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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: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:19AM (2 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:19AM (#473655) Journal

    Everybody always says this--live sports! Live sports! My reaction, and this is not meant to target you per se, is, why does it matter?

    My whole life long, I have never been able to understand the appeal. Nothing is as tedious to watch as spectator sports. Nothing is ever resolved, nothing is ever decided. Nothing real is at stake. It's not like the Mayan pelota matches where the victors literally ate the losers. Nor is it life and death in the Colosseum. If the Bills beat the Cowboys in the Super Bowl, the citizens of Dallas do not pay a tribute of $5K/head to the people of Buffalo. It does not matter.

    Playing sports, sure, there's the physical exertion, the thrill of competition, the agony of defeat and joy of victory, but watching it on a screen for 5 hours with enough commercials to choke a horse is something I'd rather chew my own eyeballs off than watch. I mean, why watch a show about fishing when you could go out and fish? Why watch some other dude hunt deer, when you could go out and hunt deer? It makes no sense.

    Voyeurism to the exclusion of participation, which is a million times better, feels like a sickness of the spirit, or even a form of existential oppression. Let's try switching off the screens and doing the things instead.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:16AM (1 child)

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday March 02 2017, @03:16AM (#473701) Journal

    Your post sounds almost exactly like something I would have written, albeit it would have taken me more words.

    It still amazes me that one of the prime drivers for television broadcasting ( when I was a little kid, no less ) was watching televised fights.

    I don't know what it is that I am missing that other people seem to have, but I can curry up absolutely no interest in that kind of thing. I'd rather lay out circuit boards.

    Now what I like to do is take a friend along with me in the van and go for a several day road-trips to nowhere in particular. If it looks interesting, get out and look around. Nothing planned. Just go.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:44AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 02 2017, @04:44AM (#473743)

      Not really, a lot of people engage in illegal betting on fights. My dad told me about this guy that used to go to bars he was at and bet on the outcome of various sporting events. He'd know the results because they'd already been broadcast, but since they hadn't yet shown up on TV, he'd always win.

      Eventually people caught on to the scam and ran him out, but even in cases where no money is changing hands, watching it live guarantees that you won't have any spoilers.