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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

#101
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much of the programming of the OTA networks are produced in-house. (Previously, it was 100% in-house.)

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#102

ObShameless reminder that https://puffer.stanford.edu remains free of charge. 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:…

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).

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.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd expect the average Joe to do all of this ?

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.)

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#104
post #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.

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.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#105

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.

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.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#106
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd expect the average Joe to do all of this ?

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

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#107

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

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.

Of the channel bundle streaming services I believe the $35/mo for Sling Blue + News Extra is most affordable way to get CNBC.

https://www.sling.com/channels/cnbc

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#108

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

Don't pretty much all cable providers have an on-the-go app now?

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#109

Did patio11 start working at Google instead of Stripe? 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 fee…

Interesting URL. You don't often see a company refer to their own action as a "price hike".

Looks like the "price hike" text is not on the link now.

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.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#110
post #90

YouTube TV had enough channels at launch. They kept adding channels that I didn’t want and charging for it. This went from best value to worst value in three short years. Not sure what the old media hacks are trying to accomplish here.

> Not sure what the old media hacks are trying to accomplish here.

They're trying to keep their channels artificially expensive and trying to limit the success of (previously) less expensive TV channel platforms like YouTube TV. They don't want to give ground on that, because if they do then it's a big freefall down to what the real value of their channels are.

They make an enormous amount of cartel-capture money from the high cost subscription services like traditional cable and DirecTV. In their ideal world, absolutely nothing would change about that (other than prices always going up over time).

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