First off, there are really two main reasons for someone not to have a cable subscription:
1. They don't care about the content
2. Price sensitivity
At Aereo, we saw these sort of mix together to create hugely elastic demand.
For a while, we offered a $1 "day pass" that would give you access to live TV for 24 hours at a time.
During the Super Bowl and various award shows, we had crazy numbers of people sign up for these day passes. We actually had to stop offering them, because we literally couldn't build out the extra capacity in a cost-effective way (remember, we needed distinct physical antennas and transcoders for every user we served).
It was tough enough to get people to pay $8/month for access to live broadcast TV and a cloud-based DVR. I have no idea how YouTube will convince anyone to pay $35.
If they can work out the licenses, I'd imagine something like a day pass would work well with consumers – but it's probably hard to get the economics of that to work out.
There is a third reason. I have always had cable till last year. Then I moved and went through the experience of getting cable from a big cable provider. I wanted them to give my money (typically around $75/month). But it ended with series of very frustrated phone calls and me deciding that sacrificing sports and news is well worth not having to deal with that company.
It's unbelievable isn't it? I live in the UK and had the same experience with a big telecom company. I'm calling them up to become a customer and give them money and I'm treated with rudeness and indifference. As someone running a startup it feels totally insane and I wonder if all big companies end up like this. Then when something like this new service comes about the incumbents are up in arms, how do they possibly expect any sympathy.
I do think OTT is going to win out in the long run. But that's really just the underlying technology.
The tough part is getting rid of the bundle. I'm not so sure that'll happen, although I really hope it does.
All of these giant media companies would much rather sell you 10 channels for $20 than a single channel for $5.
If a la carte starts happening in a serious way, it's going to be a huge win for consumers. But almost nobody on the other side really wants it. They're going to fight tooth and nail to keep the bundles.
It's only a win for the consumer if the shows they're interested in are subsidized enough by others being forced to pay for them that it offsets the amount that the consumer is forced to pay for the shows they're not interested in.
Basically it's a zero-sum game for the consumers amongst themselves while being a win for the seller.
It's only a win-win if in aggregate, people put a value on everything that is bundled. By that I mean that enough singular people put a value on a large subset of all channels.
If too many people put a value 0 on too many bundled items, it's most definitely a consumer loss. The author admits this, but claims that collectively it is a win. There's no basis provided for this assumption though, other than that it is the market. I have no problem believing the cable market is flawed though (local monopolies).
This is anecdata, but if true hits the core:
Traditionally people I know always bought (happy meal or) big mac/quarterpounder & co (this could be inaccurate dollars, because it's not the local currency) for $6, because the sandwich was $4 a la carte, and the fries an additional $2. So sure, even if my value on soda was as low as $0.1 I would still make out ahead.
But then the previously unavailable double cheeseburger arrived, which had as much meat and tasted about the same as a quarterpounder, for $2. And the Big Mac sandwich occassionally sold for $2.5.
And me who genuinelly always put a negative value on soda (really, I did however trade it for a smaller milkshake) and always drink water, would now instead save 67% since I generally could do without the fries as well.
I'm sure I'm an aberration in wanting just a double cheeseburger with water, but I'm not so sure I'm an aberration in getting a raw deal out of bundling.
The analogy with a buffét is interesting in both its similarities and its differences. People eat different amounts, sure, but there is a finite amount one could eat, and it's not everything at the buffét. Some will eat more expensive stuff (HBO, ESPN), and some will eat cheaper stuff, but the cost to the restaurant is a finite amount of food.
The analogy fails when in bundling TV it would be like sending every buffét customer 10 full dishes, of which they can only eat 1-2 full ones.
Another issue is viewer count and measurement. In traditional TV you've got the Nielsen box and all its flaws, as well as scheduled TV giving a LOT of power to broadcasters to dictate popularity by air time (and ads).
When I pay for a Netflix bundle, in aggregate with every other customer, our money is directly mapped to exactly what shows we watch, and while they can try to push some shows, they have a lot less power in dictating what people watch. This means that shows no one wants no one pays for, because they will simply not produce it. In traditional TV this was different for a myriad of reasons, including less consumer choice in the bundle (you choose a channel, not a program), no control over air times, etc.
TL;DR: I don't disagree with the economics/maths in that link, but I disagree with the premise of the input consumer value, and available choices.
Study the ownership charts and it all becomes clear. There are not 10 companies producing 10 channels. There are like 3 to 5 companies producing everything you watch. So in your scaled down example, there's only perhaps two companies each producing 5 channels, and using the miracle of economy of scale they only each collect $10. You might very superficially think each channel costs $2 but because of economy of scale and intentional government regulation it costs like $9.50 to produce one channel, $9.75 to produce 2 to 4 channels, and $10 to produce 5 channels. The lights go out on the whole system if they don't get their $10 of revenue so they have to charge "around" $10 for one channel, you can forget $2 or even $5. Well, not everyones viewing patterns are going to match one corporation, so most people are going to end up needing to buy from both companies which is $20 so a la carte is dead. In an artisinal world of bespoke channels made by individual companies or people, a la carte would work, but economy of scale and financial pressures means everything you see comes from a very narrow funnel. And that narrow funnel is why its culturally changing from broadcasting to extreme narrowcasting and revenue is collapsing, but thats another issue.
Another analysis mistake is thinking channels are all equal and of equal value. Most channels are filler taking up bandwidth to keep competitors at bay. It is exactly like retail brick and mortar software sales in the 90s where you'd have a gigantic cardboard box containing a half sheet of paper and a CD in a sleeve rattling around in there. The fillers make little to no money but they make sure that a competitor doesn't have the space to set up something that could be a hit (its quite a downward spiral).
Eventually the cable companies are going to give up on trying to manage a system that delivers every channel to every station all the time, and then the game will really be on, and its a game of logistics and scaling and financialization that the cable co has already won, so best of luck to the new entrants, but other than provoking some short term innovation...
I tried using slingtv and on top of the stream qustream issues, I realized that if I pay for a video service my tolerance for ads becomes super low. Too low to ever switch back to the traditional tv ad model
I tried it, the quality is quite lacking from the buffering to the terrible blurring during quick action in sports and movies. And I tried it from multiple connections, ATT/Comcast/Verizon fits...although this was summer of last year during Olympics. Maybe it's better now or was too saturated back then.
Some of that is definitely there. I still see a 2-5 minute delay on video streams (based on show start times etc.). I don't notice any issues with blurring but I'm usually watching old SD shows (star trek on bbc) or cartoons.
Happy customer of PlayStation Vue. At $29/mo compared to the $80+/mo I was paying for Cable, I think these services will be very disruptive to the traditional cable model.
If anyone hasn't, I highly recommend reading American Broadcasting et al v. Aereo. A fascinating case, and an interesting run down of telecommunications history.
If anything you'd think that they could be the low cost leader in the market since they'd have the best vertical integration, from low cost infrastructure to ad inventory and targeting.
Actually this offer is : 3 concurrent users for $35/month. Assuming that for many people, a single stream is enough,shared among friends it's $12/month.
I thought Aereo was a neat concept. I think the same concept applied to software defined radio would be awesome as well. In particular, I've often wanted to be able to stream far away FM radio stations, complete with the local commercials, as if I were truly there.
Though and as of now your hard wired Internet provider makes it impossible to have just affordable Internet without having some type of TV package. Any streaming service who doesn't also provide Internet service is highly disadvantaged!
I been paying $55 for 12 months for Internet and a few local and cable channels. Now that's expiring it went up to $70 a month but Internet alone is either $50 for 6Mbps or $85 for 25Mbps. 6Mbps is junk and Comcast knows it and if I added YouTube my expenses would be $85, yet who knows if 6Mbps would support solid streaming?
I'm waiting for 5G fixed wireless from Verizon and Att for some competition to Comcast! I'm sure they too will make it equally unaffordable to just have Internet without their DirectTV Now and Fios. Erggh these OTT services have a tough road ahead of them.. they will probably all end up merging with internet providers.
You'll be happy to know that the Aereo crew (myself included) is currently working on a fixed wireless ISP using millimeter waves and some very fancy active phased array technology.
And naturally, live TV, i.e. multicast, is easy and almost free for any wireless system, for example Starry or Google WebPass. And offers a good launch point for wireless internet services.
This is a cool idea but it still falls very short by not serving users outside of the US. To the point where the welcome page doesn't even acknowledge that there may be global interest: https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/ (enter your ZIP code, no country picker ... YouTube, you do realize you're on the internet, right?)
Does YouTube care about getting content to the world? Or just getting as many of their fingers in the pie as possible and abusing the current geo-restricted licensing model while they can?
As someone who has lived in many different countries, I find this stuff so frustrating. When I was living in England, my wife and I wanted to watch Japanese anime (in Japanese). Luckily Crunchyroll exists and it has quite a large amount of content for a very low price (I think we were paying 4 pounds per month). But now that I'm back in Japan, we want to watch shows from BBC... basically not possible legally. I really enjoyed watching cycling on Eurosport. Good luck.
I really wonder who is going to pay $35 a month for US shows, while you are already in the US. There are just so many other ways to get that content.
I hope one day before I die the media companies will realise that their old idea of breaking up the world into pieces and sublicensing is a stupid one.
> I hope one day before I die the media companies will realise that their old idea of breaking up the world into pieces and sublicensing is a stupid one.
You can watch iPlayer via a VPN or DNS service like unblock.us (do not know if they have service in Japan).
Note to the BBC - I would be to pay 3x the license fee to be able to watch on the internet with a subscription from outside the U.K. I bet if you opened it up world wide you would make more money then you do on the all the U.K license fees.
Even the BBC isn't powerful enough to do this. I can't remember who it was but one of the heads of the BBC said for a long time that content on BBC should be available for free everywhere. He reasoned that it was already paid for. It's one of the reason that they do so much free software development.
One of the shows that I want to watch is Match of the Day. Not sure what the situation is like now, but when I was in the UK the BBC was having a huge problem trying to negotiate the rights to put it on the iPlayer (strangely MOTD2 was OK ???). It would be impossible if they needed international distribution :-(
For freeview UK channels, you can watch some of them on FilmOn[1]
I'm a rugby fan and it's possible to watch high quality, BBC or ITV coverage of the Six Nations from abroad (BBC Scotland on Wales/Scotland has the higher quality for free). I'm pretty sure that Americans can't watch it though judging by comments on Reddit.
I moved from Scotland to Finland, and one of the things I really missed was UK TV. I'd love to have paid for it, but there aren't any really great options.
Initially I bought a NowTV subscription, with a home-made proxy setup. That worked for a long time, but then they caught on, and most of the VPN-providers became blacklisted too.
Nowadays I'm using FilmOn with a Roku box. I've slowly weaned myself off UK TV, but there are afternoons where I just want to sit on a sofa and watch two hours of "Come Dine With Me" for the snarking. I wish I could pay for it ..
Both Match of the Day's are now available on the iPlayer every week - I think from the Tuesday after airing. Still a bunch of asinine restrictions, but it's there. I remember it was like you say when they first started it.
I disagree since I am already paying for a licence in the UK I am barely able to take advantage of (I live outside the UK for 9 months a year). I am rather annoyed that I have do a workaround to watch stuff I have paid for.
I get especially annoyed when I also have to 'prove' I have a licence by ticking a box.
In other words, it's easier to get for free outside the UK than it is to pay for it.
Parent's point is still valid. There's another 3+ billion of internet users outside the U.S., it would be nice not to be an afterthought's afterthought. They just need to say "Sorry, this product will not be available outside the U.S. at launch." Is it so hard?
Yes it is. From what I understand, a network will license a show to another network in another country, probably in an exclusive way. So they can't just "oh yeah you're paying us millions to distribute in your country? Let me just walk over you by streaming directly to your customers."
It doesn't work like that. These contracts are worth more than the few users that are willing to pay to stream across borders. Sad but that's TV life.
>> They just need to say "Sorry, this product will not be available outside the U.S. at launch." Is it so hard?
> Yes it is.
No, notifying that the offering won't be available outside of the U.S. wouldn't be difficult. Actually offering it outside would (and I think that's the question you were actually answering, which wasn't the question that was asked).
This kind of thing is part of why Netflix & friends are so keen to create a bunch of original content— it's theirs, exclusively, and they don't need to deal with navigating all these preexisting commitments.
Live TV isn't competing against TBP. You can't watch sports or other live events on TBP. Why would you sign up for a live TV service, if you prefer to watch things on demand on TPB?
For any live TV offering they are competing against traditional cable providers. Netflix is already on their way on figuring out the "on-demand" content space. If you look at the blog post, 3/4s of the channels offered are either sports or live news. This simply isn't a service for on demand content.
You'd actually be surprised how good bittorrent live video streaming has got. I checked it out and it was pixel perfect 720p HD - absolutely fine for sports.
But yes, it's still niche, but wow it has moved on a lot. The program I used was called acestream.
Live TV competing with illegal IPTV service with reseller cost as low as 2$/month and consumer price 9-20$/month(on a small scale).
I know many people who have either cut their TV subscription, or at least scaled it down to lowest cheaper tier, since grabbing a mag254 IPTV box and finding a reseller offering upwards of 1000s of channels.
If u don't know about it, you may be content with standard livetv.
But if you in the know, you are cutting at least part of your cable TV bill.
> Does YouTube care about getting content to the world? Or just getting as many of their fingers in the pie as possible and abusing the current geo-restricted licensing model while they can?
I'd prefer to give YouTube the benefit of the doubt as they introduce a brand new service. They're an American company, it makes perfect sense for them to start with US customers.
I imagine most people expected to use it don't get there by clicking a link on some other site immediately after it was announced - they'll probably be running ads inside YouTube, at which point they can target more accurately.
And I can't imagine they voluntarily restricted things to just the US for zero reason. Licensing around this stuff is nightmarish, and there are benefits to launching even before you're 100% global (which nothing is yet).
The reason is that most content creators don't have the business bandwidth to do this on their own; they don't have multi-lingual business development staff, multi jurisdiction lawyers etc. So they hand this all off to content distributors, and the vast majority of these distributors are old school, they have happy and mostly profitable relationships with various resellers and TV stations around the globe. So because the content creators sell locally themselves they have automatically bifurcated the global market for their goods; local and global. It is a small step from that to regional based licensing, especially given differential pricing based on various regions ability to pay and maximising revenue.
The way I understand it, historically geo restrictions originate from physical goods, and are usually driven by distributors, who want to reduce competition and control certain regions. I.e. in order to monopolize the market, they require those who produce some goods to restrict distribution through them only for that region, and in return they offer better pricing and assistance in that distribution. I.e. this basically makes it impossible to make global distribution rights.
This logic falls flat however in the digital world, where distributor isn't limited by region. I.e. you can open a digital store, and sell worldwide (like for example computer games stores like GOG, Steam and etc.).
So in the pure digital world, geo restrictions sound like nonsense, since they reduce reach and profits, both for creators, and distributors. My guess is, this creeps into the digital sphere, because of the influence of physical distributors, who see digital ones as a threat to their local monopolies. I suppose strong grip of some regional cable TV companies, forces creators to limit their distribution through any digital stores as well. The problem is, this approach is pretty nasty when applied in the digital space. It basically becomes xenophobic. Translating it back to physical goods, it can look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbiacSD13qk
Hopefully, the weaker regional monopolists will become, the more likely we'll have global distribution for video too.
I think it also has something to do with price discrimination. A seller can maximize profit if they can come closest to charging the maximum the buyers are willing to pay. So for goods where the cost to make a copy is negligible, such as media and books, the ideal pricing strategy is to sell the product at different prices to different markets, hence why you see versions of the same textbooks being sold for $10 in Asia when it's $200 in the USA.
This is also problematic in a digital store. Imagine someone from USA coming to Asia to buy a book, and they refuse to sell it, or require to charge more based on the citizenship and so on. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happens in digital now both with regional pricing, and geoblocking. In short, applying physical geo based logic in the digital space can lead to unethical and ugly results, because of its non physical nature.
I think this will sort itself out in the near future if Google really wants to play in this area (who knows maybe this will be cancelled after a year it's Google after all). They have the machine learning power to negotiate deals with content creators that have some sort fo usage royalties. They basically get worldwide streaming rights in return for a reasonable payback that takes international viewers into account.
I think the more interesting play could be targeted add injection. Imagine this service for free but with targeted adds where TV commercials would run...I'm not sure online viewers are actually willing to watch adds for TV shows but free is also free so there's that. Or maybe a hybrid or maybe virtual product placement or some sort of add system I can't think of yet.
Add to that a theoretical possibility of automatic translation and possibly even modeling the Chinese voice of actor X to sound like the original from the original broadcast data which would cut out the dubbing costs and the worldwide streaming workflow could be optimized further.
This has always been Google's problem; it really only cares about the US. Which is not surprising given how it has historically acted as an arm of the US government. We saw this before in the iPhone vs. Android battle, it took years for Google to allow developers outside of the US (and a handful of others) in to be able to make paid apps even though Android phones where available in those markets. But when the iPhone in any country, developers from that country were immediately able to sell app in the Apple app store. This is one of the big thing that keeps us off of Google's Cloud offerings. With Google, if you're not in the US you're at best a second class citizen. With AWS you don't get that feeling at all. Even Google's founders are avowed American-supremacists, so it shouldn't come as any surprise.
This has been pretty well documented. Just watch any interview with Larry and Sergey when they talk about the role of the US in the world -- they are very open about where they stand and that they are American-supremacists (though wouldn't use that term obviously). Look at the role Google has played pushing the US government interests in Egypt and elsewhere during the "Arab Spring". Then there is Eric Schmidt's long history of operating as a go between on behalf of the US state department. Which was well documented by wiki leaks: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
No kidding. The moment I saw the zip code requirement I knew it was going to be pointless.
Not only that but $35? Come on. There's not $35 worth of programming there. It's just the same old dumbed down broadcast TV that has been in decline for over a decade.
Compared to Netflix, Amazon, and even YouTube shows ABC, NBC, Fox et al just plain suck. As proof, after watching an awesome trailer for some new sci-fi show you may be totally pumped up to watch it until at the end when they announce, "only on ABC!"
Judging by how much people currently pay for cable, there is more than $35/mo worth of programming there. Perhaps not to you, but that just means you aren't the customer for this product.
> As proof, after watching an awesome trailer for some new sci-fi show you may be totally pumped up to watch it until at the end when they announce, "only on ABC!"
Legion is pretty good. Legion is on FX. FX is on YouTube TV. To be honest I'm struggling to come up with too many recent sci-fi shows that don't entirely suck, irrespective of where they're being made.
> To be honest I'm struggling to come up with too many recent sci-fi shows that don't entirely suck, irrespective of where they're being made.
I'd have to disagree. Westworld, Rick and Morty, The 100, The Expanse, Black Mirror, Stranger Things, Outlander, and Sense8 come to mind as great recent Sci-Fi shows in active development. That's without mentioning the numerous high-caliber super hero shows recently released/coming soon.
Cool, you would think they would advertise a larger channel lineup on their landing page instead of the rather spartan "Stream ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC & more." - it certainly didn't make me think "oh, let's go look at the YouTube blog to find out what else they may be including" nor was there any guidance to check.
thanks for that, confirming that BTN is offered will help me convince the wife, if she can't see her Nebraska Cornhusker Football it would be a non-starter.
And it's got an infinite DVR. I almost never get to actually watch TV live. Hell, even when I watch TV live, I prefer to pause, go to the bathroom, get something to drink, and then skip commercials.
I'm just saying - if I can skip commercials automatically, or without much pain, that'd be very nice.
The ad skipping sounds just for the DVR. Which is fine for shows you don't need to see live, but you're not doing it for sports or first-run content (what would you even be skipping to?).
I know this is off topic, but I really disagree about the quality of broadcast TV. Hannibal and The Good Place are both beautifully shot, very distinctive, and highly ambitious, and both came out of NBC. Speechless is on ABC, and while it's a pretty by the book family sitcom, I still think it's funnier than anything else on right now.
At $35/mo, after 1 year you'll have spent $420. You can get a decent sized TV and an antenna for less than that, and enjoy free news/Jeopardy for many years afterwards.
I think his point was being able to watch them without using a TV and antenna.
I don't see why you would pay $35 a month though when you could get something like an HDHomerun and plug an antenna up to it. Or use an antenna, digital tuner and capture card and wire up your own solution.
The only advantage I see of YTTV is ESPN, so for some people that is probably enough to justify it.
They say "no need for a DVR" so I assume that you will get time-shifted content. That's not free. Also, watching 3 shows simultaneously (on devices I already own) is useful.
And for those of us cord-cutters who have been missing live sports this is a nice option.
FWIW you can buy TV antennas / tuner cards for not-too-expensive (especially after comparing that monthly cost after a few months / a year). Though that is one more peripheral to carry around if you want to be mobile, so it's not exactly equivalent :)
That's exactly why I gave in and paid for basic cable. Which ends up costing $17.76 ($10 HD fee, $5 broadcast TV fee, $2.76 taxes and fees). For access to free content.
I also bought a good indoor broadcast TV antenna. A winegard one, I think. And it normally works great, but it's only 90% reliable.
I wouldn't pay the extra $17.24 for nothing, but I'd like to watch some sports too.
Why would I pay $35 a month to stream broadcast channels that are freely available in HD over the air in my area?
It's one thing if they provided something like Netflix. But it's absolutely bonkers that they're selling what is already a free resource. What's the value-add?
They're adding a lot more than just over the air broadcast channels. For someone that likes watching live sports on occasion, this is a decent offering (the omission of TNT and TBS is odd though).
"It's one thing if they provided something like Netflix. But it's absolutely bonkers that they're selling what is already a free resource. What's the value-add?"
• 6 users can watch on their own devices simultaneously.
• Unlimited Cloud DVR.
Doubtful, outside of single-household sharing; I'd be very surprised if they got to avoid the contractual terms that limit your ability to share a PS Vue account in the same way - you have to activate a "home device" to anchor the account and regularly using six different devices in different locations would probably trigger some sort of fraud check.
DVR functionality? Thinking this is more of a Hulu competitor with live events rather than simply an antenna... probably more of a viable alternative for local sports fans who want to ditch cable?
As one example, I predict the [NFL TV Blackout Policies][] are partially driving the zip code requirement. YouTube is certainly big, but so are the pro sports leagues.
My guess is they're asking for a zip code to see in which areas there's enough demand to negotiate with local news stations. I know a few people that only keep cable because of the local news stations.
That works if you're close enough to pick anything up. Where I live, I can get OTA hdtv no problem, with a piece of wire for an antenna indoors. Where my parents live they can pick up a single channel with a directional Yagi mounted on the roof. (Not an exaggeration, we tried)
I'd bet that's simply due to advertising. Advertising within TV is insanely tied to location, and we're just now starting to figure out online advertising. TV has country, local, regional, etc ratings and reach to judge ads and prices by.. i'm not sure how much, if any of that, is standardized by advertising.
It's written in the law too, mind you, so i'd be curious if online advertising ends up with some standards that providers have to adhere to. Ie, allowing regional ads, knowing the reach, etc.
I'm just not seeing 35$ a month worth of value. Sit coms? Get a grip, man. I feel like they should pay me to watch them. TV is a wasteland. Some cable channels are pretty good. SciFi, Comdey Central, sometimes FX. (I don't like giving money to Fox, but Always Sunny is the funniest thing ever made.)
If they had a way to pick channels and only pay for those, that would be worth looking at.
EDIT: Do you still have to watch commercials? I don't see anything about commercials. If there are commercials then not just "no", but "hell, f*ck you for asking, no".
I'm actually really enjoying The Expanse and The Magicians (to the point where I bought one on Google Play and the other on iTunes). What's really cool is that I bought the current season up front and then get to watch the new episodes the day (or maybe day after?) they're released. I'm not sure if Syfy is the only channel doing that, but before these shows I was used to only being able to buy the season after it was released (e.g. Game of Thrones box set).
I'll have to check out Killjoys, given that you've put it between the two other shows that I enjoy. Thanks for the rec.
Yea, let's see, $35 for content interrupted incessantly with commercials vs $8 Netflix where everything is on-demand and commercial free?
That may only be economical for me if I ran out of things to watch on Netflix, and with the rate at which Netflix is producing stellar content that horizon is moving out further every day.
Personally, I value this kind of "TV" service around $5 a month, and I estimate it will reach that pricing in ~15 years, at which time I will purchase a subscription.
Most of that content is uninteresting, free with an antenna, and loaded with commercial breaks. I would rather spend that money for a season pass on Amazon, or to go out and see a movie once a month. If money weren't an issue, my time is still better spent on Netflix or watching lectures by smart people on YouTube. I guess its fine if they want to attract the geriatric crowd, but I cant imagine people in my generation paying that much for a vastly inferior experience. As others have said, a cheaper day pass would be better, as there still is a place for live content. Whether or not that should be a form of life support for the old guard corporate media empire, that's up to you.
"Unlimited cloud DVR" seems really pointless. Why not just save everything, as it airs, in a central archive that the users can browse at their leisure instead? It also seems to mean that you can't rewind channels you weren't watching, that you manually have to record stuff yourself. Really backwards of Google if my assumptions are correct.
It seems weird that Google aren't able to create/negotiate something relevant for today. All the things I talked about are becoming common for normal TV providers in Norway.
Because the TV networks don't want that, see: many of them opting out of the 3-day replay functionality on Sling. I'm sure Google does keep one copy of every show users have chosen to "record" instead of duplicating it, but networks don't want people just being able to access an entire series without effort (I'm guessing just because they are money-loving jackasses).
> "Unlimited cloud DVR" seems really pointless. Why not just save everything, as it airs, in a central archive that the users can browse at their leisure instead?
Even if that's what they actually do, "unlimited DVR in the cloud" may be a more accessible way of presenting that to an audience familiar with cable TV.
Your comment made me realise what they're acheiving here.
They have created the perfect streaming version of the DVR for all those non-tech-savvy older generation who are only comfortable with what they already know and love.
Now, instead of learning about the joy of Netflix and Chromecast, they can just do everything they already do with their DVR, except now it's through YouTube!
Brilliant really, particularly since they're the only ones who would pay $35/month for that crap.
No doubt that this is what they are doing. For non-live shows, they may even get a dump prior to it airing, so they have the whole day's worth of content queued up and ready to go.
If it lets you view a program guide, and watch anything that "aired" earlier than now, it sounds like it's basically a different interface but otherwise the same as current YouTube or Netflix. YouTube even has live streams.
However the way it's described makes it sound like there's probably some limitations to make it "seem like TV". The worst of this would be to totally emulate the normal TV+DVR model:
* You only get access to recordings if you picked them to "record" prior to when they "air"
* You have some arbitrary limit of number of "concurrent" recordings (eg: you can't just record every show on every channel at the same time, despite being 'unlimited DVR')
* If you want to watch/record a show and it's already started, you can only watch/record it from the current point forward
* Everything has commercials, at 31% rate, with the same commercial repeating multiple times like current TV.
They can also do some really awful things with it being a cloud DVR:
* Delete your recordings, or 'expire' them after some time. For example, you have 3 seasons of some show 'recorded' and are working your way through, but then they lose the license for that network and poof, all your 'recordings' are gone.
People commenting that $35 is too much for the content included - if you want an equivalent set of channels from Comcast/XFINITY, it will cost you almost 3x more. So it's a non brainer for me, and the fact I don't have to deal with Comcast is worth even more than saving ~60% of my monthly cable bill.
This of course is only true if you pay for cable TV.
I have Netflix and Amazon and the reset of the internet. I had a HDHomeRun hooked to an over the air but since I moved I have not hooked that up again yet as I need a huge mast to get reception.
You can use a VPN like service to get world wide streams also.
I do pay Comcast for a business internet connection to keep away from the data caps however.
Both of these services seem like an interesting step forward, but then, who really wants to watch live TV anymore, besides sports fans? The whole idea of watching something at a specific time that it's aired just seems unimaginable to me after years of on demand streaming. Not to mention commercial breaks.
It's not just watching it at a specific time, but also watching at a specific speed. I watch most video at 1.5x speed. Professional standards for how fast to talk are set low enough for a wide audience including non-native speakers. If you're watching something in your native language you can almost certainly understand faster. Live TV feels annoyingly slow.
Completely agree. Maybe 10 times a year I watch live TV, otherwise I want to choose a show and binge on episodes on demand. Unfortunately, the legal situation around licensing I think allows for "unlimited DVR" but not actually just an on-demand episode list. You have to setup your "own" recording of the episode, and your bits can be stored in the cloud for you. I'm not sure even if de-duplicating the bits runs into trouble.
last time I've had this conversation with cable execs, it was explained to me that even just de-duping the bits does in fact run into trouble. They have to store a complete copy for you, for your personal use.
> Both of these services seem like an interesting step forward, but then, who really wants to watch live TV anymore, besides sports fans?
There is probably a reason YouTube is advertising "never run out of DVR space." This isn't just about just live content, it's about no required delay but still on demand viewing.
If we started out with a Netflix like video hosting platform and then someone launches a live, continuously running, and a curated-list-of-shows platform, everyone would consider that as a mind-blowing "innovation". I guess some people do want to watch live-tv, simplifies the question of "what to watch next".
No, synced playlists that are curated by professionals, backed by millions of dollars of budget. I wouldn't consider that as mind-blowing either. It's a sarcastic comment on reactions from the valley about what they consider as an innovation.
DirectTV Now is $70 a month. They'll probably never compete against streaming only services because they need to be at a pricepoint that doesn't destroy their conventional satellite business.
Google's offering is half that. I imagine its going to have less channels. Considering Playstation Vue's selection, I guess we'll see how well they can compete.
> DirectTV Now is $70 a month. They'll probably never compete against streaming only services because they need to be at a pricepoint that doesn't destroy their conventional satellite business.
Why? Their part of AT&T, if they reinforce AT&T's fixed wired and mobile value proposition more than enough to make up for the satellite business, there's no reason AT&T couldn't accept that cost. As it is, they are already competing with other AT&T offerings.
Depending on the sports you watch there's other good deals deals. 35x12=420$. All access NFL package (for Europeans, not sure about US prices but iirc. it exists and is in the 250$ range) is about 250€/season. I think NBA/NHL are priced similarly. So you could get about two complete pro leagues for the same price (and these are a lot better than normal live, you get all games archived forever, non-commercial versions the day after, Redzone etc.)
If you want college sports or more variety or something outside of the big stuff (winter sports, cycling etc. etc.) then it's meh.
This really needs to beat PS Vue's selection to be competitive. SlingTV looks good but the lack of a DVR function is a non-starter. I'm not even sure why they bothered to even launch without that. Who watches live tv?
Kind of bizarre that they decided to highlight the free OTA networks most prominently in their marketing, when it's actually a cable replacement (or at least a partial one).
With the zip code request I wonder if they will be making local channels a key selling point. Service like Sling TV and DirecTV Now don't do a great job of handling the networks.
Local channel content (even when the network content is available) are something missing on many OTT services, so it makes sense to highlight that as a selling point.
This would actually be one of the absolutely immense capabilities Google (the advertising company) could bring.
I almost never watch cable/broadcast TV (don't have it at home, and haven't for 12+ years) so one of the things I notice when I do watch it is there are some commercials that are genuinely entertaining (well produced, funny, etc).
The issue is, after watching TV for an hour, when I see that 'entertaining' commercial for the 3rd time it is no longer entertaining.
Google can actually track what they are showing, and have an idea of who's watching. Don't show me the same commercial more than once per day (or every few hours), and definitely don't repeat the same one in a single show. Don't show me ads that are completely irrelevant. Track metrics on ads, and eliminate genuinely bad ads.
I'm not sure I'd ever come to a service where I both paid and watched ads, but this is basically the minimum necessary for me personally to watch content with ads at all.
Of the companies that would be able to pull this off, Google is definitely at the top of a very short list.
It's $25/mo cheaper than a plan from xfinity that includes all those channels (probably around $35-40 cheaper after the 12 month "trial" period, but they don't list those prices on the landing page).
The science channel will be a lot more than $5/mo if all the sports fans aren't forced to subscribe to it just to get their ESPN.
It sounds reasonable that ala carte pricing should be cheaper because you shouldn't have to subsidize channels you don't watch, but people forget that others are also subsidizing the channels they watch. The reality is that channels are already roughly priced according to their popularity and most people won't save much, if any, money with ala carte pricing.
It's really the other way around. Sports channels can't pack 24 hours of interesting content and are rapidly dying. ESPN has been crying for years now that they're dying a slow pitiful death. Sports fans don't want access to all sports, don't even want access to their sports, they want access just to the specific games they want to watch or think are important. Sports commentary outside of games just isn't compelling enough TV for casual sports fans to really watch and most of it is variations on "this season team <x> will work harder and not let other teams beat them" with archetypes of rebuilding, can-they-hold-onto-the-magic, underdog-story-of-the-season mixed in.
The rest of cable offerings is the only thing keeping these channels alive because nobody is really watching them.
Then if it doesn't make a difference, why do it? It seems to me to just be a shitty way to move money around that doesn't make sense to the consumer. If nobody wants to buy a channel, let it die.
Lets call a spade a spade: they do it because people don't have a choice and have to pay for it.
I doubt the effort will gain them significantly more customers. If they charge $35 for 10 channels, but you can get 1 channel for $5, most people will see the 10 for $35 as a better deal. Unless their per channel price were equal to (bundle price)/(number of channels in bundle), then very few people would go that route.
Hmm really? I guess I'm among the minority on this one then. There's really only a few channels I'm interested in, that I can't get online. I'd gladly pay $10 for 2 channels rather than $35 for 10... because I certainly won't be watching the other 8 channels.
The only content on the page says, "Stream ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC & more."
While "& more" could include anything, I'm going going to assume it doesn't include any of those or they'd be listed. At the very least they'd put ESPN as that's the big one for people cutting the cord and wanting to watch live sports.
I'd just like to see when they start doing personalized ads for every different person. I know TV companies have started to do more targeted ads [1] but if there's a company that can do it, it's gotta be google. If there's enough ad revenue to go around, it could be a tipping point where the local channel rules cease to matter.
I just think it's wonderful that this launched within hours of someone recommending twitter be turned around by being the go-to solution for interacting with and watching live tv.
I don't really understand what's the point of this. YouTube is already my TV. With a little streamlining and a little bit more intelligence, I wouldn't have to even click the links and just switch on autoplay to stream all the interesting content I want to see for the day. That vision is not far away.
Is Google purposefully sabotaging their subscription integration in order to leave space for paid services?
The fundamental problem I think is that this is yet another offering of packaged channels, 90% of which I don't want. Okay, maybe not 90%, but in their initial channel offering I count at least 25 of the 46 channels I'm not even remotely interested in.
Once you drop sports, Spanish language content, kids content and some of the more useless news channels I'd be paying effectively paying $35/mo for local TV I can already get for free, USA, FX, Bravo, FX, Syfy and I guess...Youtube Red?
If I were to pay $1/mo for each channel I might watch, I might pay $4 or $5/mo for this.
Dump the live TV entirely, just put the shows up so I can binge watch the ones I want. The "cloud DVR" is a dumb gimmick, all the content is already sliced and diced and uploaded to some server somewhere anyway.
Ugh..this offering is probably only really of interest to sportsball enthusiasts who are desperate to cut the cord but can't.
You omitted AMC from your list, or are you not a fan of The Walking Dead and Into The Badlands?
Regardless, yeah, my wife likes Nebraska Football and I like Purdue Basketball so a service without BTN would be a deal breaker. And If I dropped my 200+ channel cable package (smallest I could get and get all of the things we both watch) and picked up either this or the $35 tier of Playstation Vue I'd save about $100 a month. We already have Netflix and Amazon Prime and I'd probably have to subscribe to HBO now for GoT and Westworld. I'd still save close to $100 a month AND get my sportsball!
Was AMC on the list? I must have lost it in the disinterest cloud that surrounded the four ESPNs.
In all seriousness, I believe that we may be approaching a tipping point where sports franchises are going to have to come to terms about offering other ways to watch their games. Lots of people I know who do watch sports grumble about having to pay for 400 other channels they don't watch. So I know the feeling is mutual in some ways.
You should probably assume that if they ask for only a ZIP code (not a generic postal code) and don't ask for anything else that, yes, they are talking about the one country which uses ZIP codes.
"NBA Basketball on Fox Sports Regional Networks" - Would this would be a bit of a coup for YouTube? My regional sports network doesn't have any streaming options; not sure if other markets are more liberal with this.
Also, that wording...are they getting the whole regional network or just the NBA basketball?
If this gets around the blackouts, sign me up. Something legal and convenient... This is the way to gain back lost ground on the cord-cutters, and the reason we left Dish/Comcast/etc in droves in the first place. It is simply too complicated or inconvenient to legally get to the different types of entertainment I am interested in viewing.
On the contrary, I can see this going down the path where I am back up to $100/month for entertainment between Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, etc.
Seems like a pretty steep price to watch network television. As a cord-cutter, I think its a great idea because you can't get the networks with SlingTV, and TV antennas suck. But yeah, I'm not going to pay $35 for network television. I'll just keep using my shitty antenna.
I asked my questions in a "dupe" thread so reposting here.
From TV to internet to TV on internet to internet TV on any devices. One thing I wonder about is how people who purchase "bundles" traditionally will react. I'd imagine they are the biggest consumer of TV programs. (TV + INTERNET or TV + Phone + Internet style bundles). Will it end up costing the same when you break you bundle to only get internet from a provider and get "TV" from Youtube?
Another question I have is about the "cloud DVR". How does it work? Is the content already in a server somewhere so when I hit the "DVR" it just tags that? It makes no sense saving the same content multiple time because multiple people tried to DVR the same episode right?
Is lot of the modern TV already through internet? If not, won't this cause an increase in internet bandwidth used? Maybe it's no significant but i'm curious about it none the less.
There was a talk on HN about cell phones and FM being enabled on it. Will a similar thing happen on TV, i.e my TV won't work without internet in the future?
Does privacy concerns increase with this? Is it easier to track users view patterns and what not with this as opposed to traditional tv? Will it be more likely that people will post the episodes or clips they watch to youtube or will it be less common as it will be even easier for youtube to recognize and flag stuff? (I wonder if youtube will provide a tool to post tiny clips directly from TV so people can have discussions and what not as well).
Thanks in advance if anyone takes time to answer any of my question!
Sports!!! All I need and care about for my $160 a month Xfinity cable bill is Sports. Unfortunately sports takes places on various channels (ESPN, ESPN2, FOX, CBS, CBS Sports, TNT, TBS, TruTV).
OK, one question I have is how am I supposed to view this content on the various TVs throughout my house? Will this be a new Roku app? Will I just use the old Roku YouTube app? Will I have to stream it from my laptop/phone? I think the answer to this question will determine how much traction they get. My parents, my wife, nor any other non technical folks are going to stream anything from their phone. I can't see how this will win.
I really don't understand--those channels are free with an HD antenna. I don't know if this is possible anymore, but those channels used to be free through your cable cord, even without a cable box. ABC, fox, nbc, and cbs are free. Why pay $35 just to remove adds.
Are they including, AMC, MTV, etc? I don't think so or they would say so.
Ps. This is a serious question. Please someone help me understand how they are charging for free channels just to drop their ads (presumably)?
Just as a personal anechdote: I have cable for one reason -- my local cable provider has a monopoly on the A's. I cannot watch the A's play babeball without a $75 per month Comcast subscription. It is not included with the $30 shit tier cable they offer.
This fucking sucks, especially because baseball is as American as you can get. But then, charging people for stuff that used to be free is also as American as you can get.
I don't think I'd personally use it as I have tv. However I can see it being useful for cord cutters. It would be nice to see some sort of bundling. Pay x amount, get youtube premium stuff, with movie rentals, and streaming tv with other google features etc such as google play/music. However have it broken up is a good option too. I think both options could be useful.
This is cool, though part of the reason I like things like Hulu Plus is that I don't have to worry about commercials, and it's literally a third of the price.
I do find it interesting though; Youtube/Google is taking all the steps to be the next Time Warner or Comcast it seems. I wonder if this proves that that industry isn't impossible to break into.
The biggest problem with Google is their branding. They launched so many services - Google Music, Youtube Red, Youtube TV, Youtube Live, Hangouts Live, etc., it's just impossible to keep up on what they are actually trying to do. I am sure they have far less number of customers on any of these individual services than if they would have had if these were independent companies. They do everything and nothing they do recently is up to the mark.
(am googler, but don't work with any of the mentioned products)
Keep in mind that all of these products in many cases compete with other companies (music -> spotify, apple, ytr -> netflix/hulu originals, kinda, YTL -> twitch, YTTV -> cable providers). I, as a consumer, wouldn't want these things to all be bundled. I use spotify for my music, and I don't want to have to pay for Play Music or youtube red unless I use those services.
I can't even imagine how some kind of "unified google media" thing would work.
> I can't even imagine how some kind of "unified google media" thing would work.
It's quite simple. Pay more than a few services (but not as much as all of them together) and get access to all of them. The concept isn't really hard at all. You can go a step further and give increasing discounts the more services you add if you don't want one package deal.
You guys already do it for Youtube Red/Google Play Music. It's not mindblowing to imagine it being expanded from there. There's a common account for all the services anyway, so from a technical perspective you'd have a common place to store subscription information if that's not already done.
Right, but from my perspective as a consumer, at least right now, the only service I'm even remotely interested in is YTTV, and the reverse would be even worse. If I didn't want the YTTV package, there's no way I'd pay $40/mo for play music or whatever. A la carte models are a lot more efficient, the reason I don't like cable (and comcast) is because of bundled services, why on earth would I want to move to another, even more bundled, service?
Plus you've only handled the subscription portion, even if somehow we fix that. Where do I view this content? Is there a unified media dashboard that connects to 3 parts of youtube, play, and such?
I guess my basic point is that these services seem useful for entirely different groups of people. Why would consumers want them bundled, either technically or economically, and similarly, why would Google?
Think about it this way. Netflix wanted to separate their DVD and streaming into separate companies, so there would be different websites for each. Consumers complained about that so much that they changed their mind and stayed with one. If Google/YouTube started with a single product and broken it out like it is now, people I think would rightly complain.
I think the most egregious thing is music, rather than YouTube Red or this service itself. There's Google Play where you can buy music, Google Play Music where you can subscribe like Spotify, and YouTube Red also includes unlimited music on top of the shows on Red but is somehow different than Google Play Music. I guess what I would suggest if I had any say in things is just killing the Google Play Music and Google Play Movie/TV brands, and moving the content to YouTube and maybe integrating YouTube into the Google Play app on phones. YouTube already has movies, so it would just be a matter of making the music and live streaming part of it more visible on the home page. I don't see any links to them on my front page.
I would say - just brand them as completely different services unless they are totally dependent. Just because movies are served on top of YouTube doesn't necessarily mean that they literally have to be part of YouTube website. Why not a website like "MovieTube" with its own website and brand? It makes YouTube a single focused website intended to find any/all random videos on internet and people understand when they hear "MovieTube". With YouTube Red, YouTube TV, YouTube Live, YouTube Movies, etc., it is hard to remember which is what.
Sure, but that's you. Another person who subscribes to Youtube Red and Youtube TV and <insert something else here> would be more inclined to get a package.
Nobody is advocating taking a la carte away, but packages are known to increase profits because people are going to think "oh I can pay only X more and get Y" instead of evaluating each item individually.
Amazon, for example, has done a great job of balancing between Prime, which is a package subscription, and a la carte subscriptions and addons. You get a Prime music library, and can pay extra to get access to a larger music library, or pay a different price if you don't subscribe to Prime.
> Plus you've only handled the subscription portion, even if somehow we fix that. Where do I view this content? Is there a unified media dashboard that connects to 3 parts of youtube, play, and such?
Why does there need to be? YouTube Red/Google Play Music All Access are combined in one subscription, but YouTube itself has a really large number of Google-provided front ends (just for apps, off the top of my head, there is YT, YT Music, YT Kids.) And Google Play Music has its own app, which also.links to video content in YT.
I think this doesn't provide any extra value to anyone who is not a cable subscriber already; this is more useful to those who think cable is a fine package and would just prefer to not actually deal with cable companies any more than they have to. Getting this through YouTube's apps is probably going to be a big tech improvement.
It seems like a decent value proposition if you're into sports, especially if you split the price with 5 other people.
The offering does include channels that I only know of on cable (e.g. ESPN, SyFy, Bravo) at a cost significantly less than basic cable (last time I looked).
Thanks. I missed point 1 and 3. Point 2 has almost no value these days unless you don't have Hulu/Amazon/Netflix, which I guess some people don't.
I watched commercial TV for the first time in a few years the other day and lost interest in what I was watching because of it. I don't think I can go back now.
> Point 2 has almost no value these days unless you don't have Hulu/Amazon/Netflix, which I guess some people don't.
A lot of their content is from sources that aren't on Hulu, Amazon, or Netflix (or which are on one or more of those with a significant delay), so DVR is still valuable.
Point 2 is extremely valuable if you watch live stuff. I often DVR live shows and sporting events and then start watching them 30-60 min later just to fast forward through the commercials.
The page is extremely void of any details, reminds me of Cable companies landing pages. This is odd because I noticed there has been a recent explosion of third party live CNN, FOX News, ... channels, not sure if this is because YT made their copyright detection algorithms more lenient as a segue to YT TV.
1) Will it have ESPN? I only really care about ESPN on a daily basis for TV.
2) "Never run out of DVR storage" -> Will I be able to easily save recordings of any show on Youtube TV? I value this a lot for particular sporting events and have years' worth of footage backed up.
This is priced about the same as Playstation Vue, DirecTV Now, and Sling for the channels offered. Looks like they're trying to win people over with features (DVR, 6 account profiles, etc).
For what it's worth, not everyone can pick up all of those channels with a $20 antenna. I can pick up NBC, PBS, and a few odd local channels with no national affiliation. I'd imagine those in cities and metro areas would probably have more luck. But anyway, the blog post [1] has a full(er) list of channels. But even then it doesn't look price-competitive with Sling for some reason.
With $35/mo, it looks like another half-ass effort like Google phone hardware business. For 10 dollars extra over internet charges per month I get all the channels that this post explicitly mentions + some more I never watched.
You announce this on February 28 without TBS, TNT, or truTV? I get that Turner had you, but come on. Wait until April to announce if you're not gonna have them. Or even until June, when the NBA conference finals are over.
Have you found a source for the "& more" to definitively say that those are not included? Because as far as I could see, all we know is that the big ones are included and that there's others but what those are isn't very clear.
I have cable TV even tough I pretty much never watch it. I don't want it, but to remove it is more expensive than to keep it. I don't have a good incentive to pay more to have more TV.
Why would anyone want to pay $35 per month to access tired old ad supported programming when they can get subscriptions from 3 streaming services for that price.
I would - just for sports. My family subscribes to Netflix, HBO, Hulu (with Showtime), and YouTube Red and I still don't get live sports. I'd drop Hulu+Showtime (~$17) and YouTube Red (~$10). I'll be paying more, but then I'll get all NBCSN and Fox Sports which covers most of the motorsports I'm interested in.
Wow - good job. Literally people (myself included) were commenting this morning in the saving twitter thread about how something like this is really needed.
From the blog post (for what it's worth, I think it's a good idea):
>Six accounts, one price. Every YouTube TV membership comes with six accounts, each with its own unique recommendations and personal DVR with no storage limits. You can watch up to three concurrent streams at a time.
Presumably that you can add up to 6 Google accounts (i.e, your family members in the same household) to the plan for the listed price. They have a similar deal going for Google Play Music, Netflix has it, etc.
Wow, so is this the official beginning of the age of decentralized cable-companies?
As a cable cutter, one thing I am really looking forward to is the day that I can flip channels again very easily, without having to think about what I am doing.
First off, there are really two main reasons for someone not to have a cable subscription:
1. They don't care about the content
2. Price sensitivity
At Aereo, we saw these sort of mix together to create hugely elastic demand.
For a while, we offered a $1 "day pass" that would give you access to live TV for 24 hours at a time.
During the Super Bowl and various award shows, we had crazy numbers of people sign up for these day passes. We actually had to stop offering them, because we literally couldn't build out the extra capacity in a cost-effective way (remember, we needed distinct physical antennas and transcoders for every user we served).
It was tough enough to get people to pay $8/month for access to live broadcast TV and a cloud-based DVR. I have no idea how YouTube will convince anyone to pay $35.
If they can work out the licenses, I'd imagine something like a day pass would work well with consumers – but it's probably hard to get the economics of that to work out.