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YouTube TV sharply increases monthly subscription to $64.99

463 points by jbredeche 6y ago

thrill 6y ago
Who's with me to start the Ron Swanson streaming channel? It'll have all the worthwhile channels: hunting, fishing, and woodworking.
- DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  I wonder what the cheapest way to do so would be? Something through YouTube would allow easy account management, consistent interface people are familiar with, no concern regarding bandwidth and scaling - but I'm entirely unsure if there's a way to do so within the TOS and YouTube structure. Planet Money had an episode on starting a small cable TV channel. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/471633490 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/471633490
couchdb_ouchdb 6y ago
Cancelling. Really really terrible to do this in the middle of a pandemic. Who cares about these extra channels?
- serg_chernata 6y ago
  Same here, I cancelled immediately. I swallowed the previous price increases but this is getting close to regular cable TV. I switched to YTV to avoid cable to begin with.
Twirrim 6y ago
Yikes. 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".
M2Ys4U 6y ago
$779.88 a year? Yikes. That's a lot of money.
- xenospn 6y ago
  Isn't that A LOT more than just getting cable for Internet+TV? I mean, YouTube doesn't include the $50/month I'm paying for internet.
  - sco1 6y ago
    I had the same question after reading the email from Youtube this afternoon, looking at Verizon's offerings they have monthly tiers at $50, $70, and $90. Ignoring any first time user bundles, incentives, etc. I don't know what the overlap between the base tier and Youtube TV's base offerings is, but it's for sure covered by the middle tier. 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.
  - DavidPeiffer 6y ago
    YouTube TV's value proposition includes DVR and, if you're in your home area, the ability to fast forward through commercials for DVR'd content. 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.
- screamingninja 6y ago
  ... plus taxes
quantumwannabe 6y ago
If they keep increasing the price every time they add more channels pretty soon it’ll end up being the same as the old cable subscriptions. What happened to a-la-carte channels?
- tclancy 6y ago
  It’s disappointing. I’m guessing the problem is they are one of the few players with any financial muscle so the status quo is going all out to make them look bad. None of which explains how I went from grandfathered in at $35 to this is a year or so.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > If they keep increasing the price every time they add more channels pretty soon it’ll end up being the same as the old cable subscriptions. 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.
  - mohaine 6y ago
    What about base + a-la-carte blocks in the same blocks they have to pay for them? Why has no one offered this yet?
boromi 6y ago
When it increased to 50 that was my upper limit. I had to cancel my subscription today.
diwu1989 6y ago
This is getting out of hand, at this point, going with the special deals at Comcast is a better option.
- jedieaston 6y ago
  Comcast is $10 per TV (unless you’re cool with Roku) and the cord-cutter apps have good support on a bunch of different devices you can plug into your TV. I think Hulu still wins unless you want all of the channels.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    And sports fees, broadcast fee, fake fees that they try to pass off as government mandated taxes, HD technology fee, etc. And with s contract....
jiofih 6y ago
Well, it’s not like nobody predicted this. We’re back to cable, but even more expensive. Somehow even a company with a monopoly on the internet eyeballs still bows to the old barons.
KWD 6y ago
I was already on the fence at $50, as I don't watch many of the channels. Primary use was for local, and just a couple of other channels. I'll keep it for July, and then use that time to get an attic antenna setup, and then look at an antenna + Sling option, or some other setup. 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.
- mcgrath_sh 6y ago
  Definitely get an antenna for local OTA channels. Cheap and great picture quality. Does not even need to be a complicated antenna. We have some plastic square thing draped around a clock on a wall and it works perfectly. We only have one TV hooked up to the cable box in our house because antenna + streaming covers 99% of our TV needs. If I could stream the in-market NHL team, I’d ditch cable.
keithwinstein 6y ago
ObShameless reminder that https://puffer.stanford.edu 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://youtu.be/63aECX2MZvY 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.).
- gundmc 6y ago
  Only downside is it is regularly overloaded during any moderately interesting sports event.
  - jijojv 6y ago
    yeah "The study is limited to 500 participants simultaneously, meaning that at most 500 people are allowed to watch Puffer at a time."
  - justinator 6y ago
    I guess good thing those are in short supply.
- xhrpost 6y ago
  Wow that's impressive. I'm on the east coast and seeing instant buffering when changing channels.
  - hadrien01 6y ago
    I'm in France, and switching channels is faster than on DTT!
- crazygringo 6y ago
  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, 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo [2] https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/ https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/
shepardrtc 6y ago
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.
- anoncareer0212 6y ago
  That's...the opposite of my experience? That's odd, I'm in Austin, fwiw
- mrfredward 6y ago
  Or this one (I'm on android): Tapping the "cast" button to send to a Chromecast while in the middle of a show causes a random jump. On a good day, it would start playing at the beginning of the show, on a bad one it would jump to an entirely different network. 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.
- sixQuarks 6y ago
  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.
  - slivanes 6y ago
    Be aware it is max 3 streams at a time.
- burlesona 6y ago
  I agree, PS Vue was the best alternative TV service IMO. Just worked perfectly on a great range of devices.
  - chrisan 6y ago
YetAnotherMatt 6y ago
Did patio11 start working at Google instead of Stripe? 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_survey 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."
- profmonocle 6y ago
  Interesting URL. You don't often see a company refer to their own action as a "price hike".
  - vanc_cefepime 6y ago
    Probably because those who made that feedback page are the same people within the YouTube team that actually use the service and feel the same as we do.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Looks like the "price hike" text is not on the link now. 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.
beervirus 6y ago
I like the service in general ok, but YouTube TV has the worst DVR interface I've ever used. It's worse even than any of the shitty one-off cable company boxes. For $65/month, it would be nice to at least have a decent interface. Google pls buy Tivo and incorporate that.
dastbe 6y ago
While this price change is certainly impactful, I wanted to see if my experience is universal. 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.
lowmemcpu 6y ago
That cost is nearly double it's original price 3y ago, and looking at the recent channel additions -- I'm not sure the users will be convinced it's worth the extra cost. I wish someone would have a selection like: $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>
- paulcole 6y ago
  When (for example) ESPN charges like $9 per household, there’s no way to get 5 channels for $10 that includes ESPN. Sure you could get the shittiest 5 channels for $10 but what’s the point of that? Until networks change their pricing model this a la carte option is not going to work out the way people hope.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    ESPN is an outlier. Among normal mainstream cable channels, nothing else is more than $2, only a few are more than $1, and the cheap ones are $0.10 or less. Even paying extra in lieu of bundling, prices like that could work out if you make ESPN a separate $5-10 option.
- diogenescynic 6y ago
  All I want is CNBC and baseball. I can subscribe to MLB.tv which covers baseball, but as far as I can tell there is not a reasonable way to get CNBC a la carte. Paying for CNBC Pro is $30/month and that seems more than I'd like to pay.
  - listenallyall 6y ago
    CNBC averages around 250k primetime viewers (under 200k during the day). Its top show attracts fewer than 400k. Imagine how much lower viewership would be if it wasn't a "free" channel. There's essentially no economic model that allows them to stay in business in an a-la-carte world. But if they are guaranteed to be in 80 or 100 million homes via bundling, then yes it can (and does) work. https://ctv.kwayisi.org/networks/cnbc/ https://ctv.kwayisi.org/networks/cnbc/
torgian 6y ago
Wow this kinda blew my mind. I never knew there were tv sites like Hulu tv, or even YouTube tv... And the prices! Outrageous. I’m glad I stick with Netflix.
thehoff 6y ago
Anyone else using Locast? Works well for us (where we are regular rabbit ears don’t work).
uptown 6y ago
What's more interesting to me is that Google only has ~2M YouTube TV subscribers. Perhaps there's newer metrics now. https://twitter.com/RichLightShed/status/1224454820309811202 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.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  That's $1.5Bn/year in revenue for a 3-year-old product that just rebroadcasts content. How is that "nothing"?
  - ChicagoBoy11 6y ago
    I could've sworn I was doing something wrong with my math give your the parent comment to yours, so I'm glad I saw this -- my math was right, after all!
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    Also it leverages existing infrastructure (perhaps in a much tighter use case).
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Revenue means nothing. Is it profitable?
  - uptown 6y ago
    Depends entirely on how much they pay for the content. Is it profitable?
- ssivark 6y ago
  2M paying subscribers is 1B+ USD annual revenue — nothing to sneeze at!
thebeefytaco 6y ago
I was on the fence and about to cancel, since it's the media subscription service I pay the most for and get the least use out of. This makes the decision easier...
jurassic 6y ago
I was on the fence at $50 and will be cancelling as I don't care anything about these new additions. I can think of many things I would prefer to spend the $180 price hike on. Seems like they should be doing these expansions as add-ons if they don't want to see people like me churn.
coldtea 6y ago
YouTube TV still exists?
gundmc 6y ago
This is certainly CBS Viacom flexing their influence. Youtube TV without CBS and their sports coverage is dead in the water. That gives them leverage to force feed the other Viacom junk. Even the official blog post announcing the changes sounded like more of a resignation. Unfortunate. Too much money for me and I won't be continuing my subscription.
nodesocket 6y ago
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
- fomopop 6y ago
  Hulu Live TV has all those channels for $55. https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker?channels=cnbc,espn,espn2,cnn,fox-news,abc,nbc,fox,cbs,tbs,tnt https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker?channels=cnbc,espn,espn...
chrsstrm 6y ago
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.
- mennis16 6y ago
  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
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Not the same. Only works at home
  - chrsstrm 6y ago
    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.
    - mav3rick 6y ago
      You'd expect the average Joe to do all of this ?
      - derefr 6y ago
        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.)
bitL 6y ago
So YouTube is the same as cable TV now, but in a worse quality? Is Google running out of money?
tpmx 6y ago
Sort of related: 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.
- DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  I've noticed a significant uptick in ads as well. The ad quality is akin to ads on streaming-specific apps. 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.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Yeah, the ad quality is horrible. I'm in Sweden; I've seen/skipped through all of the local ads like 200 times each by now. At least it feels like that. 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.
gscott 6y ago
https://try.philo.com/ https://try.philo.com/ is $20 a month is great. It is missing some news stations, but Pluto tv is free and has a lot of news and a mystery science tv 3000 station.
- alex_dev 6y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion; I'm trying it out now. Looks like Chromecasts aren't supported, but they do have a Roku app. The Roku interface seems to be much better than Youtube TV's!
- nichos 6y ago
  I love Philo. Paired with my OTA antenna, I get local sports and news. They also include the DVR with it. Great service.
mennis16 6y ago
I signed up for YouTubeTV quite recently (at the beginning of last baseball season) at $40/month. I'm pretty surprised to see in such a short span of time it has gone up to $65. 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?
ralmidani 6y ago
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.
- notatoad 6y ago
  >Unless you must have live sports From these comments at least, it seems like this is pretty much their entire audience.
  - leereeves 6y ago
    Which makes this seem like a very bad time to raise prices, with so many live sporting events cancelled because of the pandemic.
    - astura 6y ago
      Both baseball and basketball are starting up again at the end of July.
      - leereeves 6y ago
        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?
- mennis16 6y ago
  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.
kristopolous 6y ago
youtube, no longer the loss leader of the internet?
vanc_cefepime 6y ago
Really not surprising that old media still has pull like this. 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.
- mrits 6y ago
  Yeah, we just cancelled as well after we realized we haven't logged in for a few months. I have it mainly for sports and those don't exist right now.
jimbob45 6y ago
The whole streaming platform war is beginning to resemble the Stone Soup parable. At some point, no platform will have enough content for anyone to care to subscribe (arguably now). Someone needs to come along and convince them all that sharing is in everyone’s best interests. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
- ilaksh 6y ago
  That reminded me of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup ("dcss"), which is a pretty great free-to-play game. https://crawl.develz.org/ https://crawl.develz.org/
VikingCoder 6y ago
So, what's the best way for me to watch SNL, Rachel Maddow, Rick and Morty, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine? Hulu?
- intellix 6y ago
  Netflix and YouTube with ExpressVPN?
- newfriend 6y ago
  https://soyboy.tv https://soyboy.tv has some good bundles that include these. Also Star Wars and John Oliver.
  - dang 6y ago
    Would you please stop posting flamebait and using HN for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do this, and you've unfortunately done it a lot. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
intellix 6y ago
Didn't even know people still paid for TV but reading this thread surprised me. I would say this industry is dead with the upcoming generation but guess I'll be surprised again
- scarface74 6y ago
  Really? Are you going to do the feigned Slashdot era ignorance “Do people still watch TV? I haven’t owned a TV in ten years”? 82.9 million households have cable https://nocable.org/learn/cable-tv-cord-cutting-statistics/ 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.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  There are plenty of people above the age of 40 on HN, though.
solarkraft 6y ago
Gen Z speaking: Why would anyone ever have wanted that, even at 40$?
- jftuga 6y ago
  Live sports: football (pro, college), baseball, basketball (pro, college), hockey, etc.
- Bud 6y ago
  Because it was just as good or better than a cable subscription, at around half the cost, PLUS it works a lot better on mobile devices.
- gambiting 6y ago
  I'm 29 and I haven't had TV for...8 years now? We only watch Netflix/Amazon prime or watch movies on blu ray. Every time I go visit my mum and she has the TV on(she's literally the only person I know still paying for satellite TV) I have no idea why you would. Constant ads, shows which are being interrupted by ads, no freedom of selection when it comes to content....I honestly don't understand why people still watch TV at all. I can maybe understand the argument about watching live sports, but it inevitably comes with watching all the other shit as well.
mnm1 6y ago
Have they figured out how to play the show you click on yet? No. $50 a month and the basic functionality of the app doesn't even work. With a Chromecast, it's even worse. Eventually, after clicking back and forth, disconnecting and reconnecting, it may play. Then you have to turn off the closed captioning for every single show even though it's off in the settings. Then it randomly stops at times. The ui displays the wrong show. And they have the gall to charge even more for this shittiest motherfucking app I've ever had the displeasure of using. This engineering team should be fired. They should be ashamed of themselves. They can't even make the app play a single video without problems. I've been putting up with it for years now just because of certain channels my mom likes, but no more. Fuck this garbage app. I've submitted dozens of support requests and the only people dumber than the engineers, project managers, and others who work on this app are the idiots running customer support. Fuck them all. They can shove this fucking app right up their ass.
- mobiledev2014 6y ago
  Usually don’t come to HN for this type of comment but something about it in this context is just poetry.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Sounds like you have a generation 1 Chromecast™ and bad WiFi. We hope you'll try YouTube TV again with a Chromecast Ultra™ and a Nest Wifi™ 3 pack. Take care!
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    Please tell me this is a parody of the support responses?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      The ™s make me lean in that direction.
  - drgath 6y ago
    Asking someone to spend $400+ just to upgrade equipment in order to support a service that doesn’t work well on the original equipment you sold them, takes some guts.
nostromo 6y ago
Google has successfully recreated cable TV along with the awful "pay top dollar for stuff you don't want" pricing model... wonderful.
cwhiz 6y ago
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.
- adventured 6y ago
  > 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).
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    They have lost almost 4 million subscriber this year. And streaming companies, such as YouTube TV, have also lost subscribers. So these people just stopped.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > So these people just stopped. 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.
- Fellshard 6y ago
  They want their dominant spot back. Not hard to understand.
- seansmccullough 6y ago
  This is why I just cancelled. The original package and price was perfect.
xivzgrev 6y ago
What’s the point of YouTube vs xfinity? It would be interesting if they let you pick a la Carte but no one wants to do that (lower fees)
circa 6y ago
Price hike and still no NHL Network or NFL Network/Redzone option. Good-bye YTTV!
dingle_thunk 6y ago
Good of them to do this thing to people’s credit cards, inside of a major economic crisis. Google must be close to death! A business needs money to survive, don’tcha know.
vmception 6y ago
I didn't know we were at the place to have nuanced discussion on Youtube TV benefits If you pay for: Youtube Music Youtube Premium Youtube TV Youtube Kids I question your entire decision making process. Am I missing something here?
kemonocode 6y ago
So it's just cable with extra steps now. Nice. 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.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I would doubt more than 1% are in that category - $50 (now 65) a month raises more mental alarms than your old $11 Netflix subscription.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    That’s me. I’ve been subscribing to Netflix for 7 years now despite not having watched it at all in 4 years. 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.
  - Shivetya 6y ago
    Well Netflix 4K is $16 a month. Which pretty much puts it above Disney+ let along D+ with Hulu/ESPN. Then you have HBO which still acts as if they are truly premium, if anything they are the binge a month channel. 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.
tyingq 6y ago
Add another cancellation. This was enough for me to dig up the account info for my internet provider to see if they offered a streaming service. They do, and it's $24.99/month plus $5 for the cloud DVR. That's less than half of your new rate. Dumb move.
ycombonator 6y ago
https://www.locast.org/ https://www.locast.org/ Don’t pay for TV
caymanjim 6y ago
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 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).
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Paying $65 to watch ads, no please.
  - D2187645 6y ago
    10 dollars felt too much compared to free youtube, and now they want 65 for whatever they are selling.
    - 29athrowaway 6y ago
      I pay for YouTube Red because I can skip through ads. It's worth it. In YouTube TV you get to see unavoidable ads, unlike in TV where you can switch the channel while those ads are running.
      - Volundr 6y ago
        I use YouTube TV and this comment confuses me. What exactly do you think is stopping you from changing channels?
        caymanjim 6y ago
        Yeah, it works just like TV. There are no unskippable ads or interstitials. Also with unlimited DVR and time-shifting, I rarely watch live, and I can skip all the commercials (albeit manually).
Causality1 6y ago
Starting to remind of Amazon Prime, which started out at $79 a year for two day shipping and is now $120 a year for two day shipping plus a bunch of crap I don't need or want.
stevespang 6y ago
I would not pay $5 a month for YouTube TV
j45 6y ago
Increases like this will accelerate the jump away from cable. There is no infrastructure costs comparable to physical cable, or last mile boxes and equipment. Just OTT. 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.
rafaelvasco 6y ago
Jesus. If I was subscribed to this, in my local currency this would cost me 347.61 moneys each month right now. Ugh.
coding123 6y ago
I used it 2 years ago to watch the olympics. Going to have to find an alternative...
throw03172019 6y ago
I was already considering cancelling but this is the nail in the coffin. We don’t care about the added channels. Also, the recordings are usually messed up. It will be a new show but think it’s already been watched. So we typically turn on the show in between its air time just to catch it. The iOS app makes it easier to choose which to watch. We mainly watch on Apple TV and the UI is not very good... good bye.
fmakunbound 6y ago
Is it at least ad-free for that much?
beezle 6y ago
Started at the beginning but all things come to an end. What was once a sports centric + news service has become more and more bloated. Is the audience really cord cutters? As it is probably far cheaper to get a cable+internet package than just internet + yttv. 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.
catsarebetter 6y ago
Think this may have an effect of pushing more people to get adblockers and Netflix subscriptions than anything else. Or they just want people to get free Youtube so that they have a wider audience of ad viewers to sell to advertisers.
- rahimnathwani 6y ago
  You may be confusing YouTube TV (a replacement for cable TV) with YouTube Premium (ad-free access to YouTube and Google Play Music).
  - catsarebetter 6y ago
    Hmm yep I definitely was lol
russellbeattie 6y ago
At least they were nice enough to include a link to cancel the service in their email about the price hike. Seriously! Other services purposefully make it difficult, so props to Google for doing the right thing there. I liked the service but I just don't use it enough to continue. I'll re-subscribe when they drop the price again.
- mrits 6y ago
  I agree, it was really easy. Unfortunately I first pressed the "manage my services" button which took me down a deep rabbit hole of other google services.
FpUser 6y ago
I've resigned from TV be it cable or online version ages ago and have never looked back. Not paying crazy price for bunch of garbage with the one or two channels I've used to actually watch. Goodbye vultures.
burlesona 6y ago
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.
- Arainach 6y ago
  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.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    It’s just odd that they bothered getting into this space in the first place and that they used their YouTube brand for this - “YouTube” was meant to disrupt and subvert established television, not become a part of it. 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.
fomopop 6y ago
If you're looking for a new service, we built a tool that lets you add your favorite channels and makes a recommendation. https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker
ogre_codes 6y ago
It's increasing in price by one Netflix. 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.
choppaface 6y ago
For the few months I tried YoutubeTV, the stream consistently failed (especially for live sports) and I reported it several times. I finally disputed three months of their charges with my credit card company. Google accepted the disputes within a day and effectively gave a $150 refund. I later canceled, but important to know they’re willing to give out their crappy service for free without a fight.
cable2600 6y ago
https://pluto.tv/welcome https://pluto.tv/welcome 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.
- mojo982 6y ago
  I've never heard of this before now. It looks legit. How are they able to remain free? Do they inject more ads than the already existing ones? It's not like TV doesn't already have ads. 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.
  - zip1234 6y ago
    I am one of the people that only has YouTube TV for sports. However, they cancelled Fox Sports and added a bunch of other stuff that is not sports.
pcurve 6y ago
I must've been living under a cave. This is first time I'm hearing about YouTube TV. Might be because I cut the cord many years ago.
sirmike_ 6y ago
Personally I might keep it at $65 if they had just value added youtube premium with it. I was hoping they would do this at some point as an option. But will most likely not happen.
m0zg 6y ago
So now they'll charge you $65/mo to watch ads every 10 minutes? Where do I sign up?
TehShrike 6y ago
Hey, I decided to minimize YouTube and pay for Nebula even before the price hike :-D
ecoqba11 6y ago
There are so many free alternatives now days... PlutoTV, Locast, Plex & Tubi. These combine with Netflix or Prime Video or even TV+ is more than enough.
- mister_hn 6y ago
  and if you add also Kodi Addons to the mix..
- mmanfrin 6y ago
  The distinction that needs to be made is that people aren't typically looking for things to watch, they're looking for a specific thing (generally live sports).
dkdk8283 6y ago
Price hike aside I cannot support a company that abuses creators. It used to be such a great source of knowledge and content but now it’s been gutted and has become just as mind numbing as daytime TV.
awill 6y ago
The content providers want Youtube TV to fail, and are doing it with forced bundling that increases the price. There's no other explanation. In hindsight, it was stupid for Google to get into a business where they cannot control pricing.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
At $20 they were disruptive, at $65, they are dead to me. I will be interesting to see how many others leave. The "teaser" cable package is more channels and half the cost. 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.
- thallium205 6y ago
  They definitely charge people to use maps... A lot.
  - onefuncman 6y ago
    corporations aren't people, despite a lot of hand wringing to the contrary
    - esarbe 6y ago
      Corporations aren't people. (Just to hammer it in..)
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    I don't disagree, but how much of that pricing authority is directly related to market share? The billion dollar question is, if Google charged $9.99/month for access to Google Maps, what would that do to their market share if OSM, Apple, and Microsoft/Bing were still "free" ? 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.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
iamwpj 6y ago
Still a good value. Comparable cable service in our area still hovers around $95/month, plus this has better recording and works on many devices (simultaneously!). We've had it for two years and no complaints -- we recommend it.
amriksohata 6y ago
I paid Google for Google One and it doesnt include Youtube Premium, their own video service. Whilst Amazon Prime gives you Prime Now, Prime Video and Prime Delivery. Much better value.
kerng 6y ago
The amount of ads I'm seeing on YouTube is pretty insane recently. Google must be under quite some pressure to make money.
easytiger 6y ago
We don't have this in Europe. Does it carry in show adverts as well?
- leetrout 6y ago
  Yes. 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.
  - easytiger 6y ago
    Thanks. That's horrific.
    - greatpatton 6y ago
      A European will have a big problem to understand how you can pay that much money to submit yourself to this torture...
      - easytiger 6y ago
        Having really only watched TV, in my university years through piracy, or later through dvd, streaming services etc. I have become so sensitive to interstitial advertising that I can't stand it. 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.
- alexgmcm 6y ago
  Yeah, I thought this was referring to YouTube Premium at first (which doesn't seem so bad as it would let me download videos to my phone to watch when I don't have connectivity) This YoutubeTV thing just seems awful - frankly I'm amazed it has lasted this long.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
They seem to be making a fundamental mistake in calculating their prices? 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"
touchpadder 6y ago
A dying service milking some last few dollars
TouchyJoe 6y ago
I prefer them asking for money upfront instead of selling ads and becoming controlled by the people who pay for those ads.
projektfu 6y ago
Over and over, customer surveys showed people want a la carte cable. They perceive their high bill as paying for 100 channels they have no interest in to get 3 they want. And yet, no provider will offer it that way.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Because it's not profitable and users always want more, it's just that each person wants a different set of channels.
coronadisaster 6y ago
I didnt realize that it was already $50/month... I didn't signup at $35 because I thought that it was too much... I get more than 50 HD channels for free over the air and I watch only 3 of them.
manigandham 6y ago
It's the endless cycle between bundled and a-la-carte (regardless of medium). 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.
Mindwipe 6y ago
These OTT retransmission of mostly FTA broadcast channel services haven't caught on at all anywhere globally except the US, and that seems to have been mostly a focus of unsustainable pricing. 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.
josefresco 6y ago
When I ditched cable TV my bandwidth usage skyrocketed. Now that the prices are closer, there seems to be almost no benefit to streaming TV. My Internet will be faster and Xfinity's apps are as good if not better than YT.
beastman82 6y ago
I've had it for at least a year and it blows away the competition in most respects. This is a fair price.
habosa 6y ago
I’ve had it since day one (actually since dogfood) but this is it, I just cancelled. 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.
bsenftner 6y ago
You mean to tell me people actually clicked that YouTube TV ad?
jeegsy 6y ago
I gave up MythTV for this crap
briandear 6y ago
Still no weather channel?
voicedYoda 6y ago
I still don't understand, and refuse to pay for, basic TV in the United States. Bunny ear is now a digital receiver with even more local broadcast options. And yt brings no value add, imho.
thrownaway954 6y ago
"This is just like cable but with extra steps" 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/ https://www.moneysavingpro.com/tv-providers/comcast-channels...
- p-law 6y ago
  You have to watch Comcast, though. Does the quoted rate include their local station rebroadcast fee? Their "sports fee"? These two together were something like $14/month -- and not disclosed in the price of any package -- when I finally dropped their scammy ass about 16 months ago. PLUS any boxes you may or may not have to use.
kup0 6y ago
Couldn't YouTube TV at least do what other providers and cable companies do- have different packages with different sets of channels? That + the DVR functionality/etc just might be enough to make it worth it to enough users instead of only having this noncompetitive high price-point. 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.
m3kw9 6y ago
Is a ploy to make people feel good once they lowered the price to the new still sharply higher price.
mjparrott 6y ago
Key question: why would you watch broadcast TV?
- dfxm12 6y ago
  For local content, mostly news & sports, but maybe also lifestyle stuff.
ibdf 6y ago
10 years ago I imagined online live tv would become 100% alacarte, pay just for what you watch... but unfortunately we continue to pay for tv like we always have, we just got rid of the box (in some cases not even the box). 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.
Unklejoe 6y ago
I was thinking the other day: if you replace the word "commercial" with "ad", it somehow seems much more ridiculous to be spending $50+ month for a video service, only to still have to sit through countless ads. 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.
bugeats 6y ago
So you want me to pay for the privilege of watching a mind numbing stream of psychologically manipulative advertisements interspersed with the toxic, propaganda laden death throes of the legacy media? No thanks. 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.
joshstrange 6y ago
The amount of money I would pay monthly for ALL the TV shows I care about delivered at mp4/mkv files that I can stream to any of my devices without commercials/tracking and with good subtitles is probably close to $150+/mo. 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).
jdechko 6y ago
If you are on Spectrum, check out the TV Choice package as a decent option for a la carte. It's $28/mo (including the broadcast fee) on a 2-year promotion. I get all the local channels as well as 10 channels that I pick (which includes ESPN/2/FS1). They have decent app support, and while the app blocks certain channels (like ESPN) while not on the home network, the subscription allows you to use the ESPN app anywhere. https://www.buyinternetcable.com/blog/spectrum-tv-choice-channels-list https://www.buyinternetcable.com/blog/spectrum-tv-choice-cha...
khill 6y ago
I was planning to start using YTTV when sports start up again. We were using Hulu Live before and, while it wasn't terrible, I wanted to give YTTV a try. This price hike kills that option. I will go back to Hulu or, more likely, just add TV to my monthly Fios package.
garfieldnate 6y ago
I'm 31 and I find this totally insane! Why would you pay $65/mo for something that has 8 minutes of commercial for every 22 minutes of content? Regular TV is dead to me now that we have streaming services. I'll pay for the content, but don't waste my time trying to make more money by showing me ads. I haven't had a regular TV connection since leaving for college.

463 points by jbredeche 6y ago

Who's with me to start the Ron Swanson streaming channel? It'll have all the worthwhile channels: hunting, fishing, and woodworking.

DavidPeiffer 6y ago
I wonder what the cheapest way to do so would be? Something through YouTube would allow easy account management, consistent interface people are familiar with, no concern regarding bandwidth and scaling - but I'm entirely unsure if there's a way to do so within the TOS and YouTube structure. Planet Money had an episode on starting a small cable TV channel. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/471633490 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/471633490

couchdb_ouchdb 6y ago

Cancelling. Really really terrible to do this in the middle of a pandemic. Who cares about these extra channels?

serg_chernata 6y ago
Same here, I cancelled immediately. I swallowed the previous price increases but this is getting close to regular cable TV. I switched to YTV to avoid cable to begin with.

Twirrim 6y ago

Yikes. 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".

M2Ys4U 6y ago

$779.88 a year? Yikes. That's a lot of money.

xenospn 6y ago
Isn't that A LOT more than just getting cable for Internet+TV? I mean, YouTube doesn't include the $50/month I'm paying for internet.
- sco1 6y ago
  I had the same question after reading the email from Youtube this afternoon, looking at Verizon's offerings they have monthly tiers at $50, $70, and $90. Ignoring any first time user bundles, incentives, etc. I don't know what the overlap between the base tier and Youtube TV's base offerings is, but it's for sure covered by the middle tier. 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.
- DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  YouTube TV's value proposition includes DVR and, if you're in your home area, the ability to fast forward through commercials for DVR'd content. 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.
screamingninja 6y ago
... plus taxes

quantumwannabe 6y ago

If they keep increasing the price every time they add more channels pretty soon it’ll end up being the same as the old cable subscriptions. What happened to a-la-carte channels?

tclancy 6y ago
It’s disappointing. I’m guessing the problem is they are one of the few players with any financial muscle so the status quo is going all out to make them look bad. None of which explains how I went from grandfathered in at $35 to this is a year or so.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> If they keep increasing the price every time they add more channels pretty soon it’ll end up being the same as the old cable subscriptions. 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.
- mohaine 6y ago
  What about base + a-la-carte blocks in the same blocks they have to pay for them? Why has no one offered this yet?

boromi 6y ago

When it increased to 50 that was my upper limit. I had to cancel my subscription today.

diwu1989 6y ago

This is getting out of hand, at this point, going with the special deals at Comcast is a better option.

jedieaston 6y ago
Comcast is $10 per TV (unless you’re cool with Roku) and the cord-cutter apps have good support on a bunch of different devices you can plug into your TV. I think Hulu still wins unless you want all of the channels.
- scarface74 6y ago
  And sports fees, broadcast fee, fake fees that they try to pass off as government mandated taxes, HD technology fee, etc. And with s contract....

jiofih 6y ago

Well, it’s not like nobody predicted this. We’re back to cable, but even more expensive. Somehow even a company with a monopoly on the internet eyeballs still bows to the old barons.

KWD 6y ago

I was already on the fence at $50, as I don't watch many of the channels. Primary use was for local, and just a couple of other channels. I'll keep it for July, and then use that time to get an attic antenna setup, and then look at an antenna + Sling option, or some other setup. 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.

mcgrath_sh 6y ago
Definitely get an antenna for local OTA channels. Cheap and great picture quality. Does not even need to be a complicated antenna. We have some plastic square thing draped around a clock on a wall and it works perfectly. We only have one TV hooked up to the cable box in our house because antenna + streaming covers 99% of our TV needs. If I could stream the in-market NHL team, I’d ditch cable.

keithwinstein 6y ago

ObShameless reminder that https://puffer.stanford.edu 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://youtu.be/63aECX2MZvY 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.).

gundmc 6y ago
Only downside is it is regularly overloaded during any moderately interesting sports event.
- jijojv 6y ago
  yeah "The study is limited to 500 participants simultaneously, meaning that at most 500 people are allowed to watch Puffer at a time."
- justinator 6y ago
  I guess good thing those are in short supply.
xhrpost 6y ago
Wow that's impressive. I'm on the east coast and seeing instant buffering when changing channels.
- hadrien01 6y ago
  I'm in France, and switching channels is faster than on DTT!
crazygringo 6y ago
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, 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo [2] https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/ https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/

shepardrtc 6y ago

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.

anoncareer0212 6y ago
That's...the opposite of my experience? That's odd, I'm in Austin, fwiw
mrfredward 6y ago
Or this one (I'm on android): Tapping the "cast" button to send to a Chromecast while in the middle of a show causes a random jump. On a good day, it would start playing at the beginning of the show, on a bad one it would jump to an entirely different network. 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.
sixQuarks 6y ago
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.
- slivanes 6y ago
  Be aware it is max 3 streams at a time.
burlesona 6y ago
I agree, PS Vue was the best alternative TV service IMO. Just worked perfectly on a great range of devices.
- chrisan 6y ago

YetAnotherMatt 6y ago

Did patio11 start working at Google instead of Stripe? 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_survey 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."

profmonocle 6y ago
Interesting URL. You don't often see a company refer to their own action as a "price hike".
- vanc_cefepime 6y ago
  Probably because those who made that feedback page are the same people within the YouTube team that actually use the service and feel the same as we do.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Looks like the "price hike" text is not on the link now. 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.

beervirus 6y ago

I like the service in general ok, but YouTube TV has the worst DVR interface I've ever used. It's worse even than any of the shitty one-off cable company boxes. For $65/month, it would be nice to at least have a decent interface. Google pls buy Tivo and incorporate that.

dastbe 6y ago

While this price change is certainly impactful, I wanted to see if my experience is universal. 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.

lowmemcpu 6y ago

That cost is nearly double it's original price 3y ago, and looking at the recent channel additions -- I'm not sure the users will be convinced it's worth the extra cost. I wish someone would have a selection like: $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>

paulcole 6y ago
When (for example) ESPN charges like $9 per household, there’s no way to get 5 channels for $10 that includes ESPN. Sure you could get the shittiest 5 channels for $10 but what’s the point of that? Until networks change their pricing model this a la carte option is not going to work out the way people hope.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  ESPN is an outlier. Among normal mainstream cable channels, nothing else is more than $2, only a few are more than $1, and the cheap ones are $0.10 or less. Even paying extra in lieu of bundling, prices like that could work out if you make ESPN a separate $5-10 option.
diogenescynic 6y ago
All I want is CNBC and baseball. I can subscribe to MLB.tv which covers baseball, but as far as I can tell there is not a reasonable way to get CNBC a la carte. Paying for CNBC Pro is $30/month and that seems more than I'd like to pay.
- listenallyall 6y ago
  CNBC averages around 250k primetime viewers (under 200k during the day). Its top show attracts fewer than 400k. Imagine how much lower viewership would be if it wasn't a "free" channel. There's essentially no economic model that allows them to stay in business in an a-la-carte world. But if they are guaranteed to be in 80 or 100 million homes via bundling, then yes it can (and does) work. https://ctv.kwayisi.org/networks/cnbc/ https://ctv.kwayisi.org/networks/cnbc/

torgian 6y ago

Wow this kinda blew my mind. I never knew there were tv sites like Hulu tv, or even YouTube tv... And the prices! Outrageous. I’m glad I stick with Netflix.

thehoff 6y ago

Anyone else using Locast? Works well for us (where we are regular rabbit ears don’t work).

uptown 6y ago

What's more interesting to me is that Google only has ~2M YouTube TV subscribers. Perhaps there's newer metrics now. https://twitter.com/RichLightShed/status/1224454820309811202 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.

gkoberger 6y ago
That's $1.5Bn/year in revenue for a 3-year-old product that just rebroadcasts content. How is that "nothing"?
- ChicagoBoy11 6y ago
  I could've sworn I was doing something wrong with my math give your the parent comment to yours, so I'm glad I saw this -- my math was right, after all!
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Also it leverages existing infrastructure (perhaps in a much tighter use case).
- scarface74 6y ago
  Revenue means nothing. Is it profitable?
- uptown 6y ago
  Depends entirely on how much they pay for the content. Is it profitable?
ssivark 6y ago
2M paying subscribers is 1B+ USD annual revenue — nothing to sneeze at!

thebeefytaco 6y ago

I was on the fence and about to cancel, since it's the media subscription service I pay the most for and get the least use out of. This makes the decision easier...

jurassic 6y ago

I was on the fence at $50 and will be cancelling as I don't care anything about these new additions. I can think of many things I would prefer to spend the $180 price hike on. Seems like they should be doing these expansions as add-ons if they don't want to see people like me churn.

coldtea 6y ago

YouTube TV still exists?

gundmc 6y ago

This is certainly CBS Viacom flexing their influence. Youtube TV without CBS and their sports coverage is dead in the water. That gives them leverage to force feed the other Viacom junk. Even the official blog post announcing the changes sounded like more of a resignation. Unfortunate. Too much money for me and I won't be continuing my subscription.

nodesocket 6y ago

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

fomopop 6y ago
Hulu Live TV has all those channels for $55. https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker?channels=cnbc,espn,espn2,cnn,fox-news,abc,nbc,fox,cbs,tbs,tnt https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker?channels=cnbc,espn,espn...

chrsstrm 6y ago

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.

mennis16 6y ago
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
texasbigdata 6y ago
Not the same. Only works at home
- chrsstrm 6y ago
  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.
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    You'd expect the average Joe to do all of this ?
    - derefr 6y ago
      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.)

bitL 6y ago

So YouTube is the same as cable TV now, but in a worse quality? Is Google running out of money?

tpmx 6y ago

Sort of related: 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.

DavidPeiffer 6y ago
I've noticed a significant uptick in ads as well. The ad quality is akin to ads on streaming-specific apps. 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.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Yeah, the ad quality is horrible. I'm in Sweden; I've seen/skipped through all of the local ads like 200 times each by now. At least it feels like that. 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.

gscott 6y ago

https://try.philo.com/ https://try.philo.com/ is $20 a month is great. It is missing some news stations, but Pluto tv is free and has a lot of news and a mystery science tv 3000 station.

alex_dev 6y ago
Thanks for the suggestion; I'm trying it out now. Looks like Chromecasts aren't supported, but they do have a Roku app. The Roku interface seems to be much better than Youtube TV's!
nichos 6y ago
I love Philo. Paired with my OTA antenna, I get local sports and news. They also include the DVR with it. Great service.

mennis16 6y ago

I signed up for YouTubeTV quite recently (at the beginning of last baseball season) at $40/month. I'm pretty surprised to see in such a short span of time it has gone up to $65. 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?

ralmidani 6y ago

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.

notatoad 6y ago
>Unless you must have live sports From these comments at least, it seems like this is pretty much their entire audience.
- leereeves 6y ago
  Which makes this seem like a very bad time to raise prices, with so many live sporting events cancelled because of the pandemic.
  - astura 6y ago
    Both baseball and basketball are starting up again at the end of July.
    - leereeves 6y ago
      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?
mennis16 6y ago
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.

kristopolous 6y ago

youtube, no longer the loss leader of the internet?

vanc_cefepime 6y ago

Really not surprising that old media still has pull like this. 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.

mrits 6y ago
Yeah, we just cancelled as well after we realized we haven't logged in for a few months. I have it mainly for sports and those don't exist right now.

jimbob45 6y ago

The whole streaming platform war is beginning to resemble the Stone Soup parable. At some point, no platform will have enough content for anyone to care to subscribe (arguably now). Someone needs to come along and convince them all that sharing is in everyone’s best interests. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

ilaksh 6y ago
That reminded me of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup ("dcss"), which is a pretty great free-to-play game. https://crawl.develz.org/ https://crawl.develz.org/

VikingCoder 6y ago

So, what's the best way for me to watch SNL, Rachel Maddow, Rick and Morty, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine? Hulu?

intellix 6y ago
Netflix and YouTube with ExpressVPN?
newfriend 6y ago
https://soyboy.tv https://soyboy.tv has some good bundles that include these. Also Star Wars and John Oliver.
- dang 6y ago
  Would you please stop posting flamebait and using HN for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do this, and you've unfortunately done it a lot. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

intellix 6y ago

Didn't even know people still paid for TV but reading this thread surprised me. I would say this industry is dead with the upcoming generation but guess I'll be surprised again

scarface74 6y ago
Really? Are you going to do the feigned Slashdot era ignorance “Do people still watch TV? I haven’t owned a TV in ten years”? 82.9 million households have cable https://nocable.org/learn/cable-tv-cord-cutting-statistics/ 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.
ravenstine 6y ago
There are plenty of people above the age of 40 on HN, though.

solarkraft 6y ago

Gen Z speaking: Why would anyone ever have wanted that, even at 40$?

jftuga 6y ago
Live sports: football (pro, college), baseball, basketball (pro, college), hockey, etc.
Bud 6y ago
Because it was just as good or better than a cable subscription, at around half the cost, PLUS it works a lot better on mobile devices.
gambiting 6y ago
I'm 29 and I haven't had TV for...8 years now? We only watch Netflix/Amazon prime or watch movies on blu ray. Every time I go visit my mum and she has the TV on(she's literally the only person I know still paying for satellite TV) I have no idea why you would. Constant ads, shows which are being interrupted by ads, no freedom of selection when it comes to content....I honestly don't understand why people still watch TV at all. I can maybe understand the argument about watching live sports, but it inevitably comes with watching all the other shit as well.

mnm1 6y ago

Have they figured out how to play the show you click on yet? No. $50 a month and the basic functionality of the app doesn't even work. With a Chromecast, it's even worse. Eventually, after clicking back and forth, disconnecting and reconnecting, it may play. Then you have to turn off the closed captioning for every single show even though it's off in the settings. Then it randomly stops at times. The ui displays the wrong show. And they have the gall to charge even more for this shittiest motherfucking app I've ever had the displeasure of using. This engineering team should be fired. They should be ashamed of themselves. They can't even make the app play a single video without problems. I've been putting up with it for years now just because of certain channels my mom likes, but no more. Fuck this garbage app. I've submitted dozens of support requests and the only people dumber than the engineers, project managers, and others who work on this app are the idiots running customer support. Fuck them all. They can shove this fucking app right up their ass.

mobiledev2014 6y ago
Usually don’t come to HN for this type of comment but something about it in this context is just poetry.
judge2020 6y ago
Sounds like you have a generation 1 Chromecast™ and bad WiFi. We hope you'll try YouTube TV again with a Chromecast Ultra™ and a Nest Wifi™ 3 pack. Take care!
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Please tell me this is a parody of the support responses?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    The ™s make me lean in that direction.
- drgath 6y ago
  Asking someone to spend $400+ just to upgrade equipment in order to support a service that doesn’t work well on the original equipment you sold them, takes some guts.

nostromo 6y ago

Google has successfully recreated cable TV along with the awful "pay top dollar for stuff you don't want" pricing model... wonderful.

cwhiz 6y ago

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.

adventured 6y ago
> 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).
- cwhiz 6y ago
  They have lost almost 4 million subscriber this year. And streaming companies, such as YouTube TV, have also lost subscribers. So these people just stopped.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > So these people just stopped. 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.
Fellshard 6y ago
They want their dominant spot back. Not hard to understand.
seansmccullough 6y ago
This is why I just cancelled. The original package and price was perfect.

xivzgrev 6y ago

What’s the point of YouTube vs xfinity? It would be interesting if they let you pick a la Carte but no one wants to do that (lower fees)

circa 6y ago

Price hike and still no NHL Network or NFL Network/Redzone option. Good-bye YTTV!

dingle_thunk 6y ago

Good of them to do this thing to people’s credit cards, inside of a major economic crisis. Google must be close to death! A business needs money to survive, don’tcha know.

vmception 6y ago

I didn't know we were at the place to have nuanced discussion on Youtube TV benefits If you pay for: Youtube Music Youtube Premium Youtube TV Youtube Kids I question your entire decision making process. Am I missing something here?

kemonocode 6y ago

So it's just cable with extra steps now. Nice. 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.

judge2020 6y ago
I would doubt more than 1% are in that category - $50 (now 65) a month raises more mental alarms than your old $11 Netflix subscription.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  That’s me. I’ve been subscribing to Netflix for 7 years now despite not having watched it at all in 4 years. 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.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  Well Netflix 4K is $16 a month. Which pretty much puts it above Disney+ let along D+ with Hulu/ESPN. Then you have HBO which still acts as if they are truly premium, if anything they are the binge a month channel. 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.

tyingq 6y ago

Add another cancellation. This was enough for me to dig up the account info for my internet provider to see if they offered a streaming service. They do, and it's $24.99/month plus $5 for the cloud DVR. That's less than half of your new rate. Dumb move.

ycombonator 6y ago

https://www.locast.org/ https://www.locast.org/ Don’t pay for TV

caymanjim 6y ago

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 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).

29athrowaway 6y ago
Paying $65 to watch ads, no please.
- D2187645 6y ago
  10 dollars felt too much compared to free youtube, and now they want 65 for whatever they are selling.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    I pay for YouTube Red because I can skip through ads. It's worth it. In YouTube TV you get to see unavoidable ads, unlike in TV where you can switch the channel while those ads are running.
    - Volundr 6y ago
      I use YouTube TV and this comment confuses me. What exactly do you think is stopping you from changing channels?
      - caymanjim 6y ago
        Yeah, it works just like TV. There are no unskippable ads or interstitials. Also with unlimited DVR and time-shifting, I rarely watch live, and I can skip all the commercials (albeit manually).

Causality1 6y ago

Starting to remind of Amazon Prime, which started out at $79 a year for two day shipping and is now $120 a year for two day shipping plus a bunch of crap I don't need or want.

stevespang 6y ago

I would not pay $5 a month for YouTube TV

j45 6y ago

Increases like this will accelerate the jump away from cable. There is no infrastructure costs comparable to physical cable, or last mile boxes and equipment. Just OTT. 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.

rafaelvasco 6y ago

Jesus. If I was subscribed to this, in my local currency this would cost me 347.61 moneys each month right now. Ugh.

coding123 6y ago

I used it 2 years ago to watch the olympics. Going to have to find an alternative...

throw03172019 6y ago

I was already considering cancelling but this is the nail in the coffin. We don’t care about the added channels. Also, the recordings are usually messed up. It will be a new show but think it’s already been watched. So we typically turn on the show in between its air time just to catch it. The iOS app makes it easier to choose which to watch. We mainly watch on Apple TV and the UI is not very good... good bye.

fmakunbound 6y ago

Is it at least ad-free for that much?

beezle 6y ago

Started at the beginning but all things come to an end. What was once a sports centric + news service has become more and more bloated. Is the audience really cord cutters? As it is probably far cheaper to get a cable+internet package than just internet + yttv. 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.

catsarebetter 6y ago

Think this may have an effect of pushing more people to get adblockers and Netflix subscriptions than anything else. Or they just want people to get free Youtube so that they have a wider audience of ad viewers to sell to advertisers.

rahimnathwani 6y ago
You may be confusing YouTube TV (a replacement for cable TV) with YouTube Premium (ad-free access to YouTube and Google Play Music).
- catsarebetter 6y ago
  Hmm yep I definitely was lol

russellbeattie 6y ago

At least they were nice enough to include a link to cancel the service in their email about the price hike. Seriously! Other services purposefully make it difficult, so props to Google for doing the right thing there. I liked the service but I just don't use it enough to continue. I'll re-subscribe when they drop the price again.

mrits 6y ago
I agree, it was really easy. Unfortunately I first pressed the "manage my services" button which took me down a deep rabbit hole of other google services.

FpUser 6y ago

I've resigned from TV be it cable or online version ages ago and have never looked back. Not paying crazy price for bunch of garbage with the one or two channels I've used to actually watch. Goodbye vultures.

burlesona 6y ago

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.

Arainach 6y ago
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.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  It’s just odd that they bothered getting into this space in the first place and that they used their YouTube brand for this - “YouTube” was meant to disrupt and subvert established television, not become a part of it. 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.

fomopop 6y ago

If you're looking for a new service, we built a tool that lets you add your favorite channels and makes a recommendation. https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker https://thestreamable.com/matchmaker

ogre_codes 6y ago

It's increasing in price by one Netflix. 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.

choppaface 6y ago

For the few months I tried YoutubeTV, the stream consistently failed (especially for live sports) and I reported it several times. I finally disputed three months of their charges with my credit card company. Google accepted the disputes within a day and effectively gave a $150 refund. I later canceled, but important to know they’re willing to give out their crappy service for free without a fight.

cable2600 6y ago

https://pluto.tv/welcome https://pluto.tv/welcome 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.

mojo982 6y ago
I've never heard of this before now. It looks legit. How are they able to remain free? Do they inject more ads than the already existing ones? It's not like TV doesn't already have ads. 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.
- zip1234 6y ago
  I am one of the people that only has YouTube TV for sports. However, they cancelled Fox Sports and added a bunch of other stuff that is not sports.

pcurve 6y ago

I must've been living under a cave. This is first time I'm hearing about YouTube TV. Might be because I cut the cord many years ago.

sirmike_ 6y ago

Personally I might keep it at $65 if they had just value added youtube premium with it. I was hoping they would do this at some point as an option. But will most likely not happen.

m0zg 6y ago

So now they'll charge you $65/mo to watch ads every 10 minutes? Where do I sign up?

TehShrike 6y ago

Hey, I decided to minimize YouTube and pay for Nebula even before the price hike :-D

ecoqba11 6y ago

There are so many free alternatives now days... PlutoTV, Locast, Plex & Tubi. These combine with Netflix or Prime Video or even TV+ is more than enough.

mister_hn 6y ago
and if you add also Kodi Addons to the mix..
mmanfrin 6y ago
The distinction that needs to be made is that people aren't typically looking for things to watch, they're looking for a specific thing (generally live sports).

dkdk8283 6y ago

Price hike aside I cannot support a company that abuses creators. It used to be such a great source of knowledge and content but now it’s been gutted and has become just as mind numbing as daytime TV.

awill 6y ago

The content providers want Youtube TV to fail, and are doing it with forced bundling that increases the price. There's no other explanation. In hindsight, it was stupid for Google to get into a business where they cannot control pricing.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

At $20 they were disruptive, at $65, they are dead to me. I will be interesting to see how many others leave. The "teaser" cable package is more channels and half the cost. 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.

thallium205 6y ago
They definitely charge people to use maps... A lot.
- onefuncman 6y ago
  corporations aren't people, despite a lot of hand wringing to the contrary
  - esarbe 6y ago
    Corporations aren't people. (Just to hammer it in..)
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but how much of that pricing authority is directly related to market share? The billion dollar question is, if Google charged $9.99/month for access to Google Maps, what would that do to their market share if OSM, Apple, and Microsoft/Bing were still "free" ? 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.
benhurmarcel 6y ago

iamwpj 6y ago

Still a good value. Comparable cable service in our area still hovers around $95/month, plus this has better recording and works on many devices (simultaneously!). We've had it for two years and no complaints -- we recommend it.

amriksohata 6y ago

I paid Google for Google One and it doesnt include Youtube Premium, their own video service. Whilst Amazon Prime gives you Prime Now, Prime Video and Prime Delivery. Much better value.

kerng 6y ago

The amount of ads I'm seeing on YouTube is pretty insane recently. Google must be under quite some pressure to make money.

easytiger 6y ago

We don't have this in Europe. Does it carry in show adverts as well?

leetrout 6y ago
Yes. 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.
- easytiger 6y ago
  Thanks. That's horrific.
  - greatpatton 6y ago
    A European will have a big problem to understand how you can pay that much money to submit yourself to this torture...
    - easytiger 6y ago
      Having really only watched TV, in my university years through piracy, or later through dvd, streaming services etc. I have become so sensitive to interstitial advertising that I can't stand it. 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.
alexgmcm 6y ago
Yeah, I thought this was referring to YouTube Premium at first (which doesn't seem so bad as it would let me download videos to my phone to watch when I don't have connectivity) This YoutubeTV thing just seems awful - frankly I'm amazed it has lasted this long.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

They seem to be making a fundamental mistake in calculating their prices? 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"

touchpadder 6y ago

A dying service milking some last few dollars

TouchyJoe 6y ago

I prefer them asking for money upfront instead of selling ads and becoming controlled by the people who pay for those ads.

projektfu 6y ago

Over and over, customer surveys showed people want a la carte cable. They perceive their high bill as paying for 100 channels they have no interest in to get 3 they want. And yet, no provider will offer it that way.

manigandham 6y ago
Because it's not profitable and users always want more, it's just that each person wants a different set of channels.

coronadisaster 6y ago

I didnt realize that it was already $50/month... I didn't signup at $35 because I thought that it was too much... I get more than 50 HD channels for free over the air and I watch only 3 of them.

manigandham 6y ago

It's the endless cycle between bundled and a-la-carte (regardless of medium). 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.

Mindwipe 6y ago

These OTT retransmission of mostly FTA broadcast channel services haven't caught on at all anywhere globally except the US, and that seems to have been mostly a focus of unsustainable pricing. 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.

josefresco 6y ago

When I ditched cable TV my bandwidth usage skyrocketed. Now that the prices are closer, there seems to be almost no benefit to streaming TV. My Internet will be faster and Xfinity's apps are as good if not better than YT.

beastman82 6y ago

I've had it for at least a year and it blows away the competition in most respects. This is a fair price.

habosa 6y ago

I’ve had it since day one (actually since dogfood) but this is it, I just cancelled. 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.

bsenftner 6y ago

You mean to tell me people actually clicked that YouTube TV ad?

jeegsy 6y ago

I gave up MythTV for this crap

briandear 6y ago

Still no weather channel?

voicedYoda 6y ago

I still don't understand, and refuse to pay for, basic TV in the United States. Bunny ear is now a digital receiver with even more local broadcast options. And yt brings no value add, imho.

thrownaway954 6y ago

"This is just like cable but with extra steps" 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/ https://www.moneysavingpro.com/tv-providers/comcast-channels...

p-law 6y ago
You have to watch Comcast, though. Does the quoted rate include their local station rebroadcast fee? Their "sports fee"? These two together were something like $14/month -- and not disclosed in the price of any package -- when I finally dropped their scammy ass about 16 months ago. PLUS any boxes you may or may not have to use.

kup0 6y ago

Couldn't YouTube TV at least do what other providers and cable companies do- have different packages with different sets of channels? That + the DVR functionality/etc just might be enough to make it worth it to enough users instead of only having this noncompetitive high price-point. 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.

m3kw9 6y ago

Is a ploy to make people feel good once they lowered the price to the new still sharply higher price.

mjparrott 6y ago

Key question: why would you watch broadcast TV?

dfxm12 6y ago
For local content, mostly news & sports, but maybe also lifestyle stuff.

ibdf 6y ago

10 years ago I imagined online live tv would become 100% alacarte, pay just for what you watch... but unfortunately we continue to pay for tv like we always have, we just got rid of the box (in some cases not even the box). 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.

Unklejoe 6y ago

I was thinking the other day: if you replace the word "commercial" with "ad", it somehow seems much more ridiculous to be spending $50+ month for a video service, only to still have to sit through countless ads. 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.

bugeats 6y ago

So you want me to pay for the privilege of watching a mind numbing stream of psychologically manipulative advertisements interspersed with the toxic, propaganda laden death throes of the legacy media? No thanks. 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.

joshstrange 6y ago

The amount of money I would pay monthly for ALL the TV shows I care about delivered at mp4/mkv files that I can stream to any of my devices without commercials/tracking and with good subtitles is probably close to $150+/mo. 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).

jdechko 6y ago

If you are on Spectrum, check out the TV Choice package as a decent option for a la carte. It's $28/mo (including the broadcast fee) on a 2-year promotion. I get all the local channels as well as 10 channels that I pick (which includes ESPN/2/FS1). They have decent app support, and while the app blocks certain channels (like ESPN) while not on the home network, the subscription allows you to use the ESPN app anywhere. https://www.buyinternetcable.com/blog/spectrum-tv-choice-channels-list https://www.buyinternetcable.com/blog/spectrum-tv-choice-cha...

khill 6y ago

I was planning to start using YTTV when sports start up again. We were using Hulu Live before and, while it wasn't terrible, I wanted to give YTTV a try. This price hike kills that option. I will go back to Hulu or, more likely, just add TV to my monthly Fios package.

garfieldnate 6y ago

I'm 31 and I find this totally insane! Why would you pay $65/mo for something that has 8 minutes of commercial for every 22 minutes of content? Regular TV is dead to me now that we have streaming services. I'll pay for the content, but don't waste my time trying to make more money by showing me ads. I haven't had a regular TV connection since leaving for college.