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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

#81

Post by amerkhalid »

solardev wrote: post #54
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.

It has been so long since last I saw any ad on TV/videos that when I subscribed to YouTube TV a few months ago, watching ads made me nostalgic. I told my wife that I was really enjoying these ads.

But after about a week it got really annoying. Now debating if it is worth keeping.

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

#83

Post by zem »

solardev wrote: post #54
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.

I'm in my 40s but I grew up in Dubai, where the tv station (there was only one each for English and Arabic content!) only showed ads between shows. I basically gave up on tv after coming to the US - there is no way I can ever get used to ads in the middle of a show.

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

#84

Post by flenserboy »

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.

Unless there is true change, both in delivery & content, most everything reverts back to the way it was. Music delivery seems (semi-)permanently changed, as it is nigh unimaginable for the album as it was known to make a comeback, market-wise. No similar change has happened or been allowed to happen on the TV-heritage side of things, & so we get new, shiner versions of the Old Ways.

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

#85

Post by hrunt »

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.

YTTV does not really have the ability to not show ads. Those are put in the streams they are carrying. Could they negotiate with the channels to not show ads? Maybe, but no channel is going to allow that.

A different way to think of this is to consider how many ads you would see on TV if YTTV (and every other bundled TV provider) did not have to pay carriage fees to the channels. How many ads would they have to sell to make up that lost revenue?

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

#86

Post by paxys »

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.

Tech giants have successfully transformed live TV, simply by killing it completely. No one under 35 subscribes to any kind of live TV service today other than to watch sports, and in another decade that will be fully online as well (look at the inroads Amazon and Apple are already making in that space). Some of the best new TV content is increasingly owned by Netflix, Amazon, Apple and the like. Cable TV and any kind of non-sports/special events broadcasting is going to disappear as a concept within our lifetimes.

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

#87

Post by bonton89 »

legitster wrote: post #51
hanniabu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was recently on vacation where they had a roku TV and watched these. I watched some old Unsolved Mysteries episodes, honestly there weren't really that many commercials on this at all compared to my parent's cable subscription.

I recall that after well after I had cut the cord a lot of channels on cable had switched to just playing one show all day on some channels so the concept seemed to pre-date the roku setup.

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

#88

Post by squeaky-clean »

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…

Just because lots of people seem to be getting confused, "pre-roll ad" isn't the right term for this. Pre-roll is one of those ads YouTube forces you to watch 5-30 seconds of before you can skip it, and when they play before the video starts. Mid-roll ads are the same thing, but interrupting the middle of the video. And Post-roll are ones that play after the video is over.

What you're referring to are usually called sponsored segments. They're ads, but they're just a part of the video file you're being served. They're not dynamically targeted or cycled out. So if a LTT video is sponsored by ASUS, every viewer will see the same sponsored bit about ASUS because as far as youtube knows, it's a genuine part of your video, not a slot for an ad bid.

They're still annoying, but it's not a pre-roll ad. You don't get those with Premium.

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

#89

Post by charlesray »

Baffled by the number of people itt saying "I can't believe it costs that much and still has ads." It can't not have ads. It's cable TV, YouTube has zero control over whether or not it has ads. They can't broadcast the USA network without ads. Cable has had ads for like 40 years, and traditional cable providers are much more expensive than this. Are y'all 14 years old? idgi

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

#90

Post by zem »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #61
solardev wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cory Doctorow had a superb piece on our "immune system" for ads: https://locusmag.com/2018/01/cory-doctorow-persuasion-adapta...
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