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by kschwab 1881 days ago
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.

Edit: The text of the email Roku is sending out: https://pastebin.com/C3cEE3qq

3 comments

"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).

I can't reproduce that. I wonder if it's on some specific channels.
There is DVR software that will strip out the commericals for you. Post processing DVR feature, and its awesome.
Why not Sling? I find it much cheaper than YouTubeTV
It's missing ABC and CBS. And the DVR is more limited. But, yes, it's very inexpensive in comparison to YouTubeTV.