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YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

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Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#51

Post by legitster »

hanniabu wrote: post #15
jes5199 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do people still watch live TV? I’m only exposed it to when I stay in hotels and it seems to only be Seinfeld reruns and Shark Tank

It's great for when you don't want to choose something to watch

My guilty pleasure have been the Roku Digital Channels. They have channels that are just a 24 hour feed of MST3K, or Cook's Illustrated, or How It's Made, or Antiques Roadshow. Just to turn on some background while I am making dinner or working on a project has been enjoyable, commercials and all.

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#52

Post by dylan604 »

yborg wrote: post #29
dylan604 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget you can still get a DTV OTA antenna and watch live TV with a much much better image quality and without cable's delay. Admittedly, in can take a bit of effort finding a location to place the antenna for best reception for your location, but so worth not paying for cable any longer. Sports is the primary reason for me messing with this, but it is definitely worth it.

I'd question the better image quality part of this, almost all broadcast providers have chosen to use their bandwidth to ship the maximum number of 480p subchannels.

You can question, or you can do the A/B test yourself and no longer have it as a question. Sure, they've sub-divided their bandwidth, but their flagship station still receives much more bandwidth than your cable provider.

Just do the Amazon rental for a weekend. If you don't like it, return it. You'll see the difference.

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#53

Post by pmarreck »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #30
daveidol wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad I thought YouTube Premium was ad-free?

It's free of ads from YouTube. Plenty of videos have baked in ads from the content creators themselves.

I don’t actually mind those, because at least you can skip past them manually; if they stop allowing THAT, though, THEN…

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#54

Post by solardev »

xnx wrote: post #12

I subscribe to YouTube TV but watch it less than 1/month (it's for my parents). It blows my mind that it's $60/month and still contains ads. There is nothing on TV worth sitting through ads for.

I really wonder how much of this effect is a generation gap. I see one commercial and it drives me nuts, but my parents don't even seem to notice them. Then again I have dev coworkers who're younger than me and go like "I should really get adblock at some point" while staring down pages full of pop-ups and animated crap. Guess you really can develop banner blindness by attrition lol.

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#55

Post by izzydata »

ghaff wrote: post #4
adocomplete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping the tech giants would be able to transform live TV as opposed to offer the same experience for (now) the same price.

Content is king. And you can't even neatly excise sports content from everything else. If you can live without most live content, you really do have good, albeit fragmented, alternatives. But it does require giving up live TV.

This just made me realize I don't believe I've ever intentionally watched live TV my entire life.

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#56

Post by karaterobot »

> "Charter contended the $600 figure was inaccurate, arguing that its Spectrum TV Select service in Los Angeles only cost around $219 a year more than Google's YouTube TV service," according to a MediaPost article in August.

Google should have just agreed to do a find and replace in their ad copy.

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#57

Post by [deleted] »

daveidol wrote: post #26
ylhert wrote: post #11

It's wild to me how much Youtube TV costs and yet they still serve you tons of ads. Coming from youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad, I forget how much you are bombarded with ads while watching traditional TV. The fact that you have to pay the princely sum of $73/month on top of that boggles my mind. I canceled when they raised the price from $35/month and I'll never go back at these…

> youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad I thought YouTube Premium was ad-free?

[deleted]

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#58

Post by ghaff »

dylan604 wrote: post #42
ghaff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You" can :-) But fair comment. For many people, OTA offers good enough live TV. I live at the base of a hill blocking me from the nearest major city about 40 miles away. I've never been able to pick up anything OTA even before digital signals; there was even a big "external" antenna in the attic installed by the previous owner to no avail before he just got a big C-band dish. Even a lot of radio is pretty bad. I was…

The irony here is that your specific situation was one of the driving factors of why cable was created

Even leaving aside the cable-only stations (both premium and non-premium), even getting the basic networks and maybe some UHF channels was marginal for a lot of people involving a lot of fiddling to get a usable signal.

And pre-DirectTV, the alternatives were pretty much geeking out with a big Satellite dish which only worked out on your big country property and were willing to spend the money.

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#59

Post by dylan604 »

legitster wrote: post #45
dylan604 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget you can still get a DTV OTA antenna and watch live TV with a much much better image quality and without cable's delay. Admittedly, in can take a bit of effort finding a location to place the antenna for best reception for your location, but so worth not paying for cable any longer. Sports is the primary reason for me messing with this, but it is definitely worth it.

> live TV with a much much better image quality and without cable's delay Depends. In our area they have split the digital signal so many times to carve out additional subchannels (10.1,10.2,10.3, etc) that the effective bitrate is now pretty dang low. When watching football, the channel may only be delivering 720p, and with tons of compression artifacts to boot.

Way back in the late 90s, the place I was working had a subscription to a trade rag called TV Broadcasting News (or something like that). I remember reading an article on how Congress was upset at the networks for splitting the bandwidth. But being feckless like Congress is, they did nothing about it and just shrugged their shoulders.

Fox was famous for choosing 720p as its broadcast format specifically to get 60fps for its sports programming while the other networks chose 1080i5994.

Re: YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads

#60

Post by chung8123 »

nicce wrote: post #46
chung8123 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix did transform TV. Cable subscriptions are shrinking. Many people have switch to a streaming on demand service vs a linear service. You can watch most TV without ads.

That used to be the case couple years back. Now they are bringing ads to these streaming services. And you have 10 different streaming services what you need to buy separately. Soon there will be bundling streaming service and we are back to cable tv pricing and ads.

You can still buy non-ad services and the amount of content you can get at one time has increased incredibly. I would also say the new format has increased the quality of content. In my personal opinion, tech has really changed the industry and how we watch tv.
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