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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

#171

Post by justapassenger »

CivBase wrote: post #159
caymanjim wrote: post #119

I love YoutubeTV, and I've been using it for years. This is probably enough to get me to cancel, though. It started at $40 when I signed up a couple years ago, they raised it to $50 last year, and now $65 for just a few more channels (and among them, only one I even want). I wish they'd offer a more a la carte option. I'd be willing to pay $10-15 per major broadcaster's channel collection, or $2-7 for individual chan…

I don't understand why they don't do that with YouTube channels too [edit: as in "sub to each channel a la cart"]. Let users pay $1 or $2 a month to disable ads on a channel (or $10 a month for "YouTube Premium"). That seems much more sustainable than relying exclusively on ads for income and loosing potential subscription customers to Patreon. They could even offer higher priced, per-channel subscription tiers that…

> I don't understand why they don't do that with YouTube channels too. Let users pay $1 or $2 a month to disable ads on a channel (or $10 a month for "YouTube Premium"). That seems much more sustainable than relying exclusively on ads for income and loosing potential subscription customers to Patreon. They could even offer higher priced, per-channel subscription tiers that ad flairs to comments and unlock emojis like Twitch.

Complex subscription options are one of the easiest way to lose subscribers.

> Twitch, Floatplane, and Patreon are all proof it's a viable strategy.

It's far from being proven:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patre... https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/15/amazons-twitch-hit...

> Ad revenue has proven to be terribly unstable and YouTube is extremely expensive to maintain. They should be desperately trying to diversify their revenue.

Source? Alphabets ad revenue is extremely stable for the company and keeps on growing. So is YouTube share in it. Ad revenue for creators tho - that's a different story.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#172

Post by [deleted] »

Nas808 wrote: post #117
crazygringo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no lawyer, but it doesn't exactly seem legal. Streaming free local network broadcasts was definitively ruled as illegal by the Supreme Court in 2014 -- remember that was Aereo's entire business model. [1] It seems like the Stanford service is trying to justify themselves by being an academic study and limiting to 500 concurrent participants... but it's telling they don't list any legal justification on the site,…

They don't actually check your region either, you just have to check a box saying that you're in the U.S. It seems to be flying under the radar, at least until now

[deleted]

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#173

Post by paxys »

CivBase wrote: post #159
caymanjim wrote: post #119

I love YoutubeTV, and I've been using it for years. This is probably enough to get me to cancel, though. It started at $40 when I signed up a couple years ago, they raised it to $50 last year, and now $65 for just a few more channels (and among them, only one I even want). I wish they'd offer a more a la carte option. I'd be willing to pay $10-15 per major broadcaster's channel collection, or $2-7 for individual chan…

I don't understand why they don't do that with YouTube channels too [edit: as in "sub to each channel a la cart"]. Let users pay $1 or $2 a month to disable ads on a channel (or $10 a month for "YouTube Premium"). That seems much more sustainable than relying exclusively on ads for income and loosing potential subscription customers to Patreon. They could even offer higher priced, per-channel subscription tiers that…

Isn't the exactly what YouTube Premium is (https://www.youtube.com/premium)?

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#174

Post by jedberg »

crazygringo wrote: post #42
keithwinstein wrote: post #12

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:…

I'm no lawyer, but it doesn't exactly seem legal. Streaming free local network broadcasts was definitively ruled as illegal by the Supreme Court in 2014 -- remember that was Aereo's entire business model. [1] It seems like the Stanford service is trying to justify themselves by being an academic study and limiting to 500 concurrent participants... but it's telling they don't list any legal justification on the site,…

They addressed the law in a previous post, but basically there is a carveout for non-profit research that allows the retransmission of over the air signals to people in the US.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#175

Post by burlesona »

caymanjim wrote: post #119

I love YoutubeTV, and I've been using it for years. This is probably enough to get me to cancel, though. It started at $40 when I signed up a couple years ago, they raised it to $50 last year, and now $65 for just a few more channels (and among them, only one I even want). I wish they'd offer a more a la carte option. I'd be willing to pay $10-15 per major broadcaster's channel collection, or $2-7 for individual chan…

The conventional TV channels don't allow their networks to be sold a-la-carte because they all make more money via the bundle than anyone would be willing to pay for their channels individually. Remember that most of these channels are related - for example, NBC owns Telemundo, SyFy, USA, Bravo, E!, Oxygen, etc. They sell all of those through bundles and keep $20/mo or so, but how many people would pay that much for any one of the channels, and how many people would actually buy them all?

I think everyone would love to just get their favorite channels for (let's say) $3/mo/channel with no ads... but that would be a huge loss for the media companies, so they won't sell that way.

Instead what we're seeing is disruption via alternative models, like Netflix, HBO, Apple TV+, and now even the biggest media owner (Disney) offering Disney+ and ESPN+ direct.

I'm not sure if conventional TV will still exist in its current form in a decade, but I don't think we'll ever see today's bundled TV become available a-la-carte, because it isn't compatible with that business model.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#176

Post by slivanes »

sixQuarks wrote: post #105
shepardrtc wrote: post #13

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.

Be aware it is max 3 streams at a time.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#177

Post by burlesona »

shepardrtc wrote: post #13

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.

I agree, PS Vue was the best alternative TV service IMO. Just worked perfectly on a great range of devices.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#178

Post by Arainach »

burlesona wrote: post #168

Disappointing, as Youtube TV's low entry price for the last several years took the wind out of Playstation Vue, which I really enjoyed. It's frustrating to see the big tech companies engage in monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior by selling services at a loss to drive out competition only to then jack up prices.

I doubt this is intentional. Google has no moat here - they own none of the content they provide, and the content owners have all the leverage over price.

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#179

Post by fomopop »

nodesocket wrote: post #41

When I first signed up it was great value at $35/mo. It’s dramatically been increasing since adding little value. I literally just want CNBC, ESPN, ESPN2, CNN, FOX NEWS, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, TBS, and TNT. I have gotten zero value from my nearly doubling of monthly price. Original signup June 2017 - $35/mo Price increase June 2019 - $49.99/mo Price increase August 2020 - $64.99/mo

Hulu Live TV has all those channels for $55.

https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker?channels=cnbc,espn,espn...

Re: YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

#180

Post by Fellshard »

cwhiz wrote: 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.

They want their dominant spot back. Not hard to understand.
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