YouTube TV, which costs $73 a month, agrees to end "$600 less than cable" ads
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Now it's $60 for faster internet and $73 for TV. The ads are infuriating, but it's less than half the cost for pretty much the same TV experience. This is a very clear upgrade.
With streaming services you still have to pay for certain sports packages and premiums.
Most people who stream are still paying the Internet fees and modem rental.
Some streaming services will sell you equipment (for instance, DirecTV Stream has a set-top box that isn't required, but actually behaves more like traditional cable instead of having to navigate to a separate app)
Online distribution licenses were underpriced and differently packaged for a while because producers didn't know what revenue to anticipate or which horse would be the best to bet on. But as the industry matured, stuff evened out again and it's mostly back to normal.
Many conveniences of the new technology are nice, though.
I keep a Netflix subscription running for my parents, get the free few months of Apple TV every year or so from buying a new device, and beyond that I just watch more and more YouTube in my free time and go to the cinema maybe twice a year.
Sure, YouTube doesn't really have any blockbuster/high-budget/studio-level content, but there's simply so much and so many niches that it keeps me entertained just as well as anything else, so I subscribe to YT premium and that's it.
"Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said the ad-supported versions of their streaming platforms generate more money per user than their ad-free counterparts, as the advertising revenue more than offsets the lower subscription cost." -- https://www.wsj.com/business/media/netflix-price-increase-ac...
Fortunately I pay 1/3 the YTTV cost by sharing with a friend so the cost isn't too bad. But it's too much content for my needs, and I don't prefer sharing access.
I can't imaging having to train every new employee on how to use the streaming-only custom set up you'd end up with without using a cable box, which, well, everyone probably already kind of knows how to operate ... at least for now.
It does make me wonder how long until the new employees won't have a clue how to use a cable box due to never having used one ever.
Mobiles are for a single individual. Landlines are to a single location.
If I ring X corp, I don't really care if I speak to Bob or Barbara, I often don't know if I want to speak to Bob or Barbara.
In the same way I'll email enquiries@xcorp.com not bob@xcorp.com
Apart from pirating, the only way to watch, say, NFL Football, your local baseball team and say Division 1 College Football games is gonna be with one of those $70/mo+ packages.
I would love to just pay directly for the sports/leagues I care about, but that’s just not an option.
The day they finally rip that away is the day I possibly stop following.
…as much…
To hit that revenue number on, say, a hypothetical $90/year ($10/month for 9 months) standalone league pass subscription, they'd need about 2.8M subscribers. And that doesn't figure in the distribution costs of either rolling their own live sports streaming service or more likely whitelabeling one.
Most MLS matches broadcast on cable have fewer than 400k viewers. Many have fewer than 125k. It's hard to imagine that 3M people would consistently fork over $10/month for that.
Providers will almost always pay more for some degree of exclusivity (and more stably — the MLS deal is for 10 years) than consumers will bear on their own. It's ultimately a marketing expense for providers banking on subscriber growth, something consumers aren't willing to shoulder directly for a standalone league service.
Where streaming passes have worked are on the team level for those with global brands, where they can provide exclusive content to diehard fans. But again they tend to be expensive marketing arms and not the team's primary revenue stream, which is still league TV/media contracts.
I pay for a frankly stupid amount of sports streaming services though. I wish there was a way I could watch everything I want without paying for FuboTV, DAZN, TSN+, and probably others I'm forgetting.
Anyone willing to create content at extremely low cost has flourished under the YouTube paradigm.
That idea won't stand up to close scrutiny. Especially the 'Anyone' part. YouTube undoubtedly enriches itself on their efforts. If most 'Anyone's have 'fluorished' at all it's because of their viewers; most of the 'channel' owners that I've watched regularly for years rely on Patreon for support.
I very much doubt that refusing ad-blockers will change any of that.
Oh, how I yearn for Sunday Ticket to just be its own entity so I didn’t have to buy another service.
https://tv.youtube.com/learn/nflsundayticket/
>NFL Sunday Ticket: Every out-of-market Sunday game[1]
>[1] Locally broadcast Fox and CBS games, Sunday Night Football on NBC, select digital-only games and international games excluded
See "NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube" or "NFL Sunday Ticket + NFL RedZone on YouTube"
$350/year for Sunday Ticket with YouTube TV included vs. $450/year for just Sunday Ticket, delivered via regular YouTube it seems.
Their pricing page: https://tv.youtube.com/learn/nflsundayticket/#id-plan-matrix
Image if you can't access it: https://i.imgur.com/0nsQZxA.png
YouTube TV is required—not included—with the $350/year plan.
So it's either $350/year + $73/month (with), or $450/year (without).
Assuming you only keep YouTube TV for the September-January football season, that's $715/season with YouTube TV, vs. $450/season without. If you don't get any value from YouTube TV (e.g. if you already have cable or satellite), it's cheaper without.
(Sunday Ticket doesn't show locally or nationally broadcast games such as Monday Night Football, so you kinda need access to broadcast TV alongside it.)
When DirecTV had the Sunday Ticket monopoly, you had to sign a two-year contract to be allowed to purchase it. At least with Google, you can cancel YouTube TV as soon as the season is over.
In my family's case, we weighed the cost against what we spent last football season on food + drinks at sports bars, and decided it was a better deal. ($715 over 18 weeks = $40/weekend. If we go out half as frequently, we come out ahead.)
Unfortunately, where we're located (South Dakota), there isn't a "local" team, so it's pretty random which games are broadcast by our local affiliates. If we want to follow a team and watch games we care about, it's either go out to a sports bar, or get Sunday Ticket at home. (And as discussed above, the latter is actually cheaper than the former.)
With other streaming services, we mostly stick to a "one at a time" policy. We'll subscribe to e.g. HBO Max for a month, catch up on the latest season of a show, and then cancel as soon as we're done.
I watch at most a couple of hours of TV a week, but my partner likes having "junk TV" on in the background while she's doing other stuff, so we do get some value from YouTube TV for cooking shows, shows like Deadliest Catch, etc. I wouldn't want to go back to paying $150/month for cable for that, but it's not completely worthless.
Compared to travel or my expensive tool habit, TV and football is actually a pretty small portion of our overall entertainment budget.
In spite of the occasional annoyance, I'm fine with it but I realize a lot of people wouldn't be--especially for sports.
Way back when I would travel in groups and sometimes have a roommate one of the nails on chalkboard things for me was people who would turn on the TV the first thing when they walked into a room.
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.
I actually watch a ton of This Old House on my Samsung TV in my home office.
(1) Fascinating in how it depicted other nations. South Korea as competent protagonists who are threading the needle in a dangerous world, North Korea as a broken relation who needs to redeem themselves, China as a looming threat that can still be diplomatically dealt with, USA as clumsy good guys who have lost their way, and Japan as just horrible villains.
Sports is the primary reason for me messing with this, but it is definitely worth it.
Fun things happen with reception though. Just this weekend, I was watching a match and everything was coming through just fine. The UPS truck pulled up to deliver a package to my house, and the whole time the truck was parked, the signal was struggling. As soon as the truck pulled away, everything was fine again.
As much "fun" as all of that is, it is much cheaper than me finding a sports bar to watch a match. Besides, at the time of the morning what I'm watching is on, I really am not in the mood to go some where.
I was able to get cable TV before taking any extreme measures.
And pre-DirectTV, the alternatives were pretty much geeking out with a big Satellite dish which only worked out on your big country property and were willing to spend the money.
<clears old timer's throat>
In my day, we only had 3 networks and we liked it! You kids and your choices!
But seriously, it is fascinating how in ~20 years of HDTV we've gone so far away from a small collection of channels with nothing worth watching to nothing worth watching available everywhere 24/7. Giving people their own agency in creating content has not increased the PSNR levels in the great vs dreck.
Just do the Amazon rental for a weekend. If you don't like it, return it. You'll see the difference.
After the repack many markets have multiple HD channels sharing the bandwidth previously allocated for one OTA HD channel. In addition, as ATSC 3 is being deployed these channel sharing agreements are only becoming more common.
In addition, some cable providers are taking this over-compressed feed and compressing it further.
In many situations, streaming is the best option for picture quality now.
I did some comparisons in the Philadelphia market: https://www.somesortofweatherexperiment.com/tags/tv-source-p...
Even flagship events like the Super Bowl are not exempt to from low detail, compression artifact video in this market.
When NBC last broadcast the Super Bowl there were two 1080i broadcasts (NBC and Telemundo) of the same game sharing the same physical channel (along with some sub channels). It was borderline unwatchable IMO.
I’m sure the situation isn’t as dire in all TV markets, but I think we are looking back on the days during which we could unilaterally state that OTA provides the best picture quality.
Depends. In our area they have split the digital signal so many times to carve out additional subchannels (10.1,10.2,10.3, etc) that the effective bitrate is now pretty dang low.
When watching football, the channel may only be delivering 720p, and with tons of compression artifacts to boot.
Fox was famous for choosing 720p as its broadcast format specifically to get 60fps for its sports programming while the other networks chose 1080i5994.
Here's a list of current ATSC 3.0 channels, with an indicator for the encrypted ones: https://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=atsc3
For now, most network affiliates that air an ATSC 3.0 signal must simulcast the primary video programming stream in ATSC 1.0 format. So most primary channels are still available without DRM. [1]
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
Unfortunately, I feel that content providers have a financial incentive to discourage OTA reception. I'd take that 2027 date seriously.
[1] Paragraph 39 [PDF] : https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-53A1.pdf
Youtube TV is the most expensive of the bunch, going to see if there are any other options like IPTV
Currently we get sling, which is $45 for the typical mainstream cable channels and 2 local channels (ABC and Fox). HuluTV is ok, since it includes Disney+, but about the same price as YouTubeTV. DirectTV Stream is a very complete offering, but barely cheaper than cable (and only because of the lack of equipment fees and taxes)
For that reason, it was DOA in my eyes. My problem with cable was never necessarily the price (though that was a big factor), but the linear, scheduled nature of the whole thing. I don't know why some companies keep clinging to this dated distribution model well more than a decade after Netflix showed everyone how to do it better.
If I actually pick a specific episode to watch (or nowadays to stream) it somewhere seems like I need to pay more attention to it than when I was watching a regularly scheduled syndicated episode. With the later it puts me in the same mindset as listening to radio...a casual thing that I might multitask with other things, such as reading or doing a crossword puzzle.
Personally, I think this shift could really improve society, the state of people's minds, and encourage more offline time without some draconian top-down time-limit. And all thanks to increasing the price and decreasing the quality of streaming content until you break the relationship. Cool!
Some libraries also have a Library of Things, which lend out a random assortment of objects. I've seen musical instruments, baby monitors, cake tins, etc.
Google should have just agreed to do a find and replace in their ad copy.
I can already answer this one: it would be internet-use. My sedentary time is still going to be sedentary time, that's how I want it. I'm not going to chase productivity and socializing for all the leisure time I can spare.
"Charter contended the $600 figure was inaccurate, arguing that its Spectrum TV Select service in Los Angeles only cost around $219 a year more than Google's YouTube TV service," according to a MediaPost article in August.
I would have settled for "$600 less than most cable"
At least in the US, that is no longer the case. The FCC dropped the cable card in 2020. HDHomeRun cancelled their newer cable 6 tuner on that news. I was looking into getting one for a Plex server at the time.
It seems like the exact cable TV model that all the streaming services were supposed to disrupt and put in the ground (eventually).
But then again, I'm probably not the primary user of the service anyway.
That is insane.
Streaming, however, is doing just fine catching up with costs and playing with "ad supported" pricing levels which is only expected to spread.
We're in the "eternal September" of streaming, it's only going to get worse from here.
I thought YouTube Premium was ad-free?
Two different products. YouTube Premium removes the YouTube-inserted ads.
YouTube TV is a different product. It tries to compete with cable and satellite TV (which also serve ads despite hefty monthly fees)
Or some creators have moved to Nebula, which seems to have less of that crap but IMO a worse UI than YouTube.
Like, why am I paying Nebula for this garbage? https://i.imgur.com/itiLYbK.png
He still does long-form well-researched videos if you're into that, too
Nebula is meant to serve a variety of videos. I'd probably feel the same of "I have to watch ads for this crap?" for YouTube, y'know?
I don't really know their arrangement with creators (one would hope creators get a bigger cut there, otherwise why leave YouTube?), but my favorite creators* have the same videos on both, just a little earlier on Nebula usually.
*Just engineering channels though, which is probably why they're not as spammy/shock-reaction-y.
https://nebula.tv/practical-engineering
https://nebula.tv/realengineering
https://nebula.tv/the-efficient-engineer
are all excellent
The way they're marketing themselves I didn't think I would have to curate their content myself. How much do I need do I need to pay to not have to sift through brain-numbing clickbait diarrhea?
At that point you might as well just kill your time on YouTube. Plenty of good channels there too - if you can stand the stench of the heap of trash they're buried under.
I don't think any video site these days can be easily "browsed" if you want to avoid the garbage :( It's all about picking and choosing specific channels/creators to follow and ignoring the crap... sadly.
What you are paying for is all the other stuff that isn’t garbage.
The “garbage” adds negligible costs to the Nebula experience.
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.
I don't care that the content provider found a way to show ads. I have a contract with you - you have to figure it out.
They just want our money. Twice.
The only way it gets YouTube additional money is because it lets those channels put out more frequent or higher budget videos, which usually leads to more views.
I frankly don't care at all, I will never buy Youtube TV. However, justifying this behavior is ludicrous, even if YouTube doesn't monetize on such content.
It's just unfair - you pay for no ads, and ...well you do get them because "the file..."
I just want to watch a show. Without ads, because I paid to have no ads.
But hey we're a young generation, so we understand that it's not Youtube's fault... (?). Sorry, but no way! You are the service provider - you choose what goes through your platform. When I pay, you can't treat me like "you're (still) the product, sorry". That's for me unacceptable.
Plus, offer the chance to choose: with the amount of metadata flying through our networks, they are even able to guess what I ate for lunch, ... can't they really offer a checkbox like "show/don't show movie trailers"?
They are Youtube, not random startup run by a guy working on it over the weekends...
But YouTube doesn't let video makes swap out parts of a video without re-uploading the whole thing and losing your viewcount. From what I've heard they have let some very big channels swap out things without it being considered a new video. But that's for the sake of avoiding copyright or fixing a dangerous error. Not for sponsorships.
But as someone who has never paid for cable TV before, I agree that it's jarring. Our trick is to only watch things we've marked to be recorded, which allows ad skipping. (On demand and live don't allow skipping. Starting a sportsball game an hour late gives plenty of buffer.)
That's it though.
I want / would use a tenth of what YouTube TV or any cable provider sells. I don't really want to spend 70 dollars a month for it.
Techy people will just install blockers which is arguably better for the advertisers, since they're at least stating outright (forcefully) that they don't want ads. That means we don't download the ads and the ads don't register an impression for us because most good adblockers also block trackers. But these people who just raw dog the internet and just walk right by? They're the ones truly decimating the value of advertising, and bless em for it.
There is no win condition for the advertisers in this. None. And that's shown by how aggressive and desperate they've become for even an ounce of attention. The entire pivot to video fiasco happened because advertisers wanted video ads, because making loud, stupid, brightly colored bullshit is the only tried and true way to get attention anymore.
And I'm sorry but anyone still paying for television at this point, YouTube or otherwise, is a sucker. You are paying for (probably) the largest display available in your home to at best, 2/5 of the time bombard your senses with an assault of garbage, between entertainment. Entertainment that can be had much cheaper, without the assault elsewhere with basic technology. And if that's fine with you then by all means, it ain't my money, enjoy yourself but I cannot put myself in your shoes and make it make sense to me.
But after about a week it got really annoying. Now debating if it is worth keeping.
Maybe Ad industry should promote these benefits, so people will hate ads less.
Nope. He wants to look up game stats without getting spoiled and needs frequent smoke breaks.
It's nearly unbearable for me. I only stick it out because he's 76
Ever have a favorite TV show release an episode and then you have to avoid Facebook and Twitter so you don't get spoiled?
For me I don't care so I just don't watch the game for 30 minutes or so and that's perfect. But there is no way to do what he wants without watching in real time.
Miserable though for me.
Not sure how you survive the Internet these days without one.
Eventually sports fans are going to have to pay their own way, and it may turn out to be a lot more expensive than it is now, or they'll have to restructure to pin down costs significantly.
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?
I think years ago when I first subscribed one of the major benefits was the ability to skip through these ads just like DVR, but you can no longer do that.
Arguably we don't _want_ the same as any cable provider has always worked.
You don't have to like broccoli but it'd be weird to complain that it doesn't taste like chocolate.
Of course we cannot get around the limitation of a streaming content provider displaying ads as part of their stream. It's just that $73 buys a lot of entertaining content on the internet that won't have that issue. It doubly feels like a bad deal because the content on cable TV is almost always not the highest quality content available. They are charging premium prices for standard content with long ad breaks.
I wouldn't say "I can't believe it costs that much and still has ads" but I would say "I can't believe that people see enough value to spend that kind of money for that content with those ads." In my adult life I have never paid for cable or satellite tv. My parents still do.
You can get a decent amount of channels for free in most metropolitan areas with a digital antenna. You get commercials but a one time cost for a $100 antenna is worth it.
And the more people that switch to OTA TV the better because that will mean more advertiser money, more eDTV antennas, and more channels coming on air. The market certainly is a growing: https://www.nexttv.com/news/nielsen-sees-uptick-in-over-the-...
[1] 47 CFR 73.621(e) https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/part-73/section-73.621...
HaHa! Google got kicked in the NAD[s]! Imagine that. A company having to respect the "truth in advertising" concept. Calling a company out by name with out-dated (at best) or flat out inaccurate information is ballsy, for which they deserved to get kicked squarely in for flaunting the rules everyone else plays by.