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posted by on Wednesday March 01 2017, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-bare-necessity dept.

Alphabet/Google/YouTube is betting that millennials and other cord-cutters will pay $35/month for a cloudy form of cable TV:

On Feb. 28, YouTube Inc. announced a new service that will deliver an assortment of major television channels to paying customers via the internet. For $35 a month, starting sometime this spring, subscribers to YouTube TV will be able to watch the top four broadcast networks—ABC, NBC, Fox, and CBS—and 35 or so of their affiliated cable channels, including ESPN, Disney Channel, MSNBC, National Geographic, and Fox News. Among other enticements, YouTube TV will give subscribers a DVR tool for recording shows and unlimited storage space in the cloud. The only catch is that shows are automatically deleted after nine months.

Subscribers will be able to watch YouTube TV on smartphones, tablets, laptop computers—pretty much however they want. The mobile apps are designed to easily "cast" from smartphones to larger screens, perhaps even—for we olds—actual TV sets. Throughout the app, native YouTube content will be layered in alongside the network shows. The goal, executives say, is not so much to lure older viewers away from their cable subscriptions, but rather to coax youngsters into paying for a package of linear TV channels for the first time. "This is TV reimagined for the YouTube generation," says Christian Oestlien, director of product management at YouTube.

[...] YouTube TV is organized around three zones—a home tab for finding things to watch, a live tab for scrolling through channels, and a library tab that organizes a user's recorded shows. Mohan says the ability to record limitless amounts of TV was one of the features that most excited early testers. [...] There are plenty of gaps in the lineup. Subscribers won't be able to watch anything from Viacom (Comedy Central, MTV), Discovery Communications, AMC Networks, A+E Networks (History, A&E), or Turner Broadcasting (CNN, TBS, TNT), to name a few. Replicating the entire cable-TV bundle would have been too costly, says Wojcicki. Instead, her team targeted a selection of channels that would deliver the essential elements—particularly live sports.

From the talk about a DVR-like interface, it seems like they found a compromise that allows the service to be more like TiVo than Netflix.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:19PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:19PM (#473571)

    Depends where you live. You definitely don't get 40 channels in most parts of the country without some sort of subscription.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:25PM (#473577)

    I hit about 20. I am not exactly in a metropolitan area. If I had a better antenna I think websites say I could hit nearly 30.

    including ESPN, Disney Channel, MSNBC, National Geographic, and Fox News
    Big ol skip for me.

    "This is TV reimagined for the YouTube generation,"
    People are running in the other direction because the cost is out of wack for what you get. It also sounds exactly like that service that was sued out of existence a few years ago. Just without the thousands of individual antennas.

  • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday March 02 2017, @12:13AM

    by NewNic (6420) on Thursday March 02 2017, @12:13AM (#473631) Journal

    You definitely don't get 40 channels in most parts of the country without some sort of subscription.

    That only matters if you actually watch all those 40 channels.

    --
    lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory