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

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61–70 of 239 posts

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

#61
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.

I mean that's why the ad revenue goes down over time. People get used to clicking the right X's and ignoring the garbage on the sides and in the margins, and between the actual content. Less attention. The sites respond by making the ads more egregious, more numerous and even more aggressively placed but that just trains users to click out of the new ads. Just in my lifetime I've seen the amount of ads on television increase dramatically as TV dies it's own similar death.

Techy people will just install blockers which is arguably better for the advertisers, since they're at least stating outright (forcefully) that they don't want ads. That means we don't download the ads and the ads don't register an impression for us because most good adblockers also block trackers. But these people who just raw dog the internet and just walk right by? They're the ones truly decimating the value of advertising, and bless em for it.

There is no win condition for the advertisers in this. None. And that's shown by how aggressive and desperate they've become for even an ounce of attention. The entire pivot to video fiasco happened because advertisers wanted video ads, because making loud, stupid, brightly colored bullshit is the only tried and true way to get attention anymore.

And I'm sorry but anyone still paying for television at this point, YouTube or otherwise, is a sucker. You are paying for (probably) the largest display available in your home to at best, 2/5 of the time bombard your senses with an assault of garbage, between entertainment. Entertainment that can be had much cheaper, without the assault elsewhere with basic technology. And if that's fine with you then by all means, it ain't my money, enjoy yourself but I cannot put myself in your shoes and make it make sense to me.

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

#62
post #46

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.

Yeah we're definitely seeing a slow return to "this is on-demand cable". And all I see is that independent content (like YT videos) will continue to grow. I can definitely say that I watch probably one tenth as many shows and movies now as I did 7 or 8 years ago, simply due to how fragmented streaming services have become.

I keep a Netflix subscription running for my parents, get the free few months of Apple TV every year or so from buying a new device, and beyond that I just watch more and more YouTube in my free time and go to the cinema maybe twice a year.

Sure, YouTube doesn't really have any blockbuster/high-budget/studio-level content, but there's simply so much and so many niches that it keeps me entertained just as well as anything else, so I subscribe to YT premium and that's it.

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

#63
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.

I'm ~40 and was inundated with ads most of my life, but I still hate seeing ads. I'm more tolerant on a sports game or something for some reason, but still hate it with a passion. I pay for lots of things so I don't have to see ads. Paramount Plus started showing me ads when I paid for premium, so I cut them off. Meanwhile many people younger are a lot more tolerant. I think it really comes down to your personality and personal mental state, and maybe what you're used to already (which can change in the short term).

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

#64

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.

Pretty much every streaming service with a "no ads" tier does this. I agree it's infuriating.

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

#66
YouTube TV is still cable, just delivered differently.

For that reason, it was DOA in my eyes. My problem with cable was never necessarily the price (though that was a big factor), but the linear, scheduled nature of the whole thing. I don't know why some companies keep clinging to this dated distribution model well more than a decade after Netflix showed everyone how to do it better.

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

#67
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.

Having to invest time and money into the antenna is definitely what's stopped me from using OTA up to this point. Especially given that our location is between multiple broadcast points so it's not as simple as pointing an antenna in one direction, it would have to be a multi-directional antenna. Last I looked a decent one of those wasn't cheap.

I'm in the same boat, and on-the-ground isn't even good enough. I'll have to mount a big antenna on top of my roof, which is a tall order. Not worth it to me so far.

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

#68
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…

FWIW https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y... is a crowdsourced way to skip past promos (by timestamp). Or some creators have moved to Nebula, which seems to have less of that crap but IMO a worse UI than YouTube.

While I like Nebula on premise, it seems creators on it are getting 'lazier' and some of the people on the site are downright questionable ("TL;DR News" and "Therapist Reacts" being the biggest offenders for me)

Like, why am I paying Nebula for this garbage? https://i.imgur.com/itiLYbK.png

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

#69
post #46

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.

which services have eliminated their ad-free options?

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

#70
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…

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