SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 02 2017, @12:13AM (2 children)
Yeah, my first thought is that apart from all the other issues, $35 is way too high. Got to get it under $10, at the least. Maybe $7/month.
Not that I personally care that much, as I'm a cord never.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:53AM (1 child)
That wouldn't even pay ESPN's fees. Now pay for the rest of the programming, bandwidth and overhead. There is a reason the local cable co makes you pay out the wazoo AND inserts local ads and still doesn't exactly roll in cash. The fees each channel charges is nuts and only goes up. The problem is the forced bundle of forty channels when most people only watch a dozen.
No seriously. Everybody always rants about the cable companies like they were hosing people. Go find me one with a PE ratio that would imply unnatural profits. Not even comparing to fake .com companies like FaceBook or Twitter, compare to the average of the NASDAQ. The programmers aren't even in crazy town on that basis, but then you look at their cost structure and realize they are pissing away so much money, mostly to keep people from noticing now much money sloshes through them. On the other hand, the whole entertainment industry is pretty small compared to the attention it receives. Google could probably buy all six of the content producers responsible for most of what you see on TV, hear on your iPod and see on the shelves at your local book store if they could be disentangled from the conglomerates they are already embedded in. Not that it would want to pollute its balance sheet with 'em of course or face the anti-trust implications. It is a strange situation.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:19AM
What will keep me away is the same reason I don't do cable: bundling. I don't WANT 99% of those channels. They're worth exactly *nothing* to me. That makes ESPN $35/month.
Now, if they'd let me pick and choose, subscribe to whichever I wish, maybe some are a buck a month, others $5/month, maybe some are free as a bonus to subscribers -- that I might do.
But $35/mo. for the one or two channels I'd actually watch, that ain't happening.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.