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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

Unless you must have live sports/CNBC or can’t have your internet slow down, how are YouTube TV or cable packages attractive? We have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Even when the free/promotional periods are over, they would still end up costing less than a semi-decent cable package, but with way more useful content (in fact, more than we could ever hope to watch), and little to no ads.

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>Unless you must have live sports

From these comments at least, it seems like this is pretty much their entire audience.

Which makes this seem like a very bad time to raise prices, with so many live sporting events cancelled because of the pandemic.

Both baseball and basketball are starting up again at the end of July.

But the NBA will only be playing 8 games plus playoffs, and MLB will only be playing 60 games (one third of a regular season), right?

In my case, I get 1 Gb/s (symmetrical, no data cap, and they gave me the modem/router) internet from CenturyLink for $65/month, and we decided YouTube TV was the best choice that gave us local channels (not their subchannels, darn it, and CW is still "on demand" rather than live from the local affiliate), which is important to us because the apartment we're in is the worst possible place to have an antenna. Even with the YouTube price increase it's well under what Mediacom was socking us for after the first year for 60 Mb/s down, 10 Mb/s up, tightly data capped internet and an admittedly wider choice of TV, so for now we'll stay (but start researching alternatives). (Sports? I have the Rhett Butler attitude towards them.)

My guess is live sports is a big part of the market. Depending on what sport/team you are a fan of the league-run streaming services are a huge pain with blackouts, lag, etc. YouTubeTV was the best cost+convenience option for me to watch my local MLB team when I signed up originally. Now it isn't.

Their strategy makes no sense to me if a lot of the market is indeed live sports though, so maybe I'm an outlier.

> Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Apple TV+.

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.

We only have Netflix and YouTubeTV. That's $75 for content/mo. Much cheaper than cable in our area (adding in the hardware + DVR services). We have a handful of shows we watch plus a handful of NCAA basketball and the Olympics (this year isn't working out at all..). We've looked at this very objectively (spreadsheets!) and with what we want from our TV service YouTubeTV is the best deal.

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