Are people here really so young that they never had to deal with traditional cable subscriptions? Let me tell you what it was like. You signed up for Comcast, paid a $50+ installation fee, prayed that the technician would even show up in the allotted window, paid $100-150 month for basic service, paid for a cable box/modem rental, paid for HD, paid for DVR, paid for each extra TV in your house, paid for premium channels, paid for on-demand, paid for sports packages, and then watched a shit load of ads to cap it all off. Complaining that YouTube TV is too pricey or is making things worse just shows that you don't know of the media world outside of YouTube and Netflix.
Ah, don’t forget the incredible experience of calling Comcast customer service because your special promotional rate expired and your monthly bill went up 25%, or the free HBO promotion that you couldn’t opt out of expired and you are paying $10 more, or any of half a dozen other anti consumer nonsense some scumbag at Comcast dreamt up. The most outrageous was one some Comcast rep called me to tell me I qualified for a free DVR upgrade because I was such a loyal customer. By loyal I guess they meant captive, but ok. I don’t watch TV and only had a TV package cause it was somehow cheaper than just internet due to some promotion, but sure whatever. Turns out by free he meant like an extra $30 per month. Took me a few billing cycles to notice. I had never even unboxed it. They refunded me after several hours on the phone. I should have invoiced them for my time. I got rid of them as soon as I had an alternative.
We were paying about $350 for internet + the full package to get sports.
Now it's $60 for faster internet and $73 for TV. The ads are infuriating, but it's less than half the cost for pretty much the same TV experience. This is a very clear upgrade.
I'm running jellyfin server on an old NUC (but you can use any piece of hardware or even your main computer). My android and iOS devices (including 2 TVs) have the jellyfin client. I can watch movies/TV shows anywhere and resume on another device anytime.
Correct, but there are cheaper options. Additionally, you can self-install cable these days in many places.
With streaming services you still have to pay for certain sports packages and premiums.
Most people who stream are still paying the Internet fees and modem rental.
Some streaming services will sell you equipment (for instance, DirecTV Stream has a set-top box that isn't required, but actually behaves more like traditional cable instead of having to navigate to a separate app)
It's because the shape was due to licensing and contracts by content producers, not the technology of distribution.
Online distribution licenses were underpriced and differently packaged for a while because producers didn't know what revenue to anticipate or which horse would be the best to bet on. But as the industry matured, stuff evened out again and it's mostly back to normal.
Many conveniences of the new technology are nice, though.
Tech giants have successfully transformed live TV, simply by killing it completely. No one under 35 subscribes to any kind of live TV service today other than to watch sports, and in another decade that will be fully online as well (look at the inroads Amazon and Apple are already making in that space). Some of the best new TV content is increasingly owned by Netflix, Amazon, Apple and the like. Cable TV and any kind of non-sports/special events broadcasting is going to disappear as a concept within our lifetimes.
36 and haven't paid for TV since... well, since I moved out of my parents' actually.
I pay for a frankly stupid amount of sports streaming services though. I wish there was a way I could watch everything I want without paying for FuboTV, DAZN, TSN+, and probably others I'm forgetting.
Apart from pirating, the only way to watch, say, NFL Football, your local baseball team and say Division 1 College Football games is gonna be with one of those $70/mo+ packages.
I would love to just pay directly for the sports/leagues I care about, but that’s just not an option.
Take a league like MLS, for instance. Their Apple TV deal is worth about $250M/year.
To hit that revenue number on, say, a hypothetical $90/year ($10/month for 9 months) standalone league pass subscription, they'd need about 2.8M subscribers. And that doesn't figure in the distribution costs of either rolling their own live sports streaming service or more likely whitelabeling one.
Most MLS matches broadcast on cable have fewer than 400k viewers. Many have fewer than 125k. It's hard to imagine that 3M people would consistently fork over $10/month for that.
Providers will almost always pay more for some degree of exclusivity (and more stably — the MLS deal is for 10 years) than consumers will bear on their own. It's ultimately a marketing expense for providers banking on subscriber growth, something consumers aren't willing to shoulder directly for a standalone league service.
Where streaming passes have worked are on the team level for those with global brands, where they can provide exclusive content to diehard fans. But again they tend to be expensive marketing arms and not the team's primary revenue stream, which is still league TV/media contracts.
How much of comercial settings will be eaten up be online shopping? I can’t remember the last time I went to a brick and mortar store to buy something.
AFAIK, and I'm with you on this, that bars that have tvs have to at least pretend to pay the rights holders for playing sports on their tvs, which in turn brings people in to spend money on drinks and/or food.
I can't imaging having to train every new employee on how to use the streaming-only custom set up you'd end up with without using a cable box, which, well, everyone probably already kind of knows how to operate ... at least for now.
It does make me wonder how long until the new employees won't have a clue how to use a cable box due to never having used one ever.
Netflix did transform TV. Cable subscriptions are shrinking. Many people have switch to a streaming on demand service vs a linear service. You can watch most TV without ads.
That used to be the case couple years back. Now they are bringing ads to these streaming services. And you have 10 different streaming services what you need to buy separately. Soon there will be bundling streaming service and we are back to cable tv pricing and ads.
Yeah we're definitely seeing a slow return to "this is on-demand cable". And all I see is that independent content (like YT videos) will continue to grow. I can definitely say that I watch probably one tenth as many shows and movies now as I did 7 or 8 years ago, simply due to how fragmented streaming services have become.
I keep a Netflix subscription running for my parents, get the free few months of Apple TV every year or so from buying a new device, and beyond that I just watch more and more YouTube in my free time and go to the cinema maybe twice a year.
Sure, YouTube doesn't really have any blockbuster/high-budget/studio-level content, but there's simply so much and so many niches that it keeps me entertained just as well as anything else, so I subscribe to YT premium and that's it.
Ad-supported plans are more profitable per user than ad-free plans.
"Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said the ad-supported versions of their streaming platforms generate more money per user than their ad-free counterparts, as the advertising revenue more than offsets the lower subscription cost." -- https://www.wsj.com/business/media/netflix-price-increase-ac...
You can still buy non-ad services and the amount of content you can get at one time has increased incredibly. I would also say the new format has increased the quality of content. In my personal opinion, tech has really changed the industry and how we watch tv.
Content is king. And you can't even neatly excise sports content from everything else. If you can live without most live content, you really do have good, albeit fragmented, alternatives. But it does require giving up live TV.
That is extremely rare above a certain age. It may be more common today, especially if you make a point of avoiding sports, but there are a ton of situations in which people gravitated to live TV until very recently (when some don't now have it).
Unless there is true change, both in delivery & content, most everything reverts back to the way it was. Music delivery seems (semi-)permanently changed, as it is nigh unimaginable for the album as it was known to make a comeback, market-wise. No similar change has happened or been allowed to happen on the TV-heritage side of things, & so we get new, shiner versions of the Old Ways.
You’re think of YouTube. The business model of television, especially live television, wasn’t really ever going to cost significantly less than it did. The inverse relationship between advertising and number of outlets would necessitate higher costs to the consumer, not lower costs.
Anyone willing to create content at extremely low cost has flourished under the YouTube paradigm.
> Anyone willing to create content at extremely low cost has flourished under the YouTube paradigm.
That idea won't stand up to close scrutiny. Especially the 'Anyone' part. YouTube undoubtedly enriches itself on their efforts. If most 'Anyone's have 'fluorished' at all it's because of their viewers; most of the 'channel' owners that I've watched regularly for years rely on Patreon for support.
I very much doubt that refusing ad-blockers will change any of that.
'Disruption' is a marketing tactic these days. Netflix keeps hiking prices even though they're not paying usurious amounts to license other networks' content. Uber now isn't any cheaper than the stodgy taxis they replaced.
I hope mlb.tv someday offers all games (without blackouts) and no commercial breaks. Just leave the cameras in the field and crowd between innings. I'd pay good money for that.
MLB could offer a super pricy option to skip all the ads, but they wouldn’t because they can’t tell advertisers that their richest customers aren’t gonna be part of the audience. Advertising distorts the market for everyone.
Fortunately I pay 1/3 the YTTV cost by sharing with a friend so the cost isn't too bad. But it's too much content for my needs, and I don't prefer sharing access.
While technically true this is hardly an option... Both of those "alternative" plans exclude YouTube TV while charging considerably more. How many users who enjoy paying more for less did they sell to here?
$350/year for Sunday Ticket with YouTube TV included vs. $450/year for just Sunday Ticket, delivered via regular YouTube it seems.
$350/year for Sunday Ticket with YouTube TV included vs. $450/year for just Sunday Ticket, delivered via regular YouTube it seems.
YouTube TV is required—not included—with the $350/year plan.
So it's either $350/year + $73/month (with), or $450/year (without).
Assuming you only keep YouTube TV for the September-January football season, that's $715/season with YouTube TV, vs. $450/season without. If you don't get any value from YouTube TV (e.g. if you already have cable or satellite), it's cheaper without.
(Sunday Ticket doesn't show locally or nationally broadcast games such as Monday Night Football, so you kinda need access to broadcast TV alongside it.)
When DirecTV had the Sunday Ticket monopoly, you had to sign a two-year contract to be allowed to purchase it. At least with Google, you can cancel YouTube TV as soon as the season is over.
In my family's case, we weighed the cost against what we spent last football season on food + drinks at sports bars, and decided it was a better deal. ($715 over 18 weeks = $40/weekend. If we go out half as frequently, we come out ahead.)
I agree with your math, but the whole thing is offensive and abusive no matter how you cut it. $450/year (minimum) just to get football games. We've been evaluating our different options overall, given that Netflix price-to-value continues to weaken, as does Sling and Hulu, but I can't find any reason apart from NFL games why I would subscribe to YouTubeTv.
If you don't care what games you watch, an HD antenna isn't a bad deal.
Unfortunately, where we're located (South Dakota), there isn't a "local" team, so it's pretty random which games are broadcast by our local affiliates. If we want to follow a team and watch games we care about, it's either go out to a sports bar, or get Sunday Ticket at home. (And as discussed above, the latter is actually cheaper than the former.)
With other streaming services, we mostly stick to a "one at a time" policy. We'll subscribe to e.g. HBO Max for a month, catch up on the latest season of a show, and then cancel as soon as we're done.
I watch at most a couple of hours of TV a week, but my partner likes having "junk TV" on in the background while she's doing other stuff, so we do get some value from YouTube TV for cooking shows, shows like Deadliest Catch, etc. I wouldn't want to go back to paying $150/month for cable for that, but it's not completely worthless.
Compared to travel or my expensive tool habit, TV and football is actually a pretty small portion of our overall entertainment budget.
I know not exactly what you're looking for but I bought RedZone for the first time through the NFL+ app this year and it's so nice to just have that and not fuss with any other service.
Right, which is why I said “not exactly what you’re looking for”. Was just highlighting that RedZone is purchasable *independently* through an app with little to no fuss.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, if mlb tv could release a subscription without blackouts I would no longer need YouTube tv. Same kind of problem.
I have a separate Wi-Fi network in my house that routes through a VPN in a city I’m not located in that I point my AppleTV too whenever I want to watch local MLB games. Works like a charm. Just remember to turn off location services for the MLB app in AppleTV.
Cord-cutting (still get Internet from the cable company) has saved me a fair bit of money after I realized that I could go a month without watching a live broadcast or a show recorded on my TiVo. But you pretty much only get significant cost savings today if you're willing to do mostly without live TV 100% or jump through some hoops for a rare exception.
In spite of the occasional annoyance, I'm fine with it but I realize a lot of people wouldn't be--especially for sports.
Don't forget you can still get a DTV OTA antenna and watch live TV with a much much better image quality and without cable's delay. Admittedly, in can take a bit of effort finding a location to place the antenna for best reception for your location, but so worth not paying for cable any longer.
Sports is the primary reason for me messing with this, but it is definitely worth it.
> live TV with a much much better image quality and without cable's delay
Depends. In our area they have split the digital signal so many times to carve out additional subchannels (10.1,10.2,10.3, etc) that the effective bitrate is now pretty dang low.
When watching football, the channel may only be delivering 720p, and with tons of compression artifacts to boot.
Way back in the late 90s, the place I was working had a subscription to a trade rag called TV Broadcasting News (or something like that). I remember reading an article on how Congress was upset at the networks for splitting the bandwidth. But being feckless like Congress is, they did nothing about it and just shrugged their shoulders.
Fox was famous for choosing 720p as its broadcast format specifically to get 60fps for its sports programming while the other networks chose 1080i5994.
"You" can :-) But fair comment. For many people, OTA offers good enough live TV. I live at the base of a hill blocking me from the nearest major city about 40 miles away. I've never been able to pick up anything OTA even before digital signals; there was even a big "external" antenna in the attic installed by the previous owner to no avail before he just got a big C-band dish. Even a lot of radio is pretty bad.
I was able to get cable TV before taking any extreme measures.
Even leaving aside the cable-only stations (both premium and non-premium), even getting the basic networks and maybe some UHF channels was marginal for a lot of people involving a lot of fiddling to get a usable signal.
And pre-DirectTV, the alternatives were pretty much geeking out with a big Satellite dish which only worked out on your big country property and were willing to spend the money.
> even getting the basic networks and maybe some UHF channels was marginal
<clears old timer's throat>
In my day, we only had 3 networks and we liked it! You kids and your choices!
But seriously, it is fascinating how in ~20 years of HDTV we've gone so far away from a small collection of channels with nothing worth watching to nothing worth watching available everywhere 24/7. Giving people their own agency in creating content has not increased the PSNR levels in the great vs dreck.
Having to invest time and money into the antenna is definitely what's stopped me from using OTA up to this point. Especially given that our location is between multiple broadcast points so it's not as simple as pointing an antenna in one direction, it would have to be a multi-directional antenna. Last I looked a decent one of those wasn't cheap.
I have one of those little table top style ones that came with a pretty long cable. It is a bit of an annoyance in that in my location, there are different places I need to place the antenna for best reception for that channel. Luckily, I only use it for sports, and I know the best location for each channel. So I just move it as needed, and then place it back behind the TV when done. I look at it like being similar to grabbing a gaming controller and putting it back on the charger when done.
Fun things happen with reception though. Just this weekend, I was watching a match and everything was coming through just fine. The UPS truck pulled up to deliver a package to my house, and the whole time the truck was parked, the signal was struggling. As soon as the truck pulled away, everything was fine again.
As much "fun" as all of that is, it is much cheaper than me finding a sports bar to watch a match. Besides, at the time of the morning what I'm watching is on, I really am not in the mood to go some where.
I'm in the same boat, and on-the-ground isn't even good enough. I'll have to mount a big antenna on top of my roof, which is a tall order. Not worth it to me so far.
Note that they have added DRM to the ATSC 3.0 standard, and its being implemented quite widely. This means that you'll be unable to freely record time shift sports using applications like MythTV, etc.
For now, most network affiliates that air an ATSC 3.0 signal must simulcast the primary video programming stream in ATSC 1.0 format. So most primary channels are still available without DRM. [1]
No, I don't. It looks like the FCC is going to let the market decide on this one. The sunset date for ATSC 1.0, meaning the date that stations can choose to turn off their ATSC 1.0, is 17 July 2027 [1].
Unfortunately, I feel that content providers have a financial incentive to discourage OTA reception. I'd take that 2027 date seriously.
Usually after a sports event is over, it's worth a lot less than when it's being played live, too. E.g. The Super Bowl's value is only worth something when people don't know what's going to happen. After the game everyone pretty much knows what has happened.
To each his own. At least for American football, there are so many advertisements and so much dead time between plays, I will typically record a game and then start watching it about 90 minutes after the start. That usually works out so that I finish the game just as I catch up the real time in the recording.
I'd question the better image quality part of this, almost all broadcast providers have chosen to use their bandwidth to ship the maximum number of 480p subchannels.
You can question, or you can do the A/B test yourself and no longer have it as a question. Sure, they've sub-divided their bandwidth, but their flagship station still receives much more bandwidth than your cable provider.
Just do the Amazon rental for a weekend. If you don't like it, return it. You'll see the difference.
After the repack many markets have multiple HD channels sharing the bandwidth previously allocated for one OTA HD channel. In addition, as ATSC 3 is being deployed these channel sharing agreements are only becoming more common.
In addition, some cable providers are taking this over-compressed feed and compressing it further.
In many situations, streaming is the best option for picture quality now.
I haven't been near broadcast engineering since the DTV transition, but at one point in time, they wanted to have dial-a-yield type of abilities for the splitting of the bandwidth. For primetime, they wanted to to be able to give the main channel a larger portion of the bandwidth when people were watching, and then during the day provide more options for people to view alternate programming. Even if you gave each of the .2-.X channels 3Mbps, that's still a lot of bandwidth in comparison for the .1 channel. Of course any live realtime encoding of 3Mbps will never rival a 3Mbps encode from someone like Netflix, but a lot of that is just SD content anyways so meh it gets.
Yeah it’s all VBR (statmux) and they do make manual adjustments around special events. But at this point, in this market, there are multiple “.1” channels sharing the same physical channel. They are just out of bits.
When NBC last broadcast the Super Bowl there were two 1080i broadcasts (NBC and Telemundo) of the same game sharing the same physical channel (along with some sub channels). It was borderline unwatchable IMO.
I’m sure the situation isn’t as dire in all TV markets, but I think we are looking back on the days during which we could unilaterally state that OTA provides the best picture quality.
It's for sports and news (which both earn many many eyes and are most satisfying when watched live), not so much for reality or scripted productions. Even if you like channel surfing among the latter, you can do that in most service-specific streaming apps now.
At least for news, something like [PBS NewsHour](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/) is available free for cord cutters. Sports, you're mostly looking at illicit streams from dodgy sites.
A lot of people including my brother do like to have TV as background. (Personally I hate it.)
Way back when I would travel in groups and sometimes have a roommate one of the nails on chalkboard things for me was people who would turn on the TV the first thing when they walked into a room.
My guilty pleasure have been the Roku Digital Channels. They have channels that are just a 24 hour feed of MST3K, or Cook's Illustrated, or How It's Made, or Antiques Roadshow. Just to turn on some background while I am making dinner or working on a project has been enjoyable, commercials and all.
I watch those occasionally. I couple weeks ago I happened across some South Korean movie that was their own version of a Tom Clancy war thriller. It was horrible but fascinating(1), and I would never have sought it out on my own. I like the stumble-upon factor that channels give you.
(1) Fascinating in how it depicted other nations. South Korea as competent protagonists who are threading the needle in a dangerous world, North Korea as a broken relation who needs to redeem themselves, China as a looming threat that can still be diplomatically dealt with, USA as clumsy good guys who have lost their way, and Japan as just horrible villains.
I was recently on vacation where they had a roku TV and watched these. I watched some old Unsolved Mysteries episodes, honestly there weren't really that many commercials on this at all compared to my parent's cable subscription.
I recall that after well after I had cut the cord a lot of channels on cable had switched to just playing one show all day on some channels so the concept seemed to pre-date the roku setup.
Many of the smart TVs have similar (I think they're just repackaging what was already out there on Pluto etc; Sling also includes those same channels in their Freestream)
I actually watch a ton of This Old House on my Samsung TV in my home office.
Old people watch a lot of TV, so pretty much every commercial is targeted at them. Medications, retirement planning, predatory "manage your finances" apps, and of course commercials for thinly veiled clones of NCIS.
I pay $73 a month to watch 1 Liverpool game a week (max), 1 Buffalo Bills game per week (maybe), and a smattering of NBA games. I'd so much rather just give the money directly to the teams and/or leagues.
It would be nice if they offered pay per view access for those of us who only want to watch live tv maybe a couple times a year. I can see why they don’t bother though (obviously no real money in it).
Playstation Vue was a great service. Since then streaming "TV" has become less of a value.
Currently we get sling, which is $45 for the typical mainstream cable channels and 2 local channels (ABC and Fox). HuluTV is ok, since it includes Disney+, but about the same price as YouTubeTV. DirectTV Stream is a very complete offering, but barely cheaper than cable (and only because of the lack of equipment fees and taxes)
YouTube TV is still cable, just delivered differently.
For that reason, it was DOA in my eyes. My problem with cable was never necessarily the price (though that was a big factor), but the linear, scheduled nature of the whole thing. I don't know why some companies keep clinging to this dated distribution model well more than a decade after Netflix showed everyone how to do it better.
Because there's enough people like me to make it profitable. I don't want to feel committed every time I turn on the TV. Sometimes I just like to watch whatever's on, carefree. Different strokes, all equally valid.
Similarly, I've got the first 20 or so seasons of The Simpsons on DVD, and after watching them once with the commentary on I never watched them again. But I would watch the two episodes a day that my local Fox affiliate would broadcast.
If I actually pick a specific episode to watch (or nowadays to stream) it somewhere seems like I need to pay more attention to it than when I was watching a regularly scheduled syndicated episode. With the later it puts me in the same mindset as listening to radio...a casual thing that I might multitask with other things, such as reading or doing a crossword puzzle.
I was an early cord cutter, maybe 10 years ago. Then I cut linear because we rarely watched it, and the promotion I had for directv streaming expired (was getting an amazing deal at $10 for directv stream, + hbo with the at&t unlimited mobile plan). I now only want linear tv for NFL, but I tried every which way to see how I could spend as little as possible, but I can't get it any cheaper than about $60/month. I am not spending that just to watch football. And then you also need prime for thursday. And something else for red zone. And you need to make sure you get ESPN. But not ESPN+ because that's worthless. And not NFL+, what the heck is that? It's all absurd and I hate it. I now use some free iptv sources to watch games. Quality isn't awesome, but the price is right. The way I see it, they have driven me to it.
Subscription cost for entertainment is so high, and the quality of entertainment is so low, I can't help but think that most people keep these subscriptions purely out of habit and a BIG shift in consumption patterns is bound to occur. The shift will be to offline, generative software, or offline physical media. Online consumption will be limited to periodic cheap/free options like PBS Newshour, PBS Kids, newsletters, podcasts, and similar. Ideally we'd even see a re-uptake of media like a daily local or regional paper.
Personally, I think this shift could really improve society, the state of people's minds, and encourage more offline time without some draconian top-down time-limit. And all thanks to increasing the price and decreasing the quality of streaming content until you break the relationship. Cool!
This is a reminder to check out your local library. Not only do they have tons of physical media (in some cases current movies and TV shows in disc format) but you may also get access to Hoopla, Libby, and/or Kanopy which are free apps where you can borrow all sorts of digital items.
Some libraries also have a Library of Things, which lend out a random assortment of objects. I've seen musical instruments, baby monitors, cake tins, etc.
Just because it’s expensive and low quality doesn’t mean people will stop using it - even if they recognize that. Based on the trends in entertainment over the last 70 years, I’d wager that entertainment will only be filled with more ads will be less substantive. I also think offline generative content will never happen. Will everyone have a gpu cluster in their home to run it? Generative content is certainly coming, but it will come though YouTube, Instagram, and whatever openAI has planned
> "Charter contended the $600 figure was inaccurate, arguing that its Spectrum TV Select service in Los Angeles only cost around $219 a year more than Google's YouTube TV service," according to a MediaPost article in August.
Google should have just agreed to do a find and replace in their ad copy.
I worked on research projects with large traditional live TV broadcasters. Their viewer demographic was 56+ and aging year by year. Even in those early days of Twitch top online streamers were attracting larger audiences than their top programs and that was not even on their radar.
I strongly recommend cancelling all your subscription services and seeing how long you can go without renewing any of them. Try no TV, really none at all, for a month and see how it feels. Ask yourself at the end: How did you spend your time differently?
With habit-forming I think it helps to first start by adding other activities in rotation rather than just eliminating one.
I can already answer this one: it would be internet-use. My sedentary time is still going to be sedentary time, that's how I want it. I'm not going to chase productivity and socializing for all the leisure time I can spare.
Or at least the in-between option: Use the savings from cutting the subscription services to run your own NAS at home and locally stream whatever movies or shows you own
Imo the only subscription worth it for me is yt premium with sponsorblock combo. And yt music is a nice addition, ofc not Spotify's lvl, but i don't really listen to that much new music
"Charter contended the $600 figure was inaccurate, arguing that its Spectrum TV Select service in Los Angeles only cost around $219 a year more than Google's YouTube TV service," according to a MediaPost article in August.
I always thought Select was considerably less than $73/mo, but just going to their site, I see that it's $59.99/mo (for 12 mos). So I guess it's jacked up after that first year.
I would have settled for "$600 less than most cable"
I think the best hack I've found is get cable and a TiVo with a life time subscription. Now I get the same or more content then YouTube and no commercials because TiVo has a commercial skip feature. I also don't have to pay for hardware for my cable connection because they have to give me 1 free cable card by law. I just insert that into my TiVo.
At least in the US, that is no longer the case. The FCC dropped the cable card in 2020. HDHomeRun cancelled their newer cable 6 tuner on that news. I was looking into getting one for a Plex server at the time.
Well if you still have the cable card, you can still get their older HDHomeRun tuner that only has 3 tuners (the cancelled one did 6 streams at once) and use that in Plex.
They also lied about having better quality than cable. They only do 720p while comcast does 1080. Also their customer service is crazy bad. Did the stream fail for the 5th time? Ok give me all your browser info because of course we didn’t collect that and fingerprint you in the error reporting form you just filed.
It's wild to me how much Youtube TV costs and yet they still serve you tons of ads. Coming from youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad, I forget how much you are bombarded with ads while watching traditional TV. The fact that you have to pay the princely sum of $73/month on top of that boggles my mind. I canceled when they raised the price from $35/month and I'll never go back at these prices...
Just because lots of people seem to be getting confused, "pre-roll ad" isn't the right term for this. Pre-roll is one of those ads YouTube forces you to watch 5-30 seconds of before you can skip it, and when they play before the video starts. Mid-roll ads are the same thing, but interrupting the middle of the video. And Post-roll are ones that play after the video is over.
What you're referring to are usually called sponsored segments. They're ads, but they're just a part of the video file you're being served. They're not dynamically targeted or cycled out. So if a LTT video is sponsored by ASUS, every viewer will see the same sponsored bit about ASUS because as far as youtube knows, it's a genuine part of your video, not a slot for an ad bid.
They're still annoying, but it's not a pre-roll ad. You don't get those with Premium.
Thanks for clarifying. I was worried that the parent was actually seeing real pre-roll ads with the subscription that would eventually get rolled out to everyone.
Doesn’t matter how the pre-roll ad is served or who is serving it. The customer wants to pay for no ads, and that includes removing ads otherwise embedded into the video. The fact that ads people see this as out-of-scope demonstrates how little ads people want to make a product that users want. It’s all about burning the dumb money of advertisers and abusing the users along the way.
If you had just said ad, I would agree with you. But a pre-roll ad is a specific type of youtube that many people are familiar with but don't know the proper name of. That's my point. The OP comment does not get pre-roll ads with premium. But they still get sponsor segment ads.
That's an implementation detail leak: for the end user it's just an advertisement. Call it as you want, but when I pay premium and you write "no ads" I want no ads. That's it.
I don't care that the content provider found a way to show ads. I have a contract with you - you have to figure it out.
Youtube doesn't get any money from sponsored segments. It's a direct deal between the channel owner and the sponsor.
The only way it gets YouTube additional money is because it lets those channels put out more frequent or higher budget videos, which usually leads to more views.
When I said "they" I meant: content providers, service providers and so on.
I frankly don't care at all, I will never buy Youtube TV. However, justifying this behavior is ludicrous, even if YouTube doesn't monetize on such content.
It's just unfair - you pay for no ads, and ...well you do get them because "the file..."
I am more of the opinion that things were actually simpler before, even with analog TV. You knew what to expect. Now you pay 70$ per month, but hey, the file (?) you are streaming (?) contains an advertisement. Who cares?
I just want to watch a show. Without ads, because I paid to have no ads.
But hey we're a young generation, so we understand that it's not Youtube's fault... (?). Sorry, but no way! You are the service provider - you choose what goes through your platform. When I pay, you can't treat me like "you're (still) the product, sorry". That's for me unacceptable.
Movie trailers are a bit different than coca cola ads, come on...
Plus, offer the chance to choose: with the amount of metadata flying through our networks, they are even able to guess what I ate for lunch, ... can't they really offer a checkbox like "show/don't show movie trailers"?
They are Youtube, not random startup run by a guy working on it over the weekends...
Where it gets really confusing is podcast networks (like Spotify exclusives, but also others) offer the ability to cycle out the sponsored segment. So you may be listening to a Conan O'Briend podcast episode from 2016 and hear an ad break of Conan recommending you check out some tv show airing this Saturday, October 16 2023.
But YouTube doesn't let video makes swap out parts of a video without re-uploading the whole thing and losing your viewcount. From what I've heard they have let some very big channels swap out things without it being considered a new video. But that's for the sake of avoiding copyright or fixing a dangerous error. Not for sponsorships.
Will get more and more difficult. This morning Youtube kicked me out because I was using adblock origin. And update fixed it, but if they start putting DRM...
I really appreciate creators who add chapters to their YouTube videos, especially their sponsorship advertisements, since you can easily skip over them.
While I like Nebula on premise, it seems creators on it are getting 'lazier' and some of the people on the site are downright questionable ("TL;DR News" and "Therapist Reacts" being the biggest offenders for me)
Is that really Nebula's fault? YouTube, TikTok, etc. are full of garbage too.
I don't really know their arrangement with creators (one would hope creators get a bigger cut there, otherwise why leave YouTube?), but my favorite creators* have the same videos on both, just a little earlier on Nebula usually.
*Just engineering channels though, which is probably why they're not as spammy/shock-reaction-y.
The way they're marketing themselves I didn't think I would have to curate their content myself. How much do I need do I need to pay to not have to sift through brain-numbing clickbait diarrhea?
At that point you might as well just kill your time on YouTube. Plenty of good channels there too - if you can stand the stench of the heap of trash they're buried under.
Oh, I never thought of Nebula as a curation service, just a hosting service that the creators I like seem to prefer (who knows why, maybe they get paid more there or have some promotion with them?). But I eventually moved back to YouTube too, for unrelated reasons (auto captions etc.)
I don't think any video site these days can be easily "browsed" if you want to avoid the garbage :( It's all about picking and choosing specific channels/creators to follow and ignoring the crap... sadly.
Are you unfamiliar with Little Joel? Big Joel has actual deep analysis if you like, but Little Joel is just a silly side channel of his. You're paying for this, plus also multi-hour-long analysis of, say, media analysis contrasting with the role of Jewish people who were coerced to cooperate with the Nazis in concentration camps.
Nebula is meant to serve a variety of videos. I'd probably feel the same of "I have to watch ads for this crap?" for YouTube, y'know?
You may be paying Nebula, but like all UGC platforms, it can't show you what it doesn't have. Social media video is heavy on lazy "TLDR", and light on substance.
If you dislike them, check out the SponsorBlock extension, which will skip in-video ads. While you're at it, also get DeArrow, which chooses a random frame as the thumbnail and allows community written titles that accurately describe the videos.
I think you and the comment you replied to are talking about different things. The comment you replied to IS talking about skipping these inline ads without paying (SponsorBlock). If you aren't using it and are watching the same videos, you're also seeing these ads.
xdennis is asking why bother paying for premium if you still need to use sponsorblock. Why not just use sponsorblock + (uBlock Origin, or yt-dl, or etc) to remove both forms of ads for free.
I was a Google Music All Access member since day 1 or whatever, they grandfathered me into YouTube Premium ('Red' at the time) and I was okay with that. Then my card expired, they cancelled my Music All Access, and when I re-enabled it, I no longer had YouTube Premium, I had to all of a sudden go out of my way to pay an extra $9 a month for it. I went with Apple Music as soon as I went iPhone and have not bothered to pay Google anymore. All Music Access was amazing, forcing me to YouTube is a poor choice that had they not gone that route I would still be on All Music Access. Apple One is superior in many ways anyway. I rather not be with a company that re-brands existing services then axes them when there's zero need to do so.
My significant other watches sports, so the comparison to YT Premium doesn't count for us. It was either be subjected to ads and pay a lot of money or be subjected to ads and pay a medium-small amount of money.
But as someone who has never paid for cable TV before, I agree that it's jarring. Our trick is to only watch things we've marked to be recorded, which allows ad skipping. (On demand and live don't allow skipping. Starting a sportsball game an hour late gives plenty of buffer.)
Plus they always seem to be taking away channels too. Here in NY, they removed SNY. It’s like ok if you’re raising prices, make sure you aren’t taking things away!
I subscribe to YouTube TV but watch it less than 1/month (it's for my parents). It blows my mind that it's $60/month and still contains ads. There is nothing on TV worth sitting through ads for.
I really wonder how much of this effect is a generation gap. I see one commercial and it drives me nuts, but my parents don't even seem to notice them. Then again I have dev coworkers who're younger than me and go like "I should really get adblock at some point" while staring down pages full of pop-ups and animated crap. Guess you really can develop banner blindness by attrition lol.
I mean that's why the ad revenue goes down over time. People get used to clicking the right X's and ignoring the garbage on the sides and in the margins, and between the actual content. Less attention. The sites respond by making the ads more egregious, more numerous and even more aggressively placed but that just trains users to click out of the new ads. Just in my lifetime I've seen the amount of ads on television increase dramatically as TV dies it's own similar death.
Techy people will just install blockers which is arguably better for the advertisers, since they're at least stating outright (forcefully) that they don't want ads. That means we don't download the ads and the ads don't register an impression for us because most good adblockers also block trackers. But these people who just raw dog the internet and just walk right by? They're the ones truly decimating the value of advertising, and bless em for it.
There is no win condition for the advertisers in this. None. And that's shown by how aggressive and desperate they've become for even an ounce of attention. The entire pivot to video fiasco happened because advertisers wanted video ads, because making loud, stupid, brightly colored bullshit is the only tried and true way to get attention anymore.
And I'm sorry but anyone still paying for television at this point, YouTube or otherwise, is a sucker. You are paying for (probably) the largest display available in your home to at best, 2/5 of the time bombard your senses with an assault of garbage, between entertainment. Entertainment that can be had much cheaper, without the assault elsewhere with basic technology. And if that's fine with you then by all means, it ain't my money, enjoy yourself but I cannot put myself in your shoes and make it make sense to me.
I'm ~40 and was inundated with ads most of my life, but I still hate seeing ads. I'm more tolerant on a sports game or something for some reason, but still hate it with a passion. I pay for lots of things so I don't have to see ads. Paramount Plus started showing me ads when I paid for premium, so I cut them off. Meanwhile many people younger are a lot more tolerant. I think it really comes down to your personality and personal mental state, and maybe what you're used to already (which can change in the short term).
It blows my mind how many of my employees and co-workers don't have uBlock Origin or even ABP installed. I'm 40 years old and have had an adblocker installed for as long as they've been around, and I'd guess over half of the mid-20 year old developers, analysts, content creators, and customer service people who work for me have never heard of it or used an adblocker.
Not sure how you survive the Internet these days without one.
It's not so much that it's that he wants to follow the game as it goes as far as stats go. How many completions, ints, etc.
For me I don't care so I just don't watch the game for 30 minutes or so and that's perfect. But there is no way to do what he wants without watching in real time.
I'm in my 40s but I grew up in Dubai, where the tv station (there was only one each for English and Arabic content!) only showed ads between shows. I basically gave up on tv after coming to the US - there is no way I can ever get used to ads in the middle of a show.
It has been so long since last I saw any ad on TV/videos that when I subscribed to YouTube TV a few months ago, watching ads made me nostalgic. I told my wife that I was really enjoying these ads.
But after about a week it got really annoying. Now debating if it is worth keeping.
Lol, I was actually defending ads. Like ads are perfect for taking a break to grab snacks or use restroom. Also ads provide pretty good stopping point, we are not as much binge watching TV as when on Netflix. Even when you can forward ads, it still makes you get out of the show into the real world and you realize how much TV you have been watching.
Maybe Ad industry should promote these benefits, so people will hate ads less.
YTTV does not really have the ability to not show ads. Those are put in the streams they are carrying. Could they negotiate with the channels to not show ads? Maybe, but no channel is going to allow that.
A different way to think of this is to consider how many ads you would see on TV if YTTV (and every other bundled TV provider) did not have to pay carriage fees to the channels. How many ads would they have to sell to make up that lost revenue?
I'm not so sure about "always", at least not in its current structure. The likes of ESPN (And DIS by extension) are facing a reckoning because of cord cutting. Sports has enjoyed a privileged position where people were paying ~$10/mo in their cable bundle regardless of them caring about sports or not, but that's becoming less and less viable with cord cutting.
Eventually sports fans are going to have to pay their own way, and it may turn out to be a lot more expensive than it is now, or they'll have to restructure to pin down costs significantly.
Baffled by the number of people itt saying "I can't believe it costs that much and still has ads." It can't not have ads. It's cable TV, YouTube has zero control over whether or not it has ads. They can't broadcast the USA network without ads. Cable has had ads for like 40 years, and traditional cable providers are much more expensive than this. Are y'all 14 years old? idgi
YouTube TV injects ads on certain content. I know it's there for on-demand TV shows, and some live sports. It's literally overlaid on top of the channel's ads in the live example.
I think years ago when I first subscribed one of the major benefits was the ability to skip through these ads just like DVR, but you can no longer do that.
Cable TV broadcasts include both the network's ads and slots for the carrier to run their own ads. They're not inserting bonus ads on top of the actual content. Again, this is exactly the same as any cable provider has always worked.
We don't have a choice. That's how cable works, and YouTube TV exists for those of us who need it. They can't magically create an ad free broadcast of TNT or something. How would that even work?
You don't have to like broccoli but it'd be weird to complain that it doesn't taste like chocolate.
Over the last 15 years the expectation from online content has been "If I pay money ($10-20/mo), I shouldn't have to see ads." There's been a lot of pushback on this expectation, with sponsored content and tired services. This is the strongest pushback on that expectation.
Of course we cannot get around the limitation of a streaming content provider displaying ads as part of their stream. It's just that $73 buys a lot of entertaining content on the internet that won't have that issue. It doubly feels like a bad deal because the content on cable TV is almost always not the highest quality content available. They are charging premium prices for standard content with long ad breaks.
I wouldn't say "I can't believe it costs that much and still has ads" but I would say "I can't believe that people see enough value to spend that kind of money for that content with those ads." In my adult life I have never paid for cable or satellite tv. My parents still do.
I remember my father complaining about the ads when he started paying for cable in the 1980s. I still complain about it.
You can get a decent amount of channels for free in most metropolitan areas with a digital antenna. You get commercials but a one time cost for a $100 antenna is worth it.
Does YouTubeTV carry public television stations? Aside from underwriting sponsor mentions at the beginning and end of a program, they're prohibited from mentioning sponsors [1].
I think the confusion arises because people view "cable" as something that requires coax and a set top box, and they view "streaming" as anything that goes over the internet, therefore they mistakenly view YouTube TV as streaming, when it's actually just cable. The US government uses the term "multichannel video programming distributor" for platforms like this, which is a mouthful, but at least defines the concept separately from the distribution method.
For a lot of people I imagine they are only used to ads on free stuff, like Pandora, while paying for the service removes ads. It's just an old world vs new world disparity, where old-worlders (pre-internet or slow moving area residents) are used to things like ads on cable and broadcast radio, while new-worlders (people who mostly grew up on the modern internet) didn't experience the same world at all.
"The National Advertising Division (NAD) previously ruled in Charter's favor"
HaHa! Google got kicked in the NAD[s]! Imagine that. A company having to respect the "truth in advertising" concept. Calling a company out by name with out-dated (at best) or flat out inaccurate information is ballsy, for which they deserved to get kicked squarely in for flaunting the rules everyone else plays by.
