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Comment by chrsstrm | Hacker News Reader

For any YouTube TV PMs reading, I just added an event to my calendar marking the day I'll cancel my account. Thanks for the helpful reference to the exact date my current rate expires. Spectrum is offering more channels for $45/month and you don't even need a cable box if you're using an Apple TV. YouTube TV is an OK service that is very rough around the edges and I won't miss it a single minute after I cancel.

"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.

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Just cancel now. You still get the rest of the current month you paid for and there's no need to worry about forgetting. I just cancelled mine. "Rough around the edges" is a nice way of describing an app that doesn't play what I click on but random shit it feels like.

You don't think announcing this rate hike on the morning of the last day of the Q2 is coincidence? Sounds like most people's accounts are scheduled to renew in August, which would be much more impactful if we all waited until then to cancel. The knee-jerk cancelations today are fully expected and accounted for.

"I will time my cancellation to hopefully better mess with your key business indicators"

petty but quite brilliant!

Yeah, but that would require paying them another month at the already twice inflated price. No thanks.

I paused today. My sub will continue until my next bill date (13 days) then it ends until November. YTTV will save all of my existing settings and recorded events should I decide to come back. This gives me plenty of time to evaluate alternatives or for YTTV to rethink this price hike.

Thanks, I did the same.

I assume they want cancellations so they can shutter it with less friction.

That’s an interesting thought!

You might be on to something there. In the email they sent out to subscribers, they are actually provided directions for if you wanted to cancel...I thought that was quite odd

That shouldn't be odd. All it would take is a tiny little bit of ethics in their heads.

Right. That’s why it’s odd.

This is google: a company that whose practices is borderline malware, especially on Android.

This guy gets it. It doesn't make enough money and not enough people sign up... All that garbage maintenance and 'Youtube TV' only content.

If you know C suit level, then you know within the next metric, you'll have the ammo to cancel the whole thing.

In fairness, at $45 a month you’re not getting any the unlimited DVR service YouTube TV provides, which is a big feature for some.

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.

Yeah, when I first saw the email I put a reminder to cancel before August billing, but I've been using it much less recently anyway so seeing this thread I decided to just cancel immediately. Hopefully in the future there will be a basic option back in the $40 range

Not the same. Only works at home

A road warrior VPN setup running on a Raspberry Pi 4 and placed in your home costs less than $50. There are 1000 reasons to have one anyway, and watching TV while traveling is also one of them. I know for a fact the Spectrum TV app works quite well under this setup.

You'd expect the average Joe to do all of this ?

The average Joe isn’t subscribed to YouTube TV in the first place, are they? They’re usually paying their cable/telco for TV service. (Which, as it happens, already comes these days with mobile wi-fi streaming of the same content via the provider’s apps.)

Not sure that's a given. Anecdotally, quite a few people on my friend circle hate cable and have YouTube TV for sports and a few minor things.

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

I have an Amplifi device but never tried this Teleport thing which looks like a toggle-and-forget thing. Seems simple enough, I’ve seen regular Joes and Janes go to surprisingly more convoluted lengths to access content they feel entitled to.

https://help.amplifi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037903234-Tele...

Btw, some routers have built-in VPN—I think ASUS has it, for no particular discernible reason. For dynamic IPs, it also can ping a couple DynDNS providers.

Can't speak as to whether the performance of a router's hardware is enough for VPN together with two streams of video.

Do you have a good link that explains how to do this? I am very much interested in implementing that

This OpenVPN[0] setup works very well and uses certificates for auth. It's easy to use and you just need to set up port forwarding in your home network so you can dial in from remote.

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.

[0] https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

[1] https://www.wireguard.com/

I see you commented below that you used OpenVPN for implementing this. I tried using a self-hosted Squid proxy with the Spectrum website, but was unsuccessful at getting it to work. I also tried routing the traffic over SOCKS5 (using ssh -D) and it still didn't work. This was a while ago, but I recall that the website was using Flash. I'm just assuming that the website was using Flash to do some local network checking outside of the tunneled traffic and that's why it didn't work, but I'm uncertain if that makes sense. Sounds like I should have tried a full traffic solution like a VPN...

Routing through where? If you put your proxy in the cloud then it definitely won't work as most providers block known cloud host IPs like AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. I placed my Raspberry Pi inside my home network so that when I'm traveling my traffic still appears to be coming from my home, which is what Spectrum and others are looking for to determine whether to show you the entire channel listing or just a small slice of available channels. If you're not showing a residential IP in their network then it doesn't matter what setup you use, it still won't work.

Uh yeah, sorry I didn't specify that I meant at my house, also on a raspberry pi as well FWIW.

Don't pretty much all cable providers have an on-the-go app now?

What do you mean by only works at home? I use Youtube Tv on my mobile and while traveling.

Likely they were referring to the "Spectrum is offering more channels for $45/month" bit.

Not an expert since I don't really watch cable TV, but it seems like Spectrum's app is available for iPhone too - so not just available from home.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spectrum-tv/id420455839

Sort of.

"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"

TY for reading the fine print, sort of sounds right.

i left Spectrum for youtubetv for precisely this reason

Jacking up the price and giving me more channels I don't want.

Its gone starting August 15th.

Same!

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