OPINION: YouTube TV isn’t as necessary as yet another price hike would suggest Google believes. There are few things left that demand a subscription to multi-channel live TV service, and that content is dwindling all the time.
Google has confirmed the price of YouTube TV is going up yet again, with the cord-cutting live TV streaming service now well over double the original asking price.
The price for a basic YouTube TV subscription is now $82.99 for new subcribers. For people already being hauled over the coals by the streaming giant, the $10 hike over the current price will go into effect in their next bill, or from January 13.
That $72.99 price was only brought in 18 months ago, which was an increase on $64.99. It’s another startling hike for loyal YouTube TV customers who started off paying just $35 for the service when it arrived in 2017 as a low-cost, no-strings alternative to cable or satellite television. That’s a 237% price increase in just seven years.
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It’s still no-strings and viewing options are still more plentiful thanks to the plethora of streaming devices, but the idea of it being a meaningfully cheaper alternative to the legacy providers is now well and truly dead. Now, it’s just cable and satellite prices delivered over the internet.
Not what it was
We wouldn’t mind so much if YouTube TV held strong as a proposition, but it doesn’t. In the years since its launch, YouTube TV has become immensely less valuable as a proposition, especially since 2020.
The company has lost pretty much all of the regional sports networks that made it such an intriguing proposition in the first place. Users did not see a price cut when they went away. On the contrary, in fact.
The proposition has been diminished by content owners bringing so much on demand content back in house to launch their own streaming services. That didn’t yield any price cuts either. On the contrary, in fact.
So what has YouTube TV added that would justify price increases? Well, access to some very limited 4K content, unlimited streams, and opportunity to download some DVR recordings for offline viewing. The only is, that isn’t part of the deal. You have to pay $10 extra for that, taking the total to $93.
There is a limited cool multiview feature that does enables you to watch up to four channels at once on a single screen, but YouTube TV chooses the options for you and won’t let you pick your own channels like Fubo TV does.
What makes YouTube TV worth it?
So what exactly are we paying $83 for?
Access to free to air channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox et al), and a lot of content that is increasingly simulcast or available on demand via streaming services you might already have access to.
I’ll use the example of live sports, but it also applies to drama, reality TV and movies.
Loads of the live sport on YouTube TV is available through subscriptions to ESPN+, Paramount+, Max, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, and Peacock.
Our you can watch them with a cheap indoor TV arial that carries the free to air channels. You don’t need YouTube TV for any nationally broadcast NFL game on Sundays for example.
On the flip side, loads of what isn’t available is available through YouTube TV is available on those aforementioned streaming services.
MLS and Friday Night MLB Baseball on Apple TV+, NFL Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime, the bulk of Champions League on Paramount+, NHL on ESPN+. Diehards will have those.
Heaven forbid if you want to watch every one of your local sports teams’ games, you’ll need a separate streaming service (my Miami Heat are on the FanDuel network) or a different live TV provider that offers the teams in your market (like Fubo or DirecTV Stream), because YouTube TV won’t pay up for them despite charging you more and more.
What I’m saying is there are fewer marque pieces of content that keep YouTube TV from becoming totally unnecessary for people with access to loads of streaming services.
USA Network, for example, is one of them. It exclusively offers 3-4 Premier League games a week (the rest are on Peacock) so I need at least some sort of cable package for that. I spoke to a person today who only has YTTV for this reason. I directed her to Sling TV, where you can get a bundle with USA for $40 a month.
Some ESPN US sports games are not available through ESPN+ and only on cable, the same goes for Fox Sports. WWE Raw and Smackdown is also on USA Network, but RAW goes to Netflix in January.
What I’m saying is, as a going concern, YouTube TV and its rivals hang by a thread.
As the content landscape continues to shift towards content going exclusive to streaming services, you have a situation where YouTube TV is an exclusive owner of nothing whatsoever. Only what the legacy networks are willing and able to provide it with. And that isn’t a lot these days, folks.
The drastic change in viewing habits towards on-demand means people don’t necessarily need to watch anything but sports and news as it happens. Catching-up is the norm and the new wave of streaming services provide that, enabling users to pick and choose which is best for them, or rotate to save cash rather than paying almost $100 a month.
If you’re savvy about when you subscribe you can have all the major streaming platforms at the same time, add them all together and it’ll still be much cheaper than YouTube TV.
The prestige TV is behind those paywalls now. It’s not on YouTube TV channels. It’s on Prime Video, Netflix, Max (via HBO, a YTTV add-on), Disney+, and Apple TV+. Almost everything else can be caught up with on platforms like Peacock, Paramount+ and Hulu.
YouTube TV is but another shift away from being completely obsolete. Now is not the time I would be choosing to punish customers even further, or tempting them to ditch the cable cutting live TV streaming service, just as it ditched cable.
