I'm a bit amazed these "live TV" style services even still exist and people use them. It kind of makes sense for specifically live content -- sports, mainly -- but these are basically 1980's style cable TV delivered "over the internet".
The killer feature of services like Netflix is not really the "over the internet" part, it's the "watch any show on demand" and "massive library so you can start watching from S1E1, if you want to". Streaming live TV services fail at both of these.
CloudDVR I guess kind of gets part way to on-demand, but in a frustratingly stupid way. Clearly, the service just has a single recording of every show from every channel. If a subscriber clicks "record" all it is really doing is opting them in to access to future recordings. I assume people can't get access to old recordings (then it would just be "on demand", not "DVR"). Are there also limits on how many recordings you can access (emulating a limited size hard drive)? Do recordings go away after some time? Does it also record commercials, and does it allow skipping?
Everything about these just seems like a relic of a by-gone era. They've even added artificial limitations to emulate the old actual technical limitations. The only real thing they have going for them is access to content not available on other streaming services, Otherwise everything about a service like Netflix seems to be superior in every way. If Netflix (or similar service) had live sports streaming and all the other shows, even at the same price as traditional cable, my guess is the cable industry would be dead within a year.
Since moving out of my parents' house ~15 years ago, I have lived without cable TV of any kind, and I miss it.
Live TV offers a 'channel surfing' experience that does not exist on streaming. I want to be able to come home from work and plop down on my couch and just turn the TV on and have something be showing. If I don't like it, I switch channels. I have discovered numerous TV shows, movies and documentaries this way, even if I come across it halfway through an episode.
It is a completely different experience from streaming, where my home screen is basically a billboard, and I have to invest time in selecting something and then start it from Season 1, Episode 1, timestamp 00:00. That seems like a big commitment for something that's recreational, especially when TV shows start off slowly to introduce all the characters.
I come to this realization every time I am in a hotel room that has cable TV. If it's 1 in the morning, I'm fine with watching the Veronica Mars movie or Baby Driver even if it started an hour ago.
It's definitely something people differ on. I basically never turn on a TV in a hotel room and hardly ever have TV on at home as mostly background--unless it's a webcam or something like that. I actually dropped my live TV last year because I hardly ever used it any longer.
Channel surfing is nice in that it reduces the number of choices to a small set. Instead of having to pick from an entire streaming catalog, you pick from 10-300 channels which can easily get filtered to a smaller set of choices (2-7) which is easy to pick from without any brain effort.
For me, the more important factor is randomness and immediacy. Randomness because channel surfing will bring me to a TV show I likely do not know the name of, and I will be shown a scene at a particular timestamp. So I can start watching without the lengthy exposition that's common in the first few episodes of shows.
Immediacy because there is no load time when switching channels, so it's frictionless to jump from sports, to weather, to syndicated TV sitcom. On streaming platforms, there is no such mechanism. Switching to a new show means I start from scratch. I could manually select a random episode and fast forward to a random timestamp, but that would be defeating the purpose.
One thing I liked about the older days was that when I watched something interesting many of my friends and coworkers were also watching, and we could have interesting discussions about it the next day.
Nowadays, especially with places like Netflix releasing a whole season of a show at once, it is often the case that all your friends and coworkers are all at different points in the series.
That is what I enjoyed about Game of Thrones: we're all on the same page at any given point in time. I don't know if I'm quite to the point of being Old Man Shaking Fist at Clouds, but it is one thing I miss from the old days. Said as one who cut that cord over a decade ago, too.
The killer feature of services like Netflix is not really the "over the internet" part, it's the "watch any show on demand" and "massive library so you can start watching from S1E1, if you want to". Streaming live TV services fail at both of these.
I think being over the internet is the killer feature. Cable companies had on demand for a decade before netflix streaming, being over the internet meant you were not locked into a monopoly or duopoly.
That said, I agree it seems old-timey and the wrong way of doing it.
Surprisingly, there still exists demand for "live TV" rather than choosing the show because some people don't like to decide what they want to watch. Netflix is testing "live TV" in France [0][1][2].
Cable on demand used to be more clunky than Netflix because the baseline was they were going to charge you, so they had to inform you and you had to accept. When the baseline is that the whole library is bundled, then certainly the bundled content can just start without creating a contract first.
There’s still a lot of Live TV: news, sports and serials. There’s an aspect to live that, while is going through a transformation, will always exist. You might not find any utility in it, but over 100M households in the US alone still have a pay TV subscription.
It's interesting to look at the age breakdown [1], though. Less than 50% of respondents under 50 have cable. How much of the older population does, just out of inertia and being used to it?
There's a generation growing up now with a very different experience.
I distinctly remember my kid experiencing cable for the first time around age 3 or 4 (rainy day while we were staying at a cottage): "this is in the middle, start it over at the beginning", "I want to pick a different episode" and when the first commercial came on "hey! Put my show back on! I don't want to watch this".
Yeah the pendulum is definitely swinging (or has swung) in the opposite direction (VOD) but live will always have a place (sports, news, serials, award shows, etc). Not saying there has been a massive paradigm shift in the past 5 years but the news of linear TV's death is greatly exaggerated imo.
Part of it is too that a lot of people just like to have the TV on with whatever sports, documentaries, cable news, etc. is on as a sort of background even if they're not really sitting down to watch it.
There is still a set of people that like their local news a lot. Or don't want to figure out the piecemeal way to get access to their cooking show, some current ABC/NBC/CBS show, BBC America, old episodes of Forensic Files, etc, from X different places. Though I agree, I do see it dying out.
You basically nailed it specifically on live TV and sports for my use case.
I subscribe to Hulu Live for a portion of the year when the European football season is in full swing. Typically I tune in for the second half of the season.
But as soon as the season wraps and the major trophies or shields are awarded, I downgrade to the regular subscription.
I just don’t watch enough TV, on demand or live, to justify it otherwise.
We’ve got Netflix, Hulu, HBO (included with cell plan), and Disney. That already feels like one too many but our family has a weird breakdown:
- I watch shows on Hulu
- My wife watches shows on Netflix
- My wife and I watch shows on HBO together
- Our family (kids + adults) watch shows on Disney
It’s not ideal but we have the disposable income for it and so it is what it is.
The unique thing about YTTV was that it kind of combined the live content, and watch any show on demand. Their DVR option gives you unlimited storage, and keeps shows you record for 9 months. So you could basically just spend an hour when you signed up clicking record on anything you're interested in, and then in a few months you basically had access to everything that's been on the TV for the past few months whenever you want.
Does Youtube TV still have commercials for on-demand content?
Back at the beginning, I signed up for a trial. The first thing I did was try some on-demand, and it made me sit through A LOT of commercials before the content started.
Considering that Youtube TV was 4-5x the cost of Netflix and Amazon Prime, and both are commercial-free, I canceled immediately. I watch so little TV that it's cheaper to just buy the shows I want to watch outright on Google Play... Commercial-free.
It does, because it's essentially the same thing as old school cable TV. You're getting access to ABC, CBS, PBS, NBC, Fox, FX, CNN, TNT, EPSN, BBC America, Food Network, HGTV, and so on. There's not really any service that offers (all of) that content without commercials.
You can use their cloud DVR to "record" something, and after that happens, you can fast forward through the commercials. Which is similar to what you would get with a old school cable and a real DVR.
I also hate commercials, and while you can find commercial free versions of some of the YouTube TV content, you can't find it for everything they air.
Streaming is so fragmented now, both in content and features, that you have to do quite a lot of research before buying.
"You can use their cloud DVR to "record" something, and after that happens, you can fast forward through the commercials."
Has this changed? When I tried YouTubeTV a couple of years ago, you could record things to the DVR, and sometimes not only would they not let you fast forward through the commercials, they replaced them with their own completely un-fast-forwardable commercials. Sometimes it would let you fast forward as normal though. This is what caused me to drop the subscription immediately.
I have not had that problem. But, you do have to specifically wait for the actual air time to come and go before you're able to play it with fast-forward capability.
Once that's done, I've never had an issue with fast-forward. The UI does differentiate between "recorded" and "on-demand" content.
What I have run into:
- Something I recorded is no longer available, I assume because some contract expired.
- Something that's immediately available as on-demand isn't scheduled to air "Live". I can still click the thing that says to record it, but it never airs and so never records. That's pretty rare, but it's happened.
Even if you ‘record’ something to your YouTube TV DVR, if there is an on-demand (with ads) version available from the network, your DVR recorded version will be replaced and you will be forced to watch the on-demand (with unskippable ads) version
Maybe it depends on the channel, but in my experience you can pick which version you want to watch. Take this screenshot from SNL for example: https://i.imgur.com/s7eCDi8.png
There are 3 versions currently available to me for S46 E16: two DVR and one VOD. If I select either of the two DVR versions, I can skip commercials as expected. The VOD version forces me to watch commercials (also as expected, I guess).
Youtube TV isn't direct competitor to Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. but it's a great alternative for people who want cable TV channels. I found it was much cheaper, had more viewing flexibility, and better contract terms than any cable provider in my area. That said, there's no cable TV content that makes it worth being exposed to the aggressive obnoxiousness of commercials.
That was pretty much my thinking too. Cutting my cable bill by $100/month opens up a lot of "budget" for a la carte content. I still lose out on live TV but honestly that was a rare thing for me given I watch very little sports.
Sometimes these services shoot themselves in the foot. I tried Starz on trial, and had so many commercials to sit through. No way I'm paying for Starz. (It's entirely possible and even likely you don't commercials with the paid service compared to the trial, but the trial was for me to experience the service. I'm not then risking paying for the service with the risk that it still has commercials.)
> Does Youtube TV still have commercials for on-demand content?
Doesn't every single TV content provider do this? On Demand content has unskippable commercials on every platform I've used - Netflix and Amazon Prime are not equivalents as they don't offer network On Demand content.
You can get some of what's offered on YouTube TV without commercials in other places, but it's a piecemeal adventure. If you shut down YouTube TV in favor of Amazon Prime, for example, you could pay for a subscription to AMC+ on Prime and watch "The Walking Dead", "Discovery of Witches", etc, without commercials. Or, older stuff, like "Law and Order" that has commercials on YouTube TV, but comes with Prime, no commercials.
The streaming landscape is frustrating as an end user. I have a Roku TV and have used YouTube TV, Hulu and Sling for live TV.
YouTube TV and Hulu seem to keep increasing their prices to the point where there's not much difference from traditional cable, other than it's easier to cancel.
But then there are so many caveats. Bally Sports doesn't appear to be available in my local market to stream our MLB team. I also need a separate Peacock subscription to watch some, but not all Premier League games. Also the channels available on Roku seem to change, presumably due to contract disputes like this.
Whatever promise TV over Internet once had over cable has long since gone away for me.
I think we have collective amnesia around just how bad "traditional cable" is/was (in no particular order):
1. Tons of ads
2. Ads with terrible content
3. Expensive
4. Piecemeal content (having to pay for multiple packages to get all the programs you're interested in, some options being nearly mutually exclusive)
5. You could either watch live at a time you didn't choose, record (hassle), or use a pretty terrible "on demand" UI (which may also only have the last 3 episodes or other weird restrictions)
6. Bad content
I've used Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, CBS All Access, HBO Max, and Disney Plus.
None of them have issues 1 or 2. The "previews" can get more ad like than I'd want, but no where near cable. Huge win for streaming in my book.
Combined they are about on par with the cost of cable, though I rarely have all of them subscribed at once and could easily cut back to a much cheaper combo (so, draw on issue 3, but possible win for streaming).
Issue 4 is still an issue (and I can't really imagine it not being an issue given how for profit business works).
Issue 5 is a win for streaming. Better UIs, better content strategies, etc.
Issue 6 is subjective so I'll leave that to the reader
Issue 4 (piecemeal content) is a bit ridiculous if you think about it. Netflix, as an example, has enough content to last a person their entire life and adding more every month.
That's assuming a rather undiscriminating consumer, and honestly, may not even be true in all cases anyhow... Netflix has become extremely adept at building a UI that hides how thin their offerings have actually become. If a 20-year-old tried to make the Netflix April 2021 library last their entire life I suspect they'd be disappointed well before they are 30 assuming reasonably average amouts of time spent watching it.
> YouTube TV and Hulu seem to keep increasing their prices to the point where there's not much difference from traditional cable, other than it's easier to cancel.
That removal of the cable/satellite middlemen and ease of buying and canceling is pretty big I think. Now we just need to wait for the sports organizations contracts with networks to lose sufficient value that it makes sense to cut out the old networks and blackouts or whatever completely.
However, I think the value proposition for traditional bulk purchase TV entertainment where you don’t watch 99% of it is gone. I can buy all of the stuff I watch whenever I want and it would cost less than a monthly subscription to one of these channel
services, and I wouldn’t have to sit through ads. Sports is the only missing factor, but the sports organizations are worth nowhere near what they charge right now to me.
I cut my cable TV (and cable landline) cord last year because I wasn't using either much. But I went into it knowing that it would mean giving up live TV because if I were going to subscribe to something like YouTube TV, the difference in cost wouldn't be much at the end of the day.
(My cell, even with WiFi assist, and other calling mechanisms also aren't quite as good as my landline but, again, not worth the money as essentially a backup.)
I basically watch no live TV except when possibly a disaster or other live event occurs, but for that if you live in a coverage area of https://www.locast.org/ it steams OTA transmissions of various regions.
They're being sued by broadcasters of course - with the EFF defending and a trial expected mid year this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locast
Not the person you're replying to but I'm in the same boat. I was at least able to watch my team last year but now that I can't even do that, there's no reason for me to keep paying $65/mo, it's ludicrous.
Interesting -- this weekend I finally gave up on YoutubeTV and ordered Spectrum cable again. Between the rising costs (now 69.95 a month) and the loss of both regional sports networks (I haven't been able to watch Texas Rangers baseball or Mavericks basketball in almost a year since they dropped the Fox Sports RSNs) and the Tennis channel the package is worth much less to me. The only real reason I want cable is for live sports. All the other network programming is of very little interest to me.
My total cost for a competitive package with CloudDVR (what used to be YoutubeTVs killer feature) and 400Mbps internet is now lower by about 30 bucks a month, which is not nothing.
I live in hope that one day I will be able to buy a cable/streaming package that consists of Sports plus Local Channels with cloud DVR and very high bitrate streaming. That is all that I want.
They should let us pair up and split bundles. All I want is a package that’s all available global news, and zero sports.
Looking at the individual channel costs for cable, sports is the culprit. Over half my cable costs were subsidizing live sports, costing my provider $8 - $12 per channel, with home/garden, food, and news type channels coming in under a buck each.
It’s aggressive for streaming video packages to price near cable when not offering sports. For those who watch sports, that’s a terrible deal. For those who don’t want sports, streaming is starting to cross into charging more than cable would charge for the same not-sports channels (if they have a not-sports package). That said, if the streaming price is also “ad free” and fully time shiftable, that’s huge value. (They seem to be messing this up too, a higher percentage of shows on Hulu’s no ads keep having ads every year, now not just pre-roll, now interleaved and unskippable — TiVo can skip. Had donated TiVO Series 2 w/ 2 TB expansion to Good Will but might have to get another if this trend continues.)
After two decades of no ads (TiVo then Hulu ad free), traveling and being stuck with home or hotel cable is excruciating.
In my region of the US, sports were literally subsidized by the cable bill. You paid an extra itemized fee for the privilege of regional sports programming even if you never turned your TV on. This is part of why I ended up going full internet, but due to bundling discounts the savings were not actually that impressive.
I wonder if we'll get a similar institution demanding something from our ISP bills. You can see the slow decline of ESPN[0] as it gets eaten by the internet, and I'm curious what'll happen as the money pie in that vertical decreases and how it affects professional leagues.
I don't watch sports but do enjoy cooking, travel and home shows (don't judge me!). I also did not like paying a huge monthly fee for mostly channels I don't watch. I've actually found Discovery+ to be a really great deal as it has Discovery, Food, Travel and HGTV content all bundled and on-demand for $5 a month. It's all of the content I wanted and was paying > $60 /month for, with no commercials and on-demand. It's a pretty great deal if you like this kind of content.
I had a family member that was in a Discovery show recently, so I decided to sign up to Discovery+ watch just to see my family member.
Lo and behold, discovery+ does not stream the episodes they put on tv channels until the year after or something stupid. Luckily, I had a free trial so I just canceled at no cost, but they lost any chance of getting me in the future by gate keeping their content like that.
Ah that's unfortunate, I didn't know they were gating content like that. It's still a pretty good deal though, certainly better than bundled cable, and most of the content on these stations is pretty evergreen.
Curiously, many (I don't know the percentage, only the stations I worked with in the past) local news broadcasts have additional segments during the time slots for commercial breaks. If the commercial isn't airing, it's a segment.
Same is true of national news. If the commercial doesn't run, there's other (semi-throwaway) content. Same is true for national news during the weather segment, local news can splice in a local weather and if they don't, it's national or regional weather.
Because of this, they should be able to sell the non-overlay version with content instead of ads. Sure it's throwaway content, but at least it's not yelling at you to buy things.
Have a look at fubo. I was researching this to help a family member cut the cord, and fubo's elite package seems to be the only one that provides great coverage for sports. AT&T TV NOW seemed to be promising as well, but my impression was that their app may be a little janky and their channel coverage not quite as good, for about the same price.
I have 5 TV's with Roku hardware attached. I've also been a YouTubeTV customer for several years (when it was $35/month). I'll drop YTTV long before I'll swap my Roku hardware.
Roku hardware and UI is superior to anything on the market. YouTubeTV is decent, but the competition is robust.
I see this perspective somewhat in reverse. I watch TV for the content, not how nice the remote is or how solid the box feels when I hook up the HDMI connection.
Granted, there are some objective measurements between different devices, such as Dolby support and format support, but that's typically for the most advanced consumers of content - not the vast majority of people who just want to watch certain content.
I literally live and die by the Roku fast forward/back buttons. I can get the "content" from anywhere!
The clicky, rubbery buttons and the responsive UI is amazing. After 5 minutes of use, I was hooked and bought them for all my TVs. This is the single biggest differentiator with Roku and other hardware.
> Roku hardware and UI is superior to anything on the market.
I have to agree. I've used Apple TV, and while its UI is fancier, it lags, crashes and just doesn't have the same "ergonomics". Something as simple as toggling captions and changing picture modes while paying a video is so much easier on Roku. And, all the menus provide by the Roku OS just feel snappier.
After the whole HBOMax debacle, I'm not sure if I trust Roku's side of the story and am wondering if the real issue isn't "Youtube TV won't give us a slice of their pie". I used to be a huge fan of Roku when they were the neutral streaming box that was open to all services, but the HBOMax nonsense last year soured me on them.
"Roku's standard terms for partner channels include 20% of subscription fees and 30% of ad inventory, which has driven away Peacock, as it is currently airing fewer than five minutes of ads per hour. Meanwhile, WarnerMedia has been looking to retire the HBO service now sold through Roku to promote HBO Max, which Roku has turned down singularly."
To me it just reads like Roku has grown it's subscriber base to the point where they can negotiate with content providers in the same way that cable companies used to. Which isn't great for end users, but it is what it is. Both HBOMax and Peacock ended up on Roku, so some deal was reached in both cases.
This is exactly where died for me, when I went from being a buyer of their hardware to a potential source of monthly revenue and made it more difficult to get content I want as a result. They established a customer base and good will and once that was in place, the rent seeking started. At this point once a company that make a product I like goes public, it seems like a good tome to start looking for alternatives.
I switched away from Roku to an Nvidia Shield (an Android TV device) precisely because of the Roku HBO Max thing. Maybe these smaller players don't have the sheer number of captive eyeballs needed to demand such commissions. Although I guess HBO would still have the Play Store fees? In any case, I haven't noticed this sort of customer-hurting hard negotiations yet.
As long as you can watch something on the web, you can always cast it, right? (I find Chromecast is an underappreciated device from Google. I basically never touch any of the smartTV features on my TV. I do everything from phone, tablet, or Chromebook.)
Google hasn't evolved Chromecast past a cheap, dumb dongle since it was first released. No telling what the future holds but the current trajectory is promising.
Seconded. Roku started out as the "we partner with everyone" streaming device and all this "we're a platform now" bullshit is such a consumer betrayal. I think I've bought 4 or 5 over the years since we cut cable. I'm not interested in Roku streaming services. I don't care if they get a cut of ad revenue of the app I use on my own hardware.
I do care that I couldn't get HBO for a year. The Amazon stick is pretty trash, but I'm pretty happy with the Chromecast. I've got one more to switch over and all our Rokus can go to e-waste.
Youtube TV for those wondering, I don't think there is any concern for youtube app.
I don't do youtube tv since its way too expensive, but i'm curious what kind of additional data/software they're trying to impose that other digital cable carriers aren't...
I'm a bit confused about the logic here. Roku seems to be claiming that YouTube TV has a dominant position, and Google is threatening to withhold it to get unfair benefits for the unrelated YouTube app. But the directionality is the wrong way around; YouTube TV the smaller of those services by orders of magnitude. It's dominates nothing at all, and it's a small miracle that it still exists at all. How could it possibly be used to extract unfair concessions?
Does anyone have a link to the full statement? Maybe this got garbled by the reporting somehow.
Roku is toxic and the only reason I know this is having been forced to deal with their products due to being pre-packaged on smart TVs. Roku comes "free" because it thinks it can extract value from me. It is free like a leech is free.
It tracks what you watch and superimposes ads. The interface is frightfully slow. The remote is hard to use as compared to my phone being the remote, as is the case with a Chromecast.
Tracking can be turned off in the settings. I have several Roku TVs and Roku boxes and don't see any ads "superimposed". The only ad (singular) I see is on the home screen.
My Apple TV box stopped showing YouTube a few months ago, probably because it is an early model and they couldn't be bothered upgrading the software. Instead of buying another one, I got a cheap Chromebook instead.
The killer feature of services like Netflix is not really the "over the internet" part, it's the "watch any show on demand" and "massive library so you can start watching from S1E1, if you want to". Streaming live TV services fail at both of these.
CloudDVR I guess kind of gets part way to on-demand, but in a frustratingly stupid way. Clearly, the service just has a single recording of every show from every channel. If a subscriber clicks "record" all it is really doing is opting them in to access to future recordings. I assume people can't get access to old recordings (then it would just be "on demand", not "DVR"). Are there also limits on how many recordings you can access (emulating a limited size hard drive)? Do recordings go away after some time? Does it also record commercials, and does it allow skipping?
Everything about these just seems like a relic of a by-gone era. They've even added artificial limitations to emulate the old actual technical limitations. The only real thing they have going for them is access to content not available on other streaming services, Otherwise everything about a service like Netflix seems to be superior in every way. If Netflix (or similar service) had live sports streaming and all the other shows, even at the same price as traditional cable, my guess is the cable industry would be dead within a year.