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YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

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Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#71

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…

Not the same. Only works at home

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.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#72

Unless you must have live sports/CNBC or can’t have your internet slow down, how are YouTube TV or cable packages attractive? We have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Even when the free/promotional periods are over, they would still end up costing less than a semi-decent cable package, but with way more useful content (in fact, more than we could ever hope to watch), and little to no ads.

>Unless you must have live sports

From these comments at least, it seems like this is pretty much their entire audience.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#73

Unless you must have live sports/CNBC or can’t have your internet slow down, how are YouTube TV or cable packages attractive? We have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Even when the free/promotional periods are over, they would still end up costing less than a semi-decent cable package, but with way more useful content (in fact, more than we could ever hope to watch), and little to no ads.

My guess is live sports is a big part of the market. Depending on what sport/team you are a fan of the league-run streaming services are a huge pain with blackouts, lag, etc. YouTubeTV was the best cost+convenience option for me to watch my local MLB team when I signed up originally. Now it isn't.

Their strategy makes no sense to me if a lot of the market is indeed live sports though, so maybe I'm an outlier.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#77
post #50

Sort of related: I've noticed that regular Youtube has been cranking up the ads quite a lot lately. I view most of my youtube on the TV, via their crappy HTML-based Apple TV app. So many ads to suffer through, suddenly. On the desktop, it seems like they've suddenly started work against that one chrome extension I've loved the most: The one that blocks the ads from youtube. I can't see myself subscring to youtube red…

I've noticed a significant uptick in ads as well. The ad quality is akin to ads on streaming-specific apps. It's not uncommon to only have ~4 different ads shown to you on something like CBS Mobile. They have the potential to target ads, they have an app installed (and all the privacy implications that go with it), but somehow they're showing the same 30 second ad 4 times in a row to make up a commercial break. Other…

Yeah, the ad quality is horrible. I'm in Sweden; I've seen/skipped through all of the local ads like 200 times each by now. At least it feels like that.

Sometimes you get something new - it's always some poor american local company that made their own ad (often some construction company targetting home owners) but messed up the geotargetting, I presume.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#78
Have they figured out how to play the show you click on yet? No. $50 a month and the basic functionality of the app doesn't even work. With a Chromecast, it's even worse. Eventually, after clicking back and forth, disconnecting and reconnecting, it may play. Then you have to turn off the closed captioning for every single show even though it's off in the settings. Then it randomly stops at times. The ui displays the wrong show. And they have the gall to charge even more for this shittiest motherfucking app I've ever had the displeasure of using. This engineering team should be fired. They should be ashamed of themselves. They can't even make the app play a single video without problems. I've been putting up with it for years now just because of certain channels my mom likes, but no more. Fuck this garbage app. I've submitted dozens of support requests and the only people dumber than the engineers, project managers, and others who work on this app are the idiots running customer support. Fuck them all. They can shove this fucking app right up their ass.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#79

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…

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.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#80

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?

> 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.

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