YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99
theverge.com
theverge.com
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://youtu.be/63aECX2MZvY
The content is... well, it's U.S. network television and associated daytime programming. But some people like it! And it's free (for people inside the U.S.).
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, and merely generically claim:
> Stanford respects the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe your copyright has been violated on a Stanford site, please notify puffer-copyright-notices@cs.stanford.edu and give notice as stated under Reporting of Alleged Copyright Infringement. [2]
I'm honestly shocked this ever passed Stanford legal review. Maybe it never did?
Not really.
> (Previously, it was 100% in-house.)
Nope.
Even in-house programming doesn't mean you're free of underlying copyright issues.
They don’t get that money if you use an antenna, but that’s a small market compared to the internet. Most people who use antennas won’t pay anyway, and broadcasting gives them access to the network.
But opening up streaming will draw a lot of people who would otherwise have a cable subscription. Which will lead to much more cord cutters and cut into the carriage fees from the cable company.
This increase by YTTV is driven by the leverage that ViacomCBS has because of the CBS locals then own. They are forcing YTTV to take these network. Until retransmission consent is changed, we are stuck paying the local station holders despite the fact that their content is free OTA.
[1] - https://www.multichannel.com/news/is-the-retrans-cash-cow-ru...
Also, the copyright licenses the station has for their programming usually specify limits on redistribution - e.g. geographical, types of carriage, amount of customers reached (with a wider distribution costing more, as it provides more value to the licensee and reduces the licensor's ability to sell licenses to other entities).
So the opposite of what some ISPs are trying to pull.
The reality is cable operators are no longer need to be anything but a dumb pipe. And TV channels are no longer as valuable as they once were due to multitude of other sources of information.
Pretty simple. They money using a tried and true model, why would they bother innovating or rocking the boat. It's much easier to collect the check for most of the money on the table than to bother innovating and collecting a slightly higher percentage with signicant potential downsides.
If there is such a rule I highly doubt it's intended to cover distribution to the public, more like within campus facilities, but that could be what Stanford is trying to exploit.
Seems like a long study, but I suppose it's nice to have a bigger dataset.
There wouldn't be loopholes if the law was consistent, and I would argue there is no 'spirit' in such a confusing set of rules.
They might also need to sell you a short-term lease on that particular drive bay, so that you are playing the DVD in your own home too.
First sale doctrine covers rentals, but having good relations with studios to get supply of new releases often influences rental establishments to avoid buying discs at retail to rent out. (But, RedBox will sometimes do it)
They buckled from pressure from studios and agreed to stop for the reason you gave.
It kind of seemed at the time that they used their right to do this as a negotiating tactic in getting better prices from distributors.
Kind of sad it got killed off :(
So none of the research results will be licensed, patented, or used to bolster the universities reputation?
And they aren't doing it to become world renowned for their rebroadcasting, they're doing research and publishing results first and foremost. Big difference. Unless you want to start couching every type of university research as commercial advantage now, which seems pretty harmful to the university research landscape to me.
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).
It's definitely a nice weekend project if you are serious about cutting the cord and are in an area with decent OTA signals.
I will say though, that MythTV does have the annoying "slow channel switch" issue, since it literally needs to buffer some video data before it begins to play.
They skipped ATSC 2. There were a couple broadcasters experimenting with newer codecs on ATSC, but I think that mostly fizzled out.
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.
With digital TV, several channels are multiplexed into a single broadcast frequency, so channel hopping is sometimes OK even with a single tuner.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...
That's "non-useful" content rather than "non-content", those 30% are intro and filler which you might also find in non-youtube content. And obviously it also depends strongly on what kind of content you're using youtube for. Skipping the first 30% of a recital is probably going to skip interesting content.
And we can ignore creators who over-monetize if we want (or buy Premium or use adblocking).
I heard about this a few months ago, and have since checked when the actual content starts in the videos I watch. I certainly can't agree with 30%, usually in 15-minute videos, the introduction is 1-2 minutes before they go into the meat. The bigger problem is all the filler, sponsorship breaks, "remember to ring the bell" etc., that occur at seemingly random points, though I don't think it adds up to 30% filler even if you count all that. Maybe I just skip over most of the garbage.
“Every eleven minutes” because each “half hour” episode is two separate segments totaling 22 minutes.
Broadcast was utterly unbearable when I visited the US 20 years back, I can't imagine watching it today.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-commercial_educational_sta...
One of my fondest "one of these days" project ideas: duct-tape a correlator to an RF front end, along with enough storage to "Tivoize" the local FM band. Record everything, recognize and redact any content that reoccurs within 30-second windows, and rebroadcast it for household/car consumption.
Of course that company should have cornered “digital music on the internet” but we’re themselves stuck in the radio mindset.
Edit: it appears that its original name was PopCatcher [2], by a company with the same name
I never did figure out a way to monetize it, but, the thought was to that if you were pepsi, you could be alerted for coke's new commercials on a per-market or per-station basis, depending on how you wanted to pay for it.
I ended up turning the hardware into my P25 decoder for Hamilton County (currently running at https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz ), but, I would kinda love to get back into that space again.
And yes, to be perfectly clear, what I had in mind was for removing commercials automatically. I was complaining about mindless DJ patter in my post, but that's not an issue on FM anymore. It's either not that mindless in the case of stations like KEXP, or it's nonexistent thanks to the Clear Channelization of everything else on the dial. In any case, I have no idea how I'd go about removing it reliably. Skipping repetitive commercials is a rudimentary DSP exercise, but skipping random DJ diarrhea would be an open-ended ML problem.
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the obvious solution would be to keep repetitive segments lasting at least ~3 minutes, and discard the rest. If I did it the way I was originally thinking about, I might still hear the commercial the first time it aired. But if I did it this way, I'd never hear any commercials at all, and would only miss the first appearance of a new song if I happened to be listening at the time.
I've liked listening to a handful of channels on Sirius XM when it's already been enabled in rental cars but it's not worth the price.
Most programming is on earlier.
How is that not advertising?
That’s how public broadcasting works in the US. A number of other countries manage to have public broadcasting without any private advertisements or sponsorship. (For example, Australia’s ABC.)
I live in the US and own a TV but I don't live within 50 miles of any station broadcasting TV signals, so I can't pick up any signals with a TV top antenna.
This isn't Facebook.
Facebook brings up the dregs of humanity, so I am not surprised when I see worthless comments. I would hope for a slightly higher quality of comment here though. At least we don't have
> First post!
"This new price reflects the rising costs of content, and we also believe it reflects the complete value of YouTube TV"
Your price does not reflect the complete value of your service, but happy churning.
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
https://help.amplifi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037903234-Tele...
Can't speak as to whether the performance of a router's hardware is enough for VPN together with two streams of video.
These days all the cool kids are using WireGuard[1] though. I don't have a link to a handy installer and setup guide for that but they do exist.
Using a Pi 4 with gigabit ethernet makes a big difference over older Pi hardware.
"you can enjoy up to 250 live TV channels and up to 30,000 On Demand TV shows and movies when you're connected to your Spectrum Internet WiFi network at home. Plus, when you're on the go, enjoy up to 150 live channels and up to 20,000 On Demand titles anywhere you have an internet connection"
petty but quite brilliant!
If anyone is in a similar boat I can strongly recommend the Channels DVR app: it’s $6 a month or less per year, runs on most platforms (raspberry pi included) and lets you record to anything you want.
If you know C suit level, then you know within the next metric, you'll have the ammo to cancel the whole thing.
Its gone starting August 15th.
BTW I'm dumping YTV after this move, but I haven't had a quite the same horror show w/ the app etc. At $40 it was worth it, I felt the hike to $50 was a bit steep, but now another $15/30 pct... it's just a big middle finger. I watch news & sports, but not $800 per year.
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 channels (depending on quality of programming). I might even land at $50 or more with my channel choices, but I'd prefer to pick what I'm paying for instead of subsidizing dozens of channels of programming I dislike (and quite a few that I would prefer to boycott entirely).
In YouTube TV you get to see unavoidable ads, unlike in TV where you can switch the channel while those ads are running.
Hard to see how this could possibly be worth it, since you can also skip the ads for free.
Could just be an extension of Google's anti-Apple UX design, but I would be rather surprised.
I use YouTube for many purposes: music, learning, recreation, etc. and i'd rather pay like $10 a month than spend 1 hour a month watching ads.
For the record, I do not care at all about YouTube Red exclusive content.
You're not watching them right. All ads can be fully skipped, preemptively, at a time cost of zero. If you don't like the ads, just don't watch them. There's no reason to pay for YouTube Red.
That time adds up to 30 to 60 min a month. Let's say 45 min a month in average. That means, saving 45 min of my spare time costs $12, the cost of YouTube Red.
45 min of my spare time is much more valuable than $12, so I just pay for it.
You're hallucinating. Just read the sidethread comment from tpm:
> I have never seen an ad on Youtube, much less an unskippable one.
https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-...
Stratechery also has written about this
Ie more choice more better.
Personally I was pissed when my reward for early evangelization of YoutubeTV was a Hike from $35 to $50. But now that it’s $65, I’m donzo.
This will take people back to the days of torrents and piracy.
I'm kind of confused, if it's an adversarial relationship where the seller is going to extract as much money from you as possible in either scenario, wouldn't some consumers prefer to pay specifically to starve out content they'd prefer not to see?
Maybe I'm not understanding this page, but it looks like it's "good" for me because instead of paying $9-10 for the History Channel alone I'll be paying $11.70 for History Channel + ESPN (which I will literally never watch)?
I'm not a calculus genius but I'd prefer to spend less money and only have what I want. This model assumes that I'd be willing to spend $3 per month on ESPN, but how does the graph look if I were willing to spend $0 per month on it? Or hell, since pricing is arbitrary, I'd like to pay -$3 per month as a courtesy for having to scroll past content I genuinely do not want to consume let alone subsidize?
A better way to think about bundle pricing is that the channels you really want cost $50, and they throw in a whole bunch of other crap for free. Why turn down free stuff?
A la carte makes no sense.
Whether that factors much into your personal value assessment or not, that is a valid downside to having a bunch of extra channels you don't intend to watch.
Is your point that I can't spend less because... they're going to get $50 out of me either way? Except that's impossible because there is no other way so there's literally no way of knowing a theoretical cost so it's safest to assume it's going to be $50 or more?
However, the economic equilibrium of a perfectly unbundled system is not that you get to watch the same thing for less money. It is, in the general case, that you either get less content, or pay more, or both.
To take your example, realize that it is outlier behavior to be willing to pay $9/mo for History and $0/mo for ESPN. If you took History channel, with the content that it has now, out of the cable bundle and tried to sell it $9/mo, or even $1/mo, there would be way too few interested customers to make such a proposition economically viable.
In a perfectly unbundled world, content such as the History channel does not exist. You only have marquee content like ESPN, movies for rental or purchase, or (if lowercase history is your thing) highly produced documentaries, i.e. the kind of content that willingness to pay for is high enough to justify the high customer acquisition cost. You do not have content like History channel because it lies in that tier of things that many people are kind of interested in watching, but only if it comes with something else more valuable that they already paid for.
One can debate the societal value of the existence of content such as the History channel to begin with, but that's what the argument is about, not about the consumer's individual preferences in a hypothetical world where it would be possible to watch the same content for cheaper.
This seems like you're saying "bundling mis-serves the customer." If the History Channel would not exist if people could pay for it directly, then why should it ought to exist?
Whether or not it is "mis-serving customers" depends a bit on whether there's abuse of monopoly power, which is an argument one can make about the cable companies, but not so much about the over-the-top services like HBO Go, Disney+, Netflix, or Prime, all of which are structured as a bundle. I'm not sure Prime customers, for example, are unhappy or feel mis-served by being able to watch TV shows on top of being able to order items with fast, free shipping. Bundling can be used for nefarious value-extraction in a monopolistic market, but it can also bring consumers value, so we shouldn't conflate the two.
In many competitive markets, bundling is often a consumer's preference that does serve customers well. For example, most coffee shops don't charge for sugar, creamer, and other condiments, and you maybe have some aggrieved consumers complaining that they should get a discount for drinking only black coffee. It's likely that coffee creamer companies would go bankrupt if people had to pay for condiments at every coffee shop, and we can debate whether it's even a good idea then. But on the whole, I don't think that turns into an argument that coffee shops are mis-serving customers by providing condiments that are free of charge, that is to say, bundled with the price of coffee.
Personally I live in an almost perfectly unbundled world of content already, because I tend to buy or rent the TV shows that I'm personally interested in. This works for me because I have little time to watch, don't like ads, and have enough disposable income that I'm not thinking twice about cost, but I'm not sure that many other consumers would be satisfied with the kind of entertainment experience where they have to pay $2 per episode of their favorite show.
History Channel is cheap to make compared to sports, would definitely be able to pay for itself with cheap subscriptions.
Cable TV with bundling is just a local maxima established decades ago. The long tail of interest that drives regular youtube is the proof.
That article is an absurdly oversimplified model. In the real world, the networks would find some way to diversify between the $3 and $10 channel offerings, letting them get $3 from the $3 person and $10 from the $10 person.
edit: Correction, they do mention this common and widespread approach... in a footnote. Without saying anything about why it wouldn't work.
It's like saying that you'd be willing to pay for a $2/month Spotify subscription for only the genres of music you want. That's not how the economics work. Going a la carte would mean paying as much as a bundle, for less content.
The problem here is that people's mental models are fundamentally self-centered. They imagine paying half or less for just the channels they want.
But in total, that would mean media companies getting half or less the revenue, for producing the same content -- since the marginal cost of giving extra channels is basically zero, they don't gain any money back by giving you fewer channels. Now, media companies aren't that profitable, the math simply doesn't work out, they wouldn't be able to actually make all that content. Many channels would simply be cut.
Of course, broadcast technology doesn’t support that and we have decades of industry built around a different model, giving all of the incumbents a strong incentive to resist any sort of change.
You're arguing past people. Plenty have said they're fine paying the same or more for access to less content.
I used to watch about 2 shows a week on BBC (UK; 1-1.5hrs) and disagreed with paying £M to TV show presenters who just preside over long, talky adverts for Hollywood movies and mainstream media. So I don't pay (nor watch) anymore.
I'd pay to watch those couple of shows separately. As it happens though they occasionally make their way to Netflix, so I don't have to ... but I'd still pay to watch them when they're still current.
Looks to me like there's money left on the table.
Personally I'd like to see some form of legislation that requires shows to be made available to consumers if they are available to other channels - I could pay double to BBC what Netflix pay them to get the show and we'd both win; and I wouldn't mind having it on Netflix, might watch it again.
Now BBC is a special case; I can't work out why they need to compete commercially, nor why we allow showmakers to form companies to be paid through, etc.. they should work on salaried staff paid on civil service pay scales IMO.
Really? I haven't seen anyone say they want to pay more for less content. The unspoken assumption always seems to be "if I was getting fewer channels I'd be paying less", logic which works fine for tangible goods, but less so for ones with nearly zero marginal cost to produce.
I don't even want a la carte, I'm fine with just "It's on Netflix/Hulu/HBO Max or I don't need to watch it." I'm not willing to pay more than $20 a month for TV most months, with the rare extra service to get caught up on a show I really like.
Its not unbundling you really want, or a-la-carte, it's just a lower price tag.
You have correctly identified the business case for cinema and DVDs.
Like, a single movie DVD/Blu Ray costs about as much as an entire month of Netflix. Unless you're hardly watching any TV shows or movies on Netflix, that's just an awful value.
Twitch, Floatplane, and Patreon are all proof it's a viable strategy.
Ad revenue has proven to be terribly unstable and YouTube is extremely expensive to maintain. They should be desperately trying to diversify their revenue.
Right now, every video that isn't "advertiser friendly" is dead weight and money on the table.
They already do and have for quite some time.
I meant that they could continue to offer YouTube Premium as a way to disable ads on all channels and support premium subscriptions for individual channels as an alternative for users who might not be interested in buying YouTube Premium just to support one or two channels.
Ah. In your comment you said "or," so I thought you meant "or." As in YouTube should offer this or that, not YouTube should offer this and that. But it seems like another poster has also brought up the relatively new channel membership feature.
https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/course/channel-membe...
You need to in the Partner program and have 30‘000 subs though (1000 for gaming content).
This is obviously very important for YouTube Gaming. They are (finally) getting into bundling one membership per month with YouTube Premium.
This is IMO the single most reason why Twitch is so successful. They should’ve copied Twitch Prime much earlier. The fact that kids can use their free sub a month from their parents Amazon Prime sub was a stroke of genius.
EDIT: Wow. I'm even subed to MKBHD, the example you use in your other comment, and I never noticed the "Join" button before. YouTube does a terrible job of advertising that! How am I even supposed to know what "Join" means? Thanks again for pointing that out!
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.
Source? Twitch and Patreon get along just fine. The existing options can continue as they are.
> It's far from being proven.
YouTube has already swallowed the expensive part of the deal - creating a video hosting platform. I'm just asking them to augment their monetization scheme that other platforms have already demonstrated demand for.
> Source? Alphabets ad revenue is extremely stable for the company and keeps on growing.
Source for what? Of course YouTube is expensive. It's expensive to host content at that scale. It's expensive to regulate content at that scale to comply with the law and satisfy ad partners. I don't know what else to say. I don't know if YouTube operates at a profit or not, but that's not really relevant.
What matters is YouTube's profit is almost completely dependent on their ability to sell ads. Content without ads can only benefit the platform if it drives premium subscriptions or drives users towards content with ads.
It’s how human brain operates. We’re very easily overwhelmed with multiple options.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iese/2018/11/05/cant-decide-wha...
> Source for what?
Source for a claim that selling ads is extremely unstable. Check alphabet or Facebook earning reports from last 10 years.
> I don't know if YouTube operates at a profit or not, but that's not really relevant.
How is operating at profit not relevant in a context of a business model? Especially when suggested business models of companies that lose money, like patreon, as a something that YouTube should be doing.
We’re so deep in the bubble now. Real business models and profits are irrelevant as long as they seem cool.
Then just present those options intelligently. Without overwhelming the user. I'm not convinced the model I'm proposing is that complex. Many content creators supplement their income with this exact model, but YouTube doesn't get a cut.
> Source for a claim that selling ads is extremely unstable. Check alphabet or Facebook earning reports from last 10 years.
Earning reports do not reflect the revenue earned from each ad. Alphabet is a massive company that serves ads on much more than just YouTube. The mounting interest YouTube has shown in "advertiser friendly" and "kid friendly" content demonstrates how concerned they are regarding their ad revenue.
> How is operating at profit not relevant in a context of a business model? Especially when suggested business models of companies that lose money, like patreon, as a something that YouTube should be doing.
You keep bringing up how Patreon isn't doing well as though it's obviously the fault of the monetization model, rather than the extraordinary cost of deploying a diverse content hosting service that has to compete with established giants like YouTube. YouTube already has that part done. They are paying to host the content no matter how they monetize it. Why do you think deploying a new, optional monetization option will result in a net loss?
I brought up Patreon, Twitch, and Floatplane because they demonstrate there is demand for that model. If YouTube offers it, people will certainly buy it. Just the a la cart, per-channel, tiered subscription model. That's it.
Whether or not YouTube operates in the black is not particularly relevant. I'm talking about augmenting their existing ad-based revenue model, not replacing it. For the overwhelming majority of users, it wouldn't change a thing, but YouTube could stand to bring in a lot more revenue from the minority who would be willing to purchase payed subs to support the platform and creators.
They could bring in even more revenue with subscription tiers that offer trivial rewards like comment flairs, special emojis, or early access to videos. Even if most of the extra revenue from higher tiers goes to the channel instead of the platform, it would still be extra revenue for practically no cost.
https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee
You should see a blue „Join“ button next to the sub button.
It‘s called channel membership. You need to be in the partner program and have 30‘000 subscribers (1000 for gaming channels) to activate it.
https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/course/channel-membe...
Edit: depending on what your region is it might not be a thing yet. But if your region supports Premium, I‘m pretty sure memberships are supported as well.
There's a "join" button next to the "subscribe" button. You have to be logged in to see it.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/60/11/2667
I agree the "unlimited" DVR is nice but even then it's not truly unlimited and it doesn't give me the part of unlimited that I'm interested in. I don't need unlimited shows saved for a year, I want to save a few things until I get to them or the odd rare special thing I want to save forever.
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).
I suspect a fair number of people just don't care about TV as much as the experts thought. Netflix plus Amazon Prime and a season pass of Dr. Who is about all I can watch anyhow.
Stuff might finally be happening. I can‘t wait for Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, etc. to just come in and start getting those licenses. Imagine a FIFA world cup on YouTube live-streamed in 4K. Granted, it‘s unlikely to happen soon. But sports is really the only valuable thing the traditional content providers still have.
Wait a minute, though. AT&T and NBC both have have their own streaming services now. So why wouldn‘t they use their sports licenses to stream games on there?
I enjoyed using YouTubeTV during this past college football season, but I won't be renewing this year. It was already iffy at best with Coronavirus, but now with this price hike YouTube can forget it. Probably exactly what old media wants from us anyway so we go back to cable. Forever a cable cutter.
If needed, I'll go back to Sling despite it going up as well when it first got started, but not as dramatically as YouTubeTV. Sling Orange + sports package will be $40, which is good for the few months I need it. At-least we still have some other options out there instead of having to go back to cable.
I think it is just a continuing trend in Google getting squeezed harder and harder by the falling search advertising margins and no replacement or even side hustle to compensate.
Just before Google winks out of relevance I expect to see them try to charge people to use maps.
I've observed that as the other search services have improved their free offerings, it has negatively affected what Google can charge to advertise on their search results, which has put pressure on their profitability. So at what dollar cost do the free alternatives become "good enough" and everyone switches?
As an aside, I've already switched to Apple maps because it lets me continue to save favorite places and addresses without having to turn on privacy eroding options (web and location history in Google). But I recognize I maybe unique in that I value that aspect highly.
I think lots of consumers would be willing to pay for Google Maps.
But, I'd feel pretty bad if everybody had to pay for Google Maps, since so many people rely on it.
The challenge I think for Google would be to charge what supporting maps actually costs to have the unit be revenue neutral. Street view fleets, satellite imagery, and 100,000+ machines with multi-petabyte data sets cost a bit, not to mention the engineers who work on massaging the data, developing the hardware, and operating the equipment.
Would you pay $25/month for Google Maps access? Or would you switch to Open Street Maps, Bing Maps and/or Apple Maps which were still free.
* In theory everything is a side hustle to the business of collecting data on people but Microsoft and Apple have revenue streams that aren't as threatened by increasing data privacy efforts that Google's are.
I liked the service but I just don't use it enough to continue. I'll re-subscribe when they drop the price again.
$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 <package B>
Until networks change their pricing model this a la carte option is not going to work out the way people hope.
Even paying extra in lieu of bundling, prices like that could work out if you make ESPN a separate $5-10 option.
Source: I head a Product organization at a mega media org.
I mean, I get it: you're making people pay for stuff they don't need. You can charge a higher price despite users not actually watching everything they buy. Clearly, this tactic must work at some level, or else they wouldn't do it.
On the other hand, there are users like me who take one look at that and say, "ew", and walk away from TV completely. And it's not like I'm unwilling to pay for content, I just want to get what I want when I want it and not pay for the privilege of wandering through this ridiculous maze of content that no one cares about.
Maybe I'm being naive, but it just seems to me like this is a strategy that's going to kill the cash cow on the long run. Am I wrong?
It's also possible that it would produce the secondary effect of killing channels that are more niche and not quite as profitable (maybe not profitable at all). Maybe there are channels that people would never pay for individually if given the choice, but would watch if given them as part of a package, and the aggregate value of which provides enough additional benefit to justify paying for the package as whole.
You can see how this lack of bundling might impact content by looking at movies which are traditionally more a la carte. Movies are produced under the assumption that they all need to be financially self sufficient. The end result is that most content produced is either blockbusters based off big budget IP (which tries to address discoverability) or low cost and easy to produce content that can potentially be hugely profitable if it hits. The mid-budget TV (traditional TV mainstays like sitcoms would generally fall into this bucket) would likely disappear if everything was purchased a la carte.
It is also worth considering that most of the streaming content providers all do the same bundling as the traditional powers like Viacom. The difference is that the Netflixes of the world don't organize their content into channels. However there are definitely different verticals within these companies. Netflix has one for comedy[1] that is the equivalent of Viacom's Comedy Central, they just don't actively separate this content from the rest of their catalog.
[1] - twitter.com/NetflixIsAJoke
Or are you saying that these channel additions were part of an agreement or condition that to continue to offer some of the existing channels they needed to take the additional channels and charge more?
If you're going to make suggestions, think of something realistic, at least.
Unfortunate. Too much money for me and I won't be continuing my subscription.
I assume my experience was unique somehow because it's too egregious of a bug to ignore (it basically gave me a choice of ditch the Chromecast or ditch YoutubeTV, in the end I did both), but I was using an android phone and a gen 3 chromecast so I can't imagine why this only affected me. Never got fixed in the ~1 year I had the service.
Not $65 amazed granted.
I really don't expect too many people to stay subscribed, unless they're relying on the (sketchy) revenue stream that's people who subscribed once and then forgot all about it.
I only have YouTubeTV because it’s still the cheapest way to get the BBC World News channel in the US. I used to have DirecTV but they started demanding $130/mo (without the sports channels!) minimum to get that channel - while my local cableco (Wave) doesn’t carry it at all.
I understand the bundling of channels from the same providers like Viacom and NBC/Universal that forces cable/sat customers onto higher pricing tiers, but channels like the BBC World News channel are sourced individually (as far as I know) and are offered at-cost (again, as far as I know) by cableco/sat providers - so there is absolutely no excuse for DirecTV to charge so much besides market segmentation (which they’re probably right on-the-money for (pun intended): the people interested in getting the BBC World News channel probably can afford $130/mo - and they’re right: I can afford it, but I still think it’s outrageous.
Many made the joke when Cable companies started losing subs to internet streaming sites that people would end up paying more. The big catch is most people forget to factor in their internet cost writing it off mentally as "I was already going to have it", a sentiment the streaming services want you to have.
It reads oddly for you to present something unequivocally true as a catch, especially during a pandemic when most people are especially relying on internet service to talk with friends and family, work, and education.
None of which explains how I went from grandfathered in at $35 to this is a year or so.
It's already ahead of many cable plans.
> What happened to a-la-carte channels?
Most of the cost isn't per-available-channel (and having more freedom to pick and choose increases costs), so per channel charges would be much higher than current package charges divided by channels, high enough that even though people like the idea in the abstract, they'd flee from it in concrete form.
In hindsight, it was stupid for Google to get into a business where they cannot control pricing.
I guess Google’s thinking was that the data about what people are watching was worth something which would allow them to extract higher ad revenue from TV-provider-ad-inserts as they’d be more targeted than the general-audience ads you get with traditional cable/satellite TV - but Sling and PS Vue have the same proposition to advertisers.
Pluto.TV is free because of commercials, and it has 250+ channels. It has a TV guide for what is playing and while it has no DVR it has the ability to start a movie from the beginning so you don't miss it.
EDIT: Okay, looked at the channels. Looks like they just don't have the expensive ones (ESPN, etc). So it doesn't have the sports people want.
It seems obvious, but for some reason, I accepted that TV will have "commercials", but I always associated "ads" with computers. Maybe it's a regional/language thing...IDK.
If things were normal right now I'd probably just shrug it off, but between no sports and quarantining with family instead of at my apartment I have basically been paying for nothing for 3 straight months now. This is definitely pushing me over the edge to cancel.
Maybe next spring I'll reconsider, but this doesn't seem like a great move to me right now?
https://twitter.com/RichLightShed/status/1224454820309811202
That's nothing, and in my mind - doesn't bode well for the long-term prospects of the service.
I've been a subscriber for about a year, but with the price increases, and the interface on AppleTV that seemingly wants to always show me Tennis when I turn it on, and suggest I resume programs which were recorded 3-6 months ago, it's got a very long way to go before it's got the usability of TiVo.
At this price, they're pushing me back to cable TV with a locked promo rate.
Although i understand the strings that viacomm is pulling, I wonder if this is google's way of trying to shed users in preparation for service retirement.
I was happy with Youtube TV at its initial $40 price, lukewarm with the first price jump, and now I'm really questioning it at $65. I travel quite a bit so the on-demand capability is valuable but that's starting to be a stretch.
The tricky part I'm noticing is how traditional providers are bundling. Mediacom provides internet, cable, and phone service in the Midwest. My parents got a better total price for the same service by bundling it all together. When I look at pricing, the marginal cost of basic cable TV would be a few extra dollars per month.
I'm definitely switching away from YouTube TV, but need to decide if I should go with basic cable (which won't have everything my household desires) or Hulu.
From these comments at least, it seems like this is pretty much their entire audience.
Their strategy makes no sense to me if a lot of the market is indeed live sports though, so maybe I'm an outlier.
That's 2 services more than me!
Once I run out of things to watch, it's time to shut the TV off and go ride my bike or work in the yard anyhow.
For $65/month, it would be nice to at least have a decent interface. Google pls buy Tivo and incorporate that.
Planet Money had an episode on starting a small cable TV channel. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/471633490
I don't get how everyone was in the "cut the cord" movement not too long ago when all we really have done is create another cord. $70 a month is way too much for a bunch of channels included with basic $30 package in my area:
https://www.moneysavingpro.com/tv-providers/comcast-channels...
It’s a shame because it really is a great service. The infinite DVR basically lets you build up your own on demand library of any show.
In the end I was only in it for the live sports. Those aren’t even on anymore and when they come back they’ll be cheaper on Hulu.
I can't grasp paying $65/ month for all my streaming combined, let alone just one service. I could buy a season pass to 3 new great shows every month for that much.
I've noticed that regular Youtube has been cranking up the ads quite a lot lately.
I view most of my youtube on the TV, via their crappy HTML-based Apple TV app. So many ads to suffer through, suddenly.
On the desktop, it seems like they've suddenly started work against that one chrome extension I've loved the most: The one that blocks the ads from youtube.
I can't see myself subscring to youtube red or whatever they call it. Just not going to happen.
It's not uncommon to only have ~4 different ads shown to you on something like CBS Mobile. They have the potential to target ads, they have an app installed (and all the privacy implications that go with it), but somehow they're showing the same 30 second ad 4 times in a row to make up a commercial break.
Others are far better. For a time, ESPN's app would simply show the logo and repeat the same ~4 second music loop until the commercials were done.
Sometimes you get something new - it's always some poor american local company that made their own ad (often some construction company targetting home owners) but messed up the geotargetting, I presume.
Original signup June 2017 - $35/mo
Price increase June 2019 - $49.99/mo
Price increase August 2020 - $64.99/mohttps://thestreamable.com/matchmaker?channels=cnbc,espn,espn...
I really felt "meh" about YouTube TV when I used it. To make matters worse about a 5th of the things I asked it to record ended up being the wrong thing. No idea how they managed it. All I got back when I reported the incorrect recording was a "whoops, sorry".
Overall, they need to split into multiple offerings so they can still present some value options. I don't watch sports, so that was already a waste of money in the subscription for me. These new channels do not add anything I'll be watching either.
I have tried Sling and have used all service's free trial, but at the end of the day I am not willing to pay full price to watch 10% of the content. I do miss watching live sports... and thankfully, we are getting more streaming options now.
In honestly, was probably gone once baseball started as they recently dropped YES network. Same goes for many friends in the north east who were also using yttv.
YouTube Premium may already be censored by a paranoid AI taking personal kickbacks from Jimmy Kimmel Show, but at least I can still find good content with a little effort.
Does the swipe behavior in the iOS Youtube TV app (and only the Youtube TV app) drive you crazy? It's the only app where it will consistently move two tiles with the same force any other app requires for one. After about a day of the free trial I gave up because it was that frustrating.
It seems when they add a new channel that costs say 100M pa to broadcast they divide the cost by their existing number of subscribers and mark up accordingly.
surely everyone else does it by "in five years i will have all the subscribers so divide by that number"
Cable TV was already priced optimally and digital versions are just catching up. People want more channels from a single source, but each person wants their own selection. Bundling brings down overall cost and provides many more channels, especially smaller ones with more niche content. A-la-carte can be cheaper (not always) but is limited in content.
Add in licensing and rules by content producers and there's no escape. Something fundamental needs to change beyond just the delivery mechanism of video. Many people now watch Youtube creators as a replacement for TV so maybe that's the future altogether.
https://www.buyinternetcable.com/blog/spectrum-tv-choice-cha...
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 feedback about our updated price, we encourage you to fill out this form. Find information about our updated price on this Help Article or on our blog post."
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.
I can't stand any normal cable TV other than sports, so both YTTV and cable are not for me at all, but my local cable company offers enough channels at less than $65 that even if I did decide to pay for cable TV, YT TV is a tough sell.
Unfortunately there is only 1 way to realistically do this and it involves piracy and costs somewhere from free to <$15/mo (+hardware which can vary greatly).
It's a shame the US sector is so badly regulated. Must carry obligations and effective competition mean many of these bits of structural weirdness didn't happen elsewhere.
I’ve recently started watching more YouTube and while the production quality might not be where people like, you can certainly find meaningful content for non-fiction.
This price hike kills that option. I will go back to Hulu or, more likely, just add TV to my monthly Fios package.
And with s contract....
Is Google running out of money?
You get the same ads as when the show is airing live and if it’s a local market slot you get a dark screen with text saying it’s taking a commercial break.
When watching shows you recorded as a DVR you can skip them by fast forwarding.
When watching shows YouTube tv has offered that you didn’t record you get preroll and in-line ads that are usually unskippable just like Hulu.
I have recently returned to watching golf by subscription to sky sports golf. They often mirror the NBC/CBS advertising schedule instead of using the clean feed. Totally ruins the golf tournament. I have to pause 45 mins before I watch and use an app I've written to quickly jump the two minute ad breaks.
I've spent much time in American hotel rooms. Watching TV there is like entering an ADHD simulation.
This YoutubeTV thing just seems awful - frankly I'm amazed it has lasted this long.
I get more than 50 HD channels for free over the air and I watch only 3 of them.
Google must be close to death! A business needs money to survive, don’tcha know.
And the prices! Outrageous. I’m glad I stick with Netflix.
82.9 million households have cable
https://nocable.org/learn/cable-tv-cord-cutting-statistics/
There are 128.53 million households in the US.
That means 65% of households have cable.
So what are the statistical chances that you don’t know anyone that pays for cable? Those numbers are somewhat skewed lower as far as cable TV because I don’t believe it counts OTT providers like Youtube TV, Hulu Live TV, etc.
If you pay for:
Youtube Music
Youtube Premium
Youtube TV
Youtube Kids
I question your entire decision making process.
Am I missing something here?