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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: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:59PM (3 children)

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:59PM (#473594)

    The rabbit ears aren't really all that good anyways. Not to mention, it puts you back to EVENT based TV viewing where you cannot control when you watch something. Unless.... you invest in expensive equipment and your own home media center is now capping the rabbit ears. Which is easily possible. I've seen gorgeous caps out of Canada that were claimed to be off rabbit ears (but digital of course). Of course, now you are running your own DVR. Why?

    Compare this to Netflix: for less than $10/month, you get access to all of Netflix's on-demand catalog, and can watch anything there at any time you want, and you're not hobbled by some idiotic "DVR tool" that you have to mess with and worry about programming ahead of time.

    $14.99/month gets you access to Netflix's dramatically smaller online catalog. I cannot stress enough just how much Netflix has contracted in the last 3 years. I'm not saying I don't find $14.99/month worth of value, but I am saying that it does not replace everything. That catalog is tiny, but growing very fast with original content. Surprise, surprise, the content is actually extremely good. Netflix has strong rankings for some its original content.

    What that $35/month gets you is the convenience of not having to pirate, and essentially have another Netflix service. Even together, that's a ~50% discount over traditional cable and satellite. If the catalog were big enough, and populated with all new content on those networks, it might not be such a bad deal. *might*

    And perhaps more likely to reach that most elusive of creatures: the rangy, ad-averse American teenager. “We’re bringing a lot of simplification to the TV process,” says Wojcicki. “For a new generation of viewers, this is going to make much more sense.”

    19 tons of bullshit in the article, and this is the very last paragraph. Also, the only one worth reading.

    What makes sense about continually trying to shove advertisements down the throats of admittedly ad-averse American teenagers? Which isn't even accurate. I think the whole ad-averse segment is as old as 22-24 years old.

    Having spent some time with young people just recently I've noticed that they've eschewed even traditional TV programming without advertisements and switched to Twitch. To me, it's beyond fucking stupid, but to these young people it's BIGGER than sports to watch other video gamers play games. Painfully stupid to me, but I'm sure not nearly as painful as it is to the people having wealth siphoned away from them to Twitch and the sponsored players :)

    If this $35/month service still has advertisements in it, I'm betting that they are not going to "cord up" a whole bunch of young people. Without the adverts? It really depends on the content. That $35 could go towards data plans, and from what I understand, those are higher priority than even a car.

    I really do wish to fairly compensate at least the artists for the entertainment I consume. That's easy with Netflix, and YouTube TV is offering me that as well. It's a question of price, catalog size, and ADVERTISEMENTS.

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:02AM (1 child)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:02AM (#473649) Journal

    I cannot stress enough just how much Netflix has contracted in the last 3 years. I'm not saying I don't find $14.99/month worth of value, but I am saying that it does not replace everything. That catalog is tiny, but growing very fast with original content.

    We just cancelled our Netflix because of that contraction. It's not a lot of money, but when you spend 20 minutes flipping through their tiny catalogue trying to find something to watch, you remember why you came to hate cable (aside from the endless commercials) and say to yourself, "why spend any money on this at all?"

    We had taken to watching more video on YouTube, specifically how-to stuff and the like. It's quite valuable for that. If Google F-s that up, then it will be time to build a free, community version a la Wikipedia.

    Anyway I'm with you--this YouTube TV idea is DOA.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:35AM

      by edIII (791) on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:35AM (#473661)

      I'm doing the same thing looking for something to watch. However, they have me hostage because of a few good shows that I can't wait to see the next seasons of. Like 6 or 7 shows that are just crazy good, and will soon be in the next season.

      If I would have the option to wait 7 months with almost nothing new to watch on TV, but season 2 of Firefly, than that $14.95 starts seeming more reasonable all the time. Plus I can rewatch old shows, which is something I also remember quite clearly from broadcast cable :) Full fucking circle.

      That, and every single time I seriously entertain cancelling, something like Stranger Things comes out and I'm glued to Netflix till 3am again. It seriously reminds of me So I Married An Axe Murderer and that cantankerous old man.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:33AM

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:33AM (#473737) Journal

    Being I did purchase a DVD player years ago, and quickly discovered that this new technology had enforcement mechanisms in it that would be used to prevent my skipping over stuff I did not want to waste time on, I now find phrases like:

    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.

    to be indicative of yet another business model based on making yet more demands on my time.

    I flat do not trust any "DVR tool" required to play anything anymore. If I can't convert the file into some editable ( for skipping unwanted content ) file, it is just about as useful to me as serving me a meal with a turd in it. I am simply NOT going to tolerate having my own technology force me to listen to one ad-head after another yammering on about senior care insurance, bags under my eyes, and why the clothes I have aren't good enough.

    Another thing that gets my goat is download speed. A lot of us still do not have the bandwidth to sustain a video stream, and still must rely on stream capture so the video can be downloaded at whatever speed the ISP will deliver then play back at normal video speed. I have been known to spend three hours downloading 30 minute videos on YouTube using the Time Warner cable system I have access to where I work. I'm talking things like Arduino thingies others put up. I like to watch them through VLC so I can easily view expanded images and slow the video way down so I can see just what the guy on the video did.

    I am finding a lot of this "new technology" to be worse than useless from my point of view. Its not useful to me at all, rather its just another noose someone else has around my neck to enforce his will onto me. And he's working on how to use my own technology to compel me to his business model. When I fight back the only way I know how to, he goes off a-runnin' to legislators to force me to pay attention to him, despite the fact I consider him a blathering bore and seriously want to ignore him.

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    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]