As much as I hate to admit it, I'll probably still pay it because it's just so much superior to other cable offerings(recording, multiple devices). And there's no other way to watch live sports.
Conveniently too. Last year I went to a friend's house to watch a football game and he refuses to pay for YouTube TV or any sports streaming because 'theres free streams on the internet'.
He had to get up every 5 minutes to refresh Chrome on his laptop he had connected to the TV or find a new stream because they get taken down so quickly.
70$ a month is well worth ever dealing with that shit
I've been streaming sports illegally almost 20 years now. I'm fine dealing with the ad-infested websites and constant refreshing of streams taken down for once a month events like UFC fights.
But for every day? I'll gladly pay the $1-2 a day to never deal with that.
Our TV bill just went up and I'm debating exploring YT TV.
What I want is the main Sports Networks (FS1, FS2, ESPN, ESPN2), my Regional Sports Network (but that's a Bally channel now -- and that's kind of a bit of a mess at the moment), and MLB TV (the cable channel, not their own MLB service).
I also want "DVR" for everything, and I want to be able to skip the ads (ideally with a +30s button).
I typically watch my games delayed so I can skip the ads, or even just plain "later". We DVR everything else.
YT TV DVR is best in class in my experience. You can set it to record every NCAA men's basketball game that ever airs if you want, or just your team etc.
IPTV providers are about as close as you can get to a perfect sports experience (TV/Movies have had a superior piracy experience for well on a decade+ now) and illegal IPTV providers leave a /lot/ to be desired. I don't use them since I don't care for sports but I've seen others use them and they are way better than the random "mirror 1, mirror 2, mirror 3..." sports piracy sites. However the quality is still iffy and you have to jump through hoops as providers are taken offline.
At the end of the day if I wanted to watch sports I'd just throw enough money at the problem to watch them legally. When it comes to TV/Movies, on the other hand, you cannot pay for the best experience (legally) which is really sad.
I have YouTube TV now and was pleasantly impressed with the software on Comcast Xfinity when I saw it recently.
Meanwhile YouTube TV on the Apple TV is a shit show, with non-native controls that lag, search that barely works and no integration with system services so searching for a channel by voice doesn’t work. And it still doesn’t free me from having to pay for Fox News!
Unless the software stops being the moral equivalent of electron on the TV, I’ll be moving back to cable when I next move house.
Because its alway been cable. Just Youtube, Sony, Fubo etc are the cable provider.
Yes it streams, but it was never the same as a streaming service.
Something like PlutoTv or the soon to be oversaturated FAST market is just rabbit ears.
Mono culture is coming back big in the next couple of years, and this is how.
When our streaming forefathers spoke of a la carte as the future, they should have specified each individual piece of content and not a la carte channels. It would have saved us all a lot of money.
The issue is is that all the big networks still own all the rights. Initially they sold them for cheap to vMVPDs but now the networks are charging more so YouTube fubo etc have to pay more leading to these price increases.
I think you're pretty right, but that we are currently in a boom time for standalone streaming apps, where in addition to the big guys (Netflix, DisneyHuluESPN, perhaps another 1-2 who do have both access to huge amounts of owned content and great scale) we also have every other video content producer (Warner Discovery/HBO, Paramount, NBC/Peacock, etc) currently trying to make a go of keeping as much of their content exclusive to their own bespoke paid streaming service as they can. Many of these will probably fail and hopefully resume licensing things to streaming platforms that are bigger and more appealing.
Monoculture won't be coming back since a part of it was everyone watching or listening to something at the same time. If you missed the finale of Seinfeld or Cheers you'd have to wait a long time to see it again. No one is keeping their calendar open to watch any sort of media these days.
Ala carte was most certainly not the streaming dream; in fact it's the exact opposite. The selling point of early streaming Netflix was that it had everything for one price - i.e. more bundled than cable.
The current situation of having 10 streaming services exists because Netflix wouldn't raise their prices to become cable. Netflix's business model only worked because the people making the content undervalued streaming rights. When they started asking for real money, Netflix balked[0], so they pulled their shows to their own service so they could charge users directly.
[0] Because $9.99/mo is a more attractive price than $72.99/mo
The dream of a la carte (before streaming was even a remote possibility) was to choose which channels you actually watched and which you didn't want and you would be charged accordingly. It was a reaction to too many channels that people didn't want but were charged outrageously for anyway. Cable was highly priced back then as I assume it still is today. Instead of all-or-nothing, people wanted to pay only for what they wanted in the hopes of reducing their overall bill.
But why would à la carte be that much cheaper? If a user watches a certain amount of streamed video, it doesn't cost more to stream it if it comes from ten different channels than if it comes from a single channel.
It's not. But the branding works because Americans are socialized that "customization" must be good. And because changing things often temporarily makes things better.
(Liberty Mutual Insurance takes this to the limits of absurdity by advertising "insurance customized so you only pay for what you'll need to use".)
I have no interest in paying for sports, so I do not buy sports. I can buy individual episodes, seasons, or month to month subscriptions within seconds now.
I now wait until all the episodes are out, and word of mouth from multiple sources has established quality of the content, to purchase it. I can then consume it within a month or few months, and cancel the subscription. Or rent the movie for a few dollars.
I probably pay $150 per year at most. Before a la carte steaming, that would have easily been $75+ per month with contracts and equipment fees or whatnot to Comcast. Mostly to pay for other people’s interest in sports.
> when our streaming forefathers spoke of a la carte as the future, they should have specified each individual piece of content and not a la carte channels.
Previously, this wasn't cheaper, you could get basically all the things with 2 subs, e.g. Netflix and Hulu Plus w/ Live.
Then there was a sort of golden age where Apple TV or Amazon Prime offered brand umbrellas as individual channel subscriptions. You could even add/cancel them right in the iPhone's subscription list (a few are still there).
Now most shows are congregating back under brands, each wanting full freight as if they had it all, the combination adds up.
Doing the math, if you watch specific named shows instead of background TV, it's to where season purchases might again make sense for individuals or DINK type households that only watch prestige TV.
This is incredibly stupid naming. I saw these prices and just entirely gave up even thinking about premium until I saw the note (and then I still gave up on it, anyway).
Google has decided to use Youtube branding for anything media related. Youtube Music instead of Google Play Music, Youtube Movies & TV instead of Google Play Movies & TV (which is hanging on for now).
It's also an internal organizational thing. Anything with a YouTube label is managed by the YouTube org within Google. So Google Music -> YouTube Music was not just a rebrand, it was a new codebase managed by a new team (although some engineers likely moved over).
And it's not only the names that are stupid. 50% of the time on my TV when I'm trying to open the Youtube app, I end up clicking on the Youtube TV app, because the logos look exactly the same.
I think the smart thing to have done would have been to bundle Youtube TV subscriptions with Youtube Premium access - or at least have a Youtube One subscription plan for $79.99 or something.
Otherwise as a potential new customer, Youtube TV seems to be one of just many offerings with no real advantage.
> Why should it if technology is inherently deflationary?
Most of it's not paying for the tech: It's paying for the licensing fees to the TV channels. And at least one of those licenses will always ask for more money, and none of them will ever ask for less money - Not unless TV & other streaming services are fully killed off and YouTube is literally the only place that people can watch TV.
Reductively: YouTube will have to be the sole broadcasting company for the entire world before these media companies will ever bend the knee.
I dislike price rises, and related I dislike paying for expensive sports licensing I don't watch. Sports fans should pay for sports instead of everyone subsidizing it.
That being said, as someone who helped family move off of cable in the last year, this is only inching closer to cable's headline pricing which is largely a fiction. All the big four providers of cable/satellite have the following pricing:
Sometimes you can keep threatening to cancel, take out a new 12-24 month contract, and keep the "discounted" price. But in my experience each discount is less and less generous relative to what they're advertising.
Then there are taxes & fees. The taxes are, well, taxes and also apply to streaming TV. But a lot of the "fees" have nothing at all to do with government. They're just unavoidable parts of the service's price that the cable/satellite vendors split off to misrepresent the costs.
These include, but not limited to:
- Equipment fee (main box cannot be avoided, additional boxes can be)
- Broadcast TV Fee + Regional Sports Fee (unavoidable)
- HD TV Fee (often if your equipment SUPPORTS HD then you are required to pay it)
- Administrative/Convenience Fees (rarely this can be reduced by jumping through hoops e.g. pay by paper check)
These can easily add $20 to your bill. If your contract doesn't allow monthly increases, that can sometimes not apply to fees (either increases to existing or new ones).
Now I pay $80 a year for MLS Season Pass, which is about a month of Hulu Live TV. And I won’t have to see shitty compressed ESPN+ or Bally streams for a decade.
Does that have blackouts for "local" teams? I'm 1-2 hours (traffic depending) from the Mets and MLB subscription in the past was useless for live games due to blackout restrictions.
Exactly. I had a 24 month special deal expiring recently and switched to YouTube TV. I kept the same internet plan, and between that, YouTube, and Netflix (it was free withy
Old deal) I’m still paying about $50 (soon to be 40ish) lees per month than I had on the special deal price
> I dislike paying for expensive sports licensing I don't watch.
In this line, I've been paying Fanatiz for a while and I absolutely vouch for their service. It was a godsend to me, since I live in a remote area and have no access to a good cable package. I can simply select the leagues I want to watch and pay only for those. It is an absolute delight to deal with their business model. I don't want to pay 100 bucks for every single league on every single country, I literally just want to watch 4 matches a month, why should I pay more than 20 bucks?
> They're just unavoidable parts of the service's price that the cable/satellite vendors split off to misrepresent the costs.
I worked for a Telco (that also did Cable TV).
The marketing team would literally sit around a conference table and discuss how they were going to raise quarterly revenue by $amount so they would get their bonuses. Someone would suggest a connection fee. Or a disconnection fee. Or a change service fee, increase existing fee, call out fee, paper bill fee, credit card change fee, new equipment fee,.....
They really would sit around and invent this stuff purely to increase revenue, because that was the goal.
Oh, I don't think it's unique to cable, but I do think they're particularly brazen about it and make no attempt to hide the fact they just invent new fees and charges every year for no reason other than to boost profit.
Really? I've always felt it was the ESPN viewer subsidizing the rest of the cable universe. ESPN is basically the only premium service you can't go over the top on. However, Iger says he's considering it.
ESPN is the most expensive channel by far and has been forced bundling for decades. They sued Verizon for offering basic packages without ESPN a while back, and have been rightfully terrified of consumer choice. Almost every cable subscriber was forced to pay the ESPN tax.
Paying $100+/yr for a channel I’ve never watched or cared about is a big reason why I cut the cord. They certainly aren’t “subsidizing” anything.
I hear you what you are saying, but the counter argument remains: The only way you can get ESPN is purchase ESPN (plus the rest of basic cable). For the most part, you can buy basic cable over the top (sans ESPN). So given the state of play, it seems the inelastic demand for ESPN and its one purchase venue is the subsidizer.
Until relatively recently you could not easily buy cable without ESPN, because ESPN would refuse all contracts that didn’t include it in the basic package, along with all the other channels people do want they could attach to it.
It’s only inelastic to the fraction of “subscribers” that watch it, the rest would drop it instantly if they could save the $10/month.
Not sure if it's law but in Australia providers (phone, Internet, streaming, etc.) display what the actual up-front and ongoing costs are, inclusive of fees, taxes, and one-time costs (e.g. modems).
> Sports fans should pay for sports instead of everyone subsidizing it.
They're also making the sports fans subsidize the non-sports content.
While it's generally illegal to charge people for nothing, businesses always try to sell things that are as close as possible to nothing: Channels you don't want, mobile phone time you won't use, etc.
I don't use YouTube TV or Cable. Does this price include having 3 minutes of ads every 10 minutes like cable? If not, it being the same price as cable seems like it would still be a good deal.
Nope, YouTube TV still has ads. A lot of people still pay for it because of the convenience of the DVR and accessibility on all devices without having to maintain anything, but the price to benefit calculation is certainly changing after this.
Compared to cable/satellite TV providers, it still seems like a no brainer considering the ease of watching on any device, anywhere, and starting and stopping the service.
It still has the same ad time allocation as cable, but I frequently see random nature videos in place of them or the option to switch to them. My wife doesn't see it as much as I do so your milage may vary.
From TFA, one bright side is that they're reducing the 4K addon to $9.99, down from $19.99. So if you were already paying for that, you come out $2 ahead/month.
I'm mainly just annoyed that I can't sign up for a small package with any service. I want literally locals plus whatever cheap basic cable networks want to tag along just for the exposure. $15 sounds fair for what I could get with an antenna but can't due to HOA rules and being lazy and not wanting to poke holes in my house, but with inflation I can accept that the true number should be $19.99. I haven't heard of such a thing :(
You could setup an antenna for TV or Ham radio etc in your attic or similar space. Sticking them on the roof generally offers the best reception and doesn’t take up space in your house, but even just TV rabbit ears work reasonably well for local stations.
Local TV is rarely worth the effort, but it can be a cheap way to watch the Olympics or your local sports team etc.
That strongly depends on your local conditions. There's plenty of places where an indoor antenna has been fine for receiving local stations for decades, and there's plenty of places where it's not. Digital broadcasting can be a little better than analog broadcasting, in that a good enough signal gets you as good of a picture as an excellent signal, but consistency is still important, and getting your antenna clear of obstructions is still key.
In 1996, the FCC adopted the Over the Air Reception Device Rule, or (the unfortunately named) OTARD rule. In short, the OTARD rule prohibits homeowners' associations and condominium associations from placing restrictions on residents which impede the installation, maintenance, or use of satellite dishes, TV antennas, or wireless cable antennas.
HOAs can't stop you from putting an antenna, and honestly a $10 antenna from monoprice is surprisingly good. Works much better for digital broadcasts than old rabbitears
I cancel my plan outside of football (US) season. Definitely time to do that again. It's astounding how much of broadcast time is spent in commercials. After switching to YouTube Premium and not seeing a single ad there, my life honestly improved dramatically. I wish the same existed for broadcast TV, but it's a structural element that can't be avoided.
YouTube (Premium) subscription pricing stinks if you're outside the US as well. You're ripped off on what feels like a nationalistic basis.
Eg. Last time I looked the annual option which saves money over the monthly wasn't available in the UK and the monthly was the same number despite the currency differences. ie $11.99 per month against £11.99. Outrageous.
I was on a cheap trial but cancelled on principle when I checked to extend.
You just find 4 friends to share it with, then get the family plan for £17.99 - works out at around £4.40/person/month. And yes I agree it's not a good value for the individual membership at £11.99/month.
Also:
>>and the monthly was the same number despite the currency differences. ie $11.99 per month against £11.99. Outrageous.
No, you're forgetting that the British price includes 20% VAT and the American one doesn't include taxes. The cost is literally the same once you add the VAT(12 usd = 10GBP, add 20% vat = 12GBP)
Thanks, that sounds plausible but differs from some other digital providers so I'm not convinced; the annual option missing as well indicates a different approach.
You don't need to pay for access to YouTube; you can just watch it for free. Of course, the downside is all the ads, but you can avoid that by either using it in a browser with uBlock Origin, or using the "SmartTubeNext" app.
This isn't entirely relevant, but I just want to say I am sick of our society's obsessive fascination with TV. It's solitary, sedentary, and passive. And then we bitch and complain when the people cracking this whip make it more obnoxious, more expensive, and even less entertaining.
Every show feels the same. The actors seem interchangeable. There's such a limited subset of permitted stories and things that can be said that the whole thing is boring in its homogenization. For most of us, informational programming (the last bastion of decent TV) is now largely replaced with preachy documentaries and voyeuristic glimpses into the lives of shitty, but dramatic people. Our entertainment is an ouroboros constantly digesting itself.
Do something else! Play a videogame. Read a book. Go out and do something calming. Stop worshipping TV and movies and entertainment, and the talented but otherwise largely dumb and unqualified individuals playing all these derivative characters.
And for god sakes stop sucking off the teat of these stupid subscription plans! The least we can do to fight pack is to pirate it.
The video game industry is quickly approaching the television industry. It has become simply an interactive tool for narrative delivery.
Its simply a matter of time before the cancerous growth of capitalism gets its fingers into the media even deeper.
Mark my words. Gaming is trending towards subscription service, and advertising will only find its way deeper into the way content is delivered until your sessions are 20 minutes long with 5 minutes for ads.
It certainly feels that way. I am playing fewer and fewer new titles, and find that I keep returning to classics. Even 'indie' stuff is starting to feel very same-ish
AAA is a bit dodgy these days. Lots of filler content and poor writing. Indies have a wider variance of quality but there’s usually a handful every year that are superb. Gaming definitely has been taking a back seat in my life the past few years though. Except Elden Ring. I loved my time there, bloated as the game is at times.
One of the reasons I'm glad Stadia failed. I don't think that continuing costs can be avoided for online multiplayer where continuous support is necessary, but single-player offline games would likely get swept up in this tide as well.
I also play way less games nowadays, and mostly for Switch, for which I prefer the physical cartridges. I'm honestly not even sure if disks are still sold for the newest Xbox or Playstation.
Of course, PC/Steam vs console could keep things from completely sucking for consumers. Hopefully?
Idunno, beating Cyberpunk 2077 elicited more of an emotional reaction from me than anything TV or movies has done. Baldur's Gate, Anachronox, Oblivion, hell even the old final fantasy games had so much more going for them story-wise than pretty much anything Hollywood could come up with save for its most longest-running series.
So it's a matter of personal preference rather than an inherent value in video games. Plenty of sports fans have emotional responses to their team's successes and failures. It's not my scene, but the popularity of the various -Cons suggests there is a huge crowd who feels similarly about certain TV shows and movies.
I will make no defense of video game stories... but I find it laughable to hold up most "prestige" TV shows. How do the "prestige" video games hold up against most TV shows? :D
Putting charity to the claim, since you do have to interact with games, I could see how the thought could be that they are more mentally stimulating. Gambling, of course, gives the lie to that claim. Addictive does not mean productive, and all of that.
That said, why do so many folks obsess over productivity?
I’m not saying TV is better than videogames. I’m saying Breaking Bad is better than Clash Royale, and as such, judging all videogames as worse than TV is absurd.
The Last of Us (game) is much better than MILF Manor lol
Right. Is why I offer no defense of games as a whole. But "prestige" of either is good. And probably is more sophisticated than the norm of the other.
That said, I offered charity to the idea. Breaking Bad is entertaining. Is it mentally stimulating, though? Tetris is probably as mentally challenging. More, in many ways.
That said, even with that charity to the idea, I think it is misguided. Mentally stimulating can just be addicting with no growth.
And then further, I think the idea that you need growth is misguided. Being entertained is fine.
Compromises, compromises. Play a visual novel. There!
Snark aside, I should note the flexibility in storytelling that all interactive fiction provides. Namely, as the author you get to use time travel without having it as a plot element. That way, you also avoid the overemphasis that long-running linear stories place on their singular endings.
Hmm...this has definitely been said on HN before in some thread related to the Netflix CYOAs. I wonder if a useful robot9000 is now feasible with modern language models, with aggregating and summarizing of perennial forum debates.
I was just using your own words to show you the 2 quoted statements you made are in direct opposition to each other. They are all entertainment. That's all.
The "brainlessness" of television is the fault of content producers, not the medium itself. Fred Rogers was probably one of the greatest users of television.
I wouldn’t call video games more sophisticated or intellectual, but they do require you to use your brain in a way that is not strictly necessary for watching TV.
Likewise, I don't have any illusions about medium fully defining the quality of content: eg reading 50 Shades of Grey isn't more rewarding or meaningful than watching The Wire.
But apples-to-apples, watching video is the only common activity that feels maximally passive.
I guess with the exception of listening to music? Not sure how this fits in
Music consumption itself is passive, but we frequently use it as a backdrop to do other things. Or we dance to it. I would like to think that the curation of playlists or mp3 libraries is considerably more involved than doing so with videos, on account of how limited in scope most songs/tracks are compared to video.
Are you kidding? I bet a ton of us go to raves or undergrounds or festivals, Burning Man has been pretty much taken over by SV tech dweebs, and I meet tons of tech folks in the local scene here, and that scene is just a tiny fraction of the overall picture for this area
If YOU don't, I would highly recommend considering it. Hell I'm pretty sure I got my COVID 19lbs because I couldn't go out and dance at parties when lockdown hit
This is not true for everyone. It's mostly true for me (although I play Guitar Hero, which makes it quite active). It's not at all true for my girlfriend, who listens to music very actively.
Agreed about background music, but I definitely spend time listening to music and doing nothing else, and the medium feels active to me in a way that television doesn't.
On the other hand, I've been a musician since I was three, so perhaps the way I'm processing music is different from normal. One facet might be that I usually don't find myself focusing much on lyrics (if any), which means it ends up as a semi-meditative activity in a way that TV can't.
I DJ in the local techno underground and produce it as a hobby, music is a very active and deliberate activity for me. That there are so many different ways to engage with it is part of why I don't lump it in the same bucket as TV.
They're also basically impossible to play while eating dinner, unlike watching TV. They're also generally not something you can do with your girlfriend or wife.
> They're also generally not something you can do with your girlfriend or wife.
This is an issue of availability. There need to be more games with a broader appeal. I can certainly see why FPSs are not appealing to the feminine demographic. On the other hand, the Wii was popular with all genders and all ages.
Yes, often when we meet folks they wanna talk about their shows. And I kinda inwardly groan. Don't people have their own lives and do things any more? Maybe the rent is too high to do anything but work then crash in front of the TV these days?
It's often nice to talk about things that you share in common - weather, kids, and traditionally TV have often fill those roles. These are the normal ways to break the ice and get to know someone better before delving into other topics.
You can probably say something similar for any form of entertainment. You can always gain something from it (and that's excluding the benefit of doing something you enjoy).
It’s not clear to me how playing video games is any better or worse than watching TV, other than it appears to be your preferred choice of entertainment.
I’ll watch TV for an hour or so a day before calling it a night and it gives my spouse and me a lot to talk about, something to bond over, build a corpus of inside jokes, be able to talk to other people who might have watched a particular show, etc.
> It’s not clear to me how playing video games is any better or worse than watching TV, other than it appears to be your preferred choice of entertainment.
Having to interact with a world is by definition more active than solely watching. Since GP is judging sedentary and passive content ingestion, then yes, it’s much better. Especially when the TV content is mindless reality TV.
There exists many TV shows that have artistic merit rivaling any book or film. The secret is just to actively select and seek out those specific works and not passively watch whatever random thing.
>Do something else! Play a videogame. Read a book. Go out and do something calming. Stop worshipping TV and movies and entertainment
Videogames and books are things you can't do with a partner. Going out is, but that takes a lot of time (travel time is a lot of overhead) and usually costs money unless you just go to the local park or something. Plus, it's restricted by the weather.
>And for god sakes stop sucking off the teat of these stupid subscription plans! The least we can do to fight pack is to pirate it.
Since this article is about YouTube TV, I'd like to plug the excellent Android TV app "SmartTubeNext". If you have a Google/Android TV, you can install this app (it's a bit of a pain since Google won't allow it in the Play store, so you need a downloader app to install it directly from GitHub) and watch YouTube videos without ads or sponsor segments.
> Since this article is about YouTube TV, I'd like to plug the excellent Android TV app "SmartTubeNext". If you have a Google/Android TV, you can install this app (it's a bit of a pain since Google won't allow it in the Play store, so you need a downloader app to install it directly from GitHub) and watch YouTube videos without ads or sponsor segments.
NewPipe is available on F-Droid and offers the same thing.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I need to say this on HN, but since you've probably never dated any women, I have to inform you that almost no women actually want to play first-person shooter deathmatches with you.
First, these sorts of comments are best left to Reddit, not here.
Secondly, I'm gay and my boyfriend and I play tons of video games together.
Third, even if I wasn't, I'd probably have the wherewithall to find a girlfriend that shares my interests or at least doesn't have a problem with them.
Amazingly, humans (yes, including women, perhaps shocking to you) are complex and nuanced creatures that find enjoyment across a wide range of activities. Women can absolutely enjoy video games, just not when they're forced to play with sexist creeps like you.
Yes because no one on HN has a significant other that they spend time with watching TV.
Or do you think after 12 years my wife and I should spend all of our time together looking lovingly into each others eyes talking about our relationship?
So instead “playing video games” is much more stimulating? You realize the previous generation also said video games were ruining children?
It’s also funny that your alternative was “playing video games” and not going outside for run, riding a bike, etc - anything that requires physical exertion or actually being around a group of other people.
I subscribed when YouTube TV first came out in 2017, for $35/mo. It was a good deal at the time and well worth it (since I didn't have cable), even though I didn't watch much regularly scheduled TV. When it hit $50/mo it wasn't a good deal anymore. Doesn't matter they added a ton of new channels because most of what is there is stuff no one (in my household) watches. This was the problem with cable, I don't want to pay $100/mo for 3 channels.
In the last few years there has been a fairly consistent drama of "Will they or won't they" related to channels. Seems like Google likes to play hardball with the channel providers and just causes a headache for the subscribers.
I'm not going to say this price hike is the straw that broke the camels back, because our house really didn't use YouTube TV regularly enough to warrant the price previously. But it was a good reminder to cancel the service, so I have.
Right now I can upgrade my cable internet provider (sadly the only high speed option right now) to add "Preferred TV" (aka ALL the channels) for only an additional $63/mo more than what I'm currently paying for just internet.
So yes, YouTube TV is more expensive than cable now.
Are they going to follow Netflix preventing sharing accounts?
It seems like right now they are actually pretty far in the opposite direction, with the subscription covering a Google family group of up to 5 accounts.
$70 / 5 = $14, back to bearable apart from having to explain your watch history to relatives (if it is visible, I don't know for sure).
I pay a little over $100/year for YouTube premium and that’s all I need. Premiere League highlights, German documentaries about pretzels, hour long POV shows shot in working Japanese kitchens to entertain my young daughter, the occasional full episode of Stairway to Stardom - and I’m sorted.
I recently unsubscribed from YouTube TV because it had an insane number of ads for watching one episode of a favorite show. I think I counted a total of 8 breaks in the show and each break has 1-5 ads. What a joke.
We were all so excited. We could now record TV on our tivo, replay it later skipping the commercials. Life was good.
Then it got even better, we could download or stream our content over the internet so we didn't need to pay $100 a month for cable and $50 for internet, we could just do the $50 for internet.
Now that those small startups sold their businesses to the giant media companies, we're all back to being literally forced to watch commercials, pay $100 to some big media company on top of our isp costs, and we can't record content locally perpetually and "own" it, even if we "buy" it.
This strikes me as extraordinarily expensive. As a point of comparison, I live in one of the world's most expensive cities, and for almost exactly the same amount of money I can get a 25 Gbps fibre-to-the-premises broadband connection that comes with about 200 TV channels from half a dozen countries.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadHe had to get up every 5 minutes to refresh Chrome on his laptop he had connected to the TV or find a new stream because they get taken down so quickly.
70$ a month is well worth ever dealing with that shit
I've been streaming sports illegally almost 20 years now. I'm fine dealing with the ad-infested websites and constant refreshing of streams taken down for once a month events like UFC fights.
But for every day? I'll gladly pay the $1-2 a day to never deal with that.
What I want is the main Sports Networks (FS1, FS2, ESPN, ESPN2), my Regional Sports Network (but that's a Bally channel now -- and that's kind of a bit of a mess at the moment), and MLB TV (the cable channel, not their own MLB service).
I also want "DVR" for everything, and I want to be able to skip the ads (ideally with a +30s button).
I typically watch my games delayed so I can skip the ads, or even just plain "later". We DVR everything else.
Will YT TV let me do that?
At the end of the day if I wanted to watch sports I'd just throw enough money at the problem to watch them legally. When it comes to TV/Movies, on the other hand, you cannot pay for the best experience (legally) which is really sad.
Meanwhile YouTube TV on the Apple TV is a shit show, with non-native controls that lag, search that barely works and no integration with system services so searching for a channel by voice doesn’t work. And it still doesn’t free me from having to pay for Fox News!
Unless the software stops being the moral equivalent of electron on the TV, I’ll be moving back to cable when I next move house.
When our streaming forefathers spoke of a la carte as the future, they should have specified each individual piece of content and not a la carte channels. It would have saved us all a lot of money.
The networks can’t achieve economies of scale with independent apps so they have to cave to price pressure too.
The current situation of having 10 streaming services exists because Netflix wouldn't raise their prices to become cable. Netflix's business model only worked because the people making the content undervalued streaming rights. When they started asking for real money, Netflix balked[0], so they pulled their shows to their own service so they could charge users directly.
[0] Because $9.99/mo is a more attractive price than $72.99/mo
(Liberty Mutual Insurance takes this to the limits of absurdity by advertising "insurance customized so you only pay for what you'll need to use".)
I have no interest in paying for sports, so I do not buy sports. I can buy individual episodes, seasons, or month to month subscriptions within seconds now.
I now wait until all the episodes are out, and word of mouth from multiple sources has established quality of the content, to purchase it. I can then consume it within a month or few months, and cancel the subscription. Or rent the movie for a few dollars.
I probably pay $150 per year at most. Before a la carte steaming, that would have easily been $75+ per month with contracts and equipment fees or whatnot to Comcast. Mostly to pay for other people’s interest in sports.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/tv-shows/id32
Previously, this wasn't cheaper, you could get basically all the things with 2 subs, e.g. Netflix and Hulu Plus w/ Live.
Then there was a sort of golden age where Apple TV or Amazon Prime offered brand umbrellas as individual channel subscriptions. You could even add/cancel them right in the iPhone's subscription list (a few are still there).
Now most shows are congregating back under brands, each wanting full freight as if they had it all, the combination adds up.
Doing the math, if you watch specific named shows instead of background TV, it's to where season purchases might again make sense for individuals or DINK type households that only watch prestige TV.
I'm sick of ads on YouTube so I was thinking of subscribing.
But it's USD$73 A MONTH? That's like more than AUD$100 a month.
What am I missing? That's about 4 X ridiculous.
"It's a good change..."
Until I read your comment. wow.
The thing that you get when you click on Music in the left sidebar of YouTube.
i think youtube layed off even the goldfish in a bowl they had developing the app.
You're missing "TV". YouTube and YouTube TV are different products.
Yes, the brands are pretty confusing.
Otherwise as a potential new customer, Youtube TV seems to be one of just many offerings with no real advantage.
Let's put that into the BLS CPI Inflation Calculator (https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm).
Results: "$64.99 in June 2020 has the same buying power as $75.84 in February 2023".
So this doesn't quite keep up with inflation.
Most of it's not paying for the tech: It's paying for the licensing fees to the TV channels. And at least one of those licenses will always ask for more money, and none of them will ever ask for less money - Not unless TV & other streaming services are fully killed off and YouTube is literally the only place that people can watch TV.
Reductively: YouTube will have to be the sole broadcasting company for the entire world before these media companies will ever bend the knee.
That being said, as someone who helped family move off of cable in the last year, this is only inching closer to cable's headline pricing which is largely a fiction. All the big four providers of cable/satellite have the following pricing:
- Advertised discount price (12-24 month contract)
- Normal price
- Taxes & Fees
Sometimes you can keep threatening to cancel, take out a new 12-24 month contract, and keep the "discounted" price. But in my experience each discount is less and less generous relative to what they're advertising.
Then there are taxes & fees. The taxes are, well, taxes and also apply to streaming TV. But a lot of the "fees" have nothing at all to do with government. They're just unavoidable parts of the service's price that the cable/satellite vendors split off to misrepresent the costs.
These include, but not limited to:
- Equipment fee (main box cannot be avoided, additional boxes can be)
- Broadcast TV Fee + Regional Sports Fee (unavoidable)
- HD TV Fee (often if your equipment SUPPORTS HD then you are required to pay it)
- Administrative/Convenience Fees (rarely this can be reduced by jumping through hoops e.g. pay by paper check)
These can easily add $20 to your bill. If your contract doesn't allow monthly increases, that can sometimes not apply to fees (either increases to existing or new ones).
In this line, I've been paying Fanatiz for a while and I absolutely vouch for their service. It was a godsend to me, since I live in a remote area and have no access to a good cable package. I can simply select the leagues I want to watch and pay only for those. It is an absolute delight to deal with their business model. I don't want to pay 100 bucks for every single league on every single country, I literally just want to watch 4 matches a month, why should I pay more than 20 bucks?
I worked for a Telco (that also did Cable TV).
The marketing team would literally sit around a conference table and discuss how they were going to raise quarterly revenue by $amount so they would get their bonuses. Someone would suggest a connection fee. Or a disconnection fee. Or a change service fee, increase existing fee, call out fee, paper bill fee, credit card change fee, new equipment fee,.....
They really would sit around and invent this stuff purely to increase revenue, because that was the goal.
Paying $100+/yr for a channel I’ve never watched or cared about is a big reason why I cut the cord. They certainly aren’t “subsidizing” anything.
It’s only inelastic to the fraction of “subscribers” that watch it, the rest would drop it instantly if they could save the $10/month.
They're also making the sports fans subsidize the non-sports content.
While it's generally illegal to charge people for nothing, businesses always try to sell things that are as close as possible to nothing: Channels you don't want, mobile phone time you won't use, etc.
Local TV is rarely worth the effort, but it can be a cheap way to watch the Olympics or your local sports team etc.
In 1996, the FCC adopted the Over the Air Reception Device Rule, or (the unfortunately named) OTARD rule. In short, the OTARD rule prohibits homeowners' associations and condominium associations from placing restrictions on residents which impede the installation, maintenance, or use of satellite dishes, TV antennas, or wireless cable antennas.
I happily paid $10 a month for Locast. All I want is the locals and whatever they piggyback on. I can't get it for less than $40.
I continue to do without. Don't tell me about antennas. I live too far away for my "locals" to be picked up with an antenna.
I bitterly resent the graft that allowed the major networks to get a 90+ year old judge out of retirement to specifically rule in their favor.
Eg. Last time I looked the annual option which saves money over the monthly wasn't available in the UK and the monthly was the same number despite the currency differences. ie $11.99 per month against £11.99. Outrageous.
I was on a cheap trial but cancelled on principle when I checked to extend.
Also:
>>and the monthly was the same number despite the currency differences. ie $11.99 per month against £11.99. Outrageous.
No, you're forgetting that the British price includes 20% VAT and the American one doesn't include taxes. The cost is literally the same once you add the VAT(12 usd = 10GBP, add 20% vat = 12GBP)
Every show feels the same. The actors seem interchangeable. There's such a limited subset of permitted stories and things that can be said that the whole thing is boring in its homogenization. For most of us, informational programming (the last bastion of decent TV) is now largely replaced with preachy documentaries and voyeuristic glimpses into the lives of shitty, but dramatic people. Our entertainment is an ouroboros constantly digesting itself.
Do something else! Play a videogame. Read a book. Go out and do something calming. Stop worshipping TV and movies and entertainment, and the talented but otherwise largely dumb and unqualified individuals playing all these derivative characters.
And for god sakes stop sucking off the teat of these stupid subscription plans! The least we can do to fight pack is to pirate it.
It truly is the boob tube.
> Stop worshipping TV and movies and entertainment
Maybe I should have rephrased that to 'passive' entertainment.
Its simply a matter of time before the cancerous growth of capitalism gets its fingers into the media even deeper.
Mark my words. Gaming is trending towards subscription service, and advertising will only find its way deeper into the way content is delivered until your sessions are 20 minutes long with 5 minutes for ads.
Illegalize advertising.
One of the reasons I'm glad Stadia failed. I don't think that continuing costs can be avoided for online multiplayer where continuous support is necessary, but single-player offline games would likely get swept up in this tide as well.
I also play way less games nowadays, and mostly for Switch, for which I prefer the physical cartridges. I'm honestly not even sure if disks are still sold for the newest Xbox or Playstation.
Of course, PC/Steam vs console could keep things from completely sucking for consumers. Hopefully?
Putting charity to the claim, since you do have to interact with games, I could see how the thought could be that they are more mentally stimulating. Gambling, of course, gives the lie to that claim. Addictive does not mean productive, and all of that.
That said, why do so many folks obsess over productivity?
The Last of Us (game) is much better than MILF Manor lol
That said, I offered charity to the idea. Breaking Bad is entertaining. Is it mentally stimulating, though? Tetris is probably as mentally challenging. More, in many ways.
That said, even with that charity to the idea, I think it is misguided. Mentally stimulating can just be addicting with no growth.
And then further, I think the idea that you need growth is misguided. Being entertained is fine.
Snark aside, I should note the flexibility in storytelling that all interactive fiction provides. Namely, as the author you get to use time travel without having it as a plot element. That way, you also avoid the overemphasis that long-running linear stories place on their singular endings.
Hmm...this has definitely been said on HN before in some thread related to the Netflix CYOAs. I wonder if a useful robot9000 is now feasible with modern language models, with aggregating and summarizing of perennial forum debates.
I was just using your own words to show you the 2 quoted statements you made are in direct opposition to each other. They are all entertainment. That's all.
I also go to the gym and cycle outside, people are allowed to like things
But apples-to-apples, watching video is the only common activity that feels maximally passive.
I guess with the exception of listening to music? Not sure how this fits in
If YOU don't, I would highly recommend considering it. Hell I'm pretty sure I got my COVID 19lbs because I couldn't go out and dance at parties when lockdown hit
But I do a run and lift weights regulatly
Burning Man has been intertwined with tech culture for like...30 years?
On the other hand, I've been a musician since I was three, so perhaps the way I'm processing music is different from normal. One facet might be that I usually don't find myself focusing much on lyrics (if any), which means it ends up as a semi-meditative activity in a way that TV can't.
This is an issue of availability. There need to be more games with a broader appeal. I can certainly see why FPSs are not appealing to the feminine demographic. On the other hand, the Wii was popular with all genders and all ages.
Nor a reason to berate anyone else about their choice.
People probably said the same about reading at several points in history. It's about how you use the technology, not the technology itself.
I’ll watch TV for an hour or so a day before calling it a night and it gives my spouse and me a lot to talk about, something to bond over, build a corpus of inside jokes, be able to talk to other people who might have watched a particular show, etc.
Having to interact with a world is by definition more active than solely watching. Since GP is judging sedentary and passive content ingestion, then yes, it’s much better. Especially when the TV content is mindless reality TV.
(I’m not a gamer myself)
>Do something else! Play a videogame. Read a book. Go out and do something calming. Stop worshipping TV and movies and entertainment
Videogames and books are things you can't do with a partner. Going out is, but that takes a lot of time (travel time is a lot of overhead) and usually costs money unless you just go to the local park or something. Plus, it's restricted by the weather.
>And for god sakes stop sucking off the teat of these stupid subscription plans! The least we can do to fight pack is to pirate it.
Since this article is about YouTube TV, I'd like to plug the excellent Android TV app "SmartTubeNext". If you have a Google/Android TV, you can install this app (it's a bit of a pain since Google won't allow it in the Play store, so you need a downloader app to install it directly from GitHub) and watch YouTube videos without ads or sponsor segments.
NewPipe is available on F-Droid and offers the same thing.
There are, in fact, many games that are playable by more than one person.
Secondly, I'm gay and my boyfriend and I play tons of video games together.
Third, even if I wasn't, I'd probably have the wherewithall to find a girlfriend that shares my interests or at least doesn't have a problem with them.
Amazingly, humans (yes, including women, perhaps shocking to you) are complex and nuanced creatures that find enjoyment across a wide range of activities. Women can absolutely enjoy video games, just not when they're forced to play with sexist creeps like you.
Or do you think after 12 years my wife and I should spend all of our time together looking lovingly into each others eyes talking about our relationship?
So instead “playing video games” is much more stimulating? You realize the previous generation also said video games were ruining children?
It’s also funny that your alternative was “playing video games” and not going outside for run, riding a bike, etc - anything that requires physical exertion or actually being around a group of other people.
In the last few years there has been a fairly consistent drama of "Will they or won't they" related to channels. Seems like Google likes to play hardball with the channel providers and just causes a headache for the subscribers.
I'm not going to say this price hike is the straw that broke the camels back, because our house really didn't use YouTube TV regularly enough to warrant the price previously. But it was a good reminder to cancel the service, so I have.
Right now I can upgrade my cable internet provider (sadly the only high speed option right now) to add "Preferred TV" (aka ALL the channels) for only an additional $63/mo more than what I'm currently paying for just internet.
So yes, YouTube TV is more expensive than cable now.
It seems like right now they are actually pretty far in the opposite direction, with the subscription covering a Google family group of up to 5 accounts.
$70 / 5 = $14, back to bearable apart from having to explain your watch history to relatives (if it is visible, I don't know for sure).
Then it got even better, we could download or stream our content over the internet so we didn't need to pay $100 a month for cable and $50 for internet, we could just do the $50 for internet.
Now that those small startups sold their businesses to the giant media companies, we're all back to being literally forced to watch commercials, pay $100 to some big media company on top of our isp costs, and we can't record content locally perpetually and "own" it, even if we "buy" it.
Except for those of us who don't watch television and buy blurays of the content we want