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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 Phoenix666 on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:34AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday March 02 2017, @01:34AM (#473659) Journal

    I find I'm feeling the same way, almost like an allergic reaction. Companies have seemed to have made a collective decision to suck. They buy up or shut down all the competition, so they don't feel people have any alternative.

    I'm thinking maybe the best move is to walk away from all of them. Most of the best things in life are free. Now that the door to decentralized information has been opened, maybe we can all help each other to a better future without PHB's and do-nothing, know-nothing charlatans.

    It's not a well-formed thought. Like I said, it's more of a visceral response.

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