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
465 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 324 ms ] threadI 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 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.
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.
None of which explains how I went from grandfathered in at $35 to this is a year or so.
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.
And with s contract....
Planet Money had an episode on starting a small cable TV channel. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/471633490
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.
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.).
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
[2] https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/
Not really.
> (Previously, it was 100% in-house.)
Nope.
Even in-house programming doesn't mean you're free of underlying copyright issues.
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.
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.
[1] - https://www.multichannel.com/news/is-the-retrans-cash-cow-ru...
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).
So the opposite of what some ISPs are trying to pull.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like a long study, but I suppose it's nice to have a bigger dataset.
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.
They might also need to sell you a short-term lease on that particular drive bay, so that you are playing the DVD in your own home too.
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 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.
Kind of sad it got killed off :(
[1] https://www.locast.org
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locast#Legal_challenge
So none of the research results will be licensed, patented, or used to bolster the universities reputation?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20491571
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).
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.
They skipped ATSC 2. There were a couple broadcasters experimenting with newer codecs on ATSC, but I think that mostly fizzled out.
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.
With digital TV, several channels are multiplexed into a single broadcast frequency, so channel hopping is sometimes OK even with a single tuner.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...
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.
And we can ignore creators who over-monetize if we want (or buy Premium or use adblocking).
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.
“Every eleven minutes” because each “half hour” episode is two separate segments totaling 22 minutes.
Broadcast was utterly unbearable when I visited the US 20 years back, I can't imagine watching it today.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-commercial_educational_sta...
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.
Of course that company should have cornered “digital music on the internet” but we’re themselves stuck in the radio mindset.
Edit: it appears that its original name was PopCatcher [2], by a company with the same name
[1] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/intempo-rebel-review/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PopCatcher
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.
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.
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.
Most programming is on earlier.
How is that not advertising?
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.)
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.
This isn't Facebook.
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
> First post!
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.
Not $65 amazed granted.
More seriously though, it looks like people are overwhelmingly not happy about this change. Google already launched a special form to give feedback:
https://support.google.com/youtubetv/contact/yttv_price_hike...)
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."
Yeah, they were epicly tone-deaf on the Google Maps price hike:
Google Maps rep: Can we book a meeting next week to talk about new features in Google Maps?
Me: ok.
[week goes by]
Google Maps rep: We're excited to announce that Google Maps is 10x more expensive now. Isn't that great?
Me: Wait a minute. How does that help me?
Google Maps rep: Have a nice day!
Me switches to free OpenLayers API by OpenStreetMap.
For $65/month, it would be nice to at least have a decent interface. Google pls buy Tivo and incorporate that.
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.
$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>
Until networks change their pricing model this a la carte option is not going to work out the way people hope.
Even paying extra in lieu of bundling, prices like that could work out if you make ESPN a separate $5-10 option.
https://ctv.kwayisi.org/networks/cnbc/
https://www.sling.com/channels/cnbc
Source: I head a Product organization at a mega media org.
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?
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.
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.
[1] - twitter.com/NetflixIsAJoke
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?
If you're going to make suggestions, think of something realistic, at least.
And the prices! Outrageous. I’m glad I stick with Netflix.
https://twitter.com/RichLightShed/status/1224454820309811202
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.
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.
Unfortunate. Too much money for me and I won't be continuing my subscription.
https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker?channels=cnbc,espn,espn...
"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.
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
https://help.amplifi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037903234-Tele...
Can't speak as to whether the performance of a router's hardware is enough for VPN together with two streams of video.
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.
[0] https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install
[1] https://www.wireguard.com/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spectrum-tv/id420455839
"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"
petty but quite brilliant!
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.
If you know C suit level, then you know within the next metric, you'll have the ammo to cancel the whole thing.
Its gone starting August 15th.
Is Google running out of money?