to promote its strategic priority du jour, which is getting traction for Google+. This is hardly the first time Google has done this -- for example, they'll often bootstrap key products with "Oh yeah, we have a mortal lock on navigation on the Internet." That's why Google Video (and later Youtube) got such prominent billing in the search results, why Chrome has a front-page-of-the-Internet banner ad on the homepage of the company that doesn't do banner ads, etc.
+ Edit to add: A quick check of a few diverse searches show that Youtube is substantially less prominent than I remember it being.
Wow that's ugly. I don't know if the Google brand is the best thing for them to use here, maybe they could have bought a lesser Groupon competitor and kept their brand. It seems from the outside that Youtube is one of Google's most successful purchases because they kept it a little separate.
I don't really understand what's the point of this. YouTube is already my TV. With a little streamlining and a little bit more intelligence, I wouldn't have to even click the links and just switch on autoplay to stream all the interesting content I want to see for the day. That vision is not far away.
Is Google purposefully sabotaging their subscription integration in order to leave space for paid services?
Yep, I confirm that is my experience as well. Google is starting to inch towards the television industry. In all honesty Im not watching any TV these days but i imagine its some advertising and snippets of content. Youtube without membership or ad blockers is just like that if not worse. From how if started to what is has become it’s a long way…
Ooh ohh I've got an idea. Put things back how they were. YouTube doesn't make sense as a primary Google-branded property. It's users have a different of needs than other Google-branded products do. Hell, YouTube isn't even housed in Mountain View. It's in a different city.
I doubt that most users understand that Youtube and Google are the same company. Having a single signon between those two services makes very little sense. As for the other services, those under the Google brand, it makes more sense.
It's the attempt to push Google+ on me that I dislike.
And many if not most of those YouTube creators are increasingly dissatisfied with Googles management and are looking for an alternative platform. It seems like such an obvious missed opportunity.
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.
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