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Youtube Television

YouTube TV Adds a $20 Monthly Upgrade for 4K Support and Offline Viewing (techcrunch.com) 63

Posted by msmash from the for-what-it-is-worth dept.
Today, YouTube TV announced a 4K Plus add-on package with offline downloads, 5.1 Dolby audio, and features that make it easier to watch live sports. From a report: YouTube TV is already one of the pricier streaming services out there -- at $64.99 per month, you might not save much money by choosing YouTube in lieu of your cable service. Hulu + Live TV is priced the same, but offers a Disney+ and ESPN+ add-on for a total of $72.99 per month. But if you want to kick your video quality (and your monthly bill) up a notch, you can now enable 4K streaming for an extra $19.99 per month, bringing your grand total to $84.98 monthly.

The 4K Plus add-on package will also allow subscribers to download shows from DVR to watch offline -- currently, that's not possible on the standard $64.99 per month package. Meanwhile, the 5.1 Dolby audio capabilities will be a free addition for all YouTube TV members -- in a blog post, the company says this has been one of users' "biggest requests." The sports upgrades also come at no additional cost -- one new feature will let viewers jump to key plays and specific highlight moments when watching a DVR recording or trying to catch up live.
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YouTube TV Adds a $20 Monthly Upgrade for 4K Support and Offline Viewing More

YouTube TV Adds a $20 Monthly Upgrade for 4K Support and Offline Viewing

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  • I'm sure others will follow suit and with many providers having data caps or people needing to pay for top tier internet service to avoid caps might as well just get cable or satellite it'll probably be cheaper.
    • Hate to tell you, but cable already charges extra for HDTV. I'm sure they'll change another fee for 2K or 4K TV.
      • I know they do and now that streaming services are adding 4K fees it just brings them in line with cable.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          I don't mind this, after all, if you wanted TV, cutting the cord was going to do the same thing in the end.

          What I object to is the fact more and more studios are refusing to allow purchases or rentals of the content. I mean, I like to buy my TV on DVD box sets (preferably Blu-Ray), but those are becoming increasingly rare - lots of studios stopped releasing box sets - some still have DVDs (annoying if you were collecting the Blu-Ray).

          But now, it seems a lot of them aren't doing the long term rental thing an

          • Meanwhile, vinyl made a hell of a comeback. #logic

            Sure, you can buy the record player. They just don't tell you the needle is pay-per-groove.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

              Meanwhile, vinyl made a hell of a comeback. #logic

              Sure, you can buy the record player. They just don't tell you the needle is pay-per-groove.

              Vinyl sucks, but it hosts so much nostalgia that marketers saw money signs. But it's honestly just marketing.

              Why? Have you checked out the turntables they have out there? Not just the Crosley brand ones - but given those use the same mechanism as many more expensive units, well. That's right, there's only like a couple of turntable mechanisms out there, all made in Ch

              • Matsushita (Panasonic) started making Technics 1200s... the only pair of turntables anyone should ever buy or have bought, really... again a few years ago. And a quick googling shows that the Mk 7 is indeed still made in Japan. Not that you'd need new Mk 7s though. You're definitely right in that those things are tanks and pretty much indestructible. Hell... you could get a '70s-vintage pair of Mk 2s; and they'd serve you just as well as a modern pair. The Mk 7s just buy you *another* 40 years of servi

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by syn3rg ( 530741 )

              pay-per-groove.

              Groove on YouTube for free [youtube.com]

      • Where? Which cable services charge extra? Hate to break it to you Time Warner now Spectrum doesn't. Verizon doesn't. So which ones?

        Streaming services are fast becoming more expensive than cable. Reason: Content. Content is the reason why your cable bill is high. That does not change when you switch to streaming. You can lower cost by eliminating content. That's all.

  • Sure looks like cable (Score:4, Informative)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday June 28, 2021 @06:32PM (#61531562)

    Works and priced just like cable. Fuck that - the excessive fees is why I cut the cord. I guess they think they can fool the post-cable generation that hasn't seen a cable bill before, won't work for too long.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Works and priced just like cable. Fuck that - the excessive fees is why I cut the cord. I guess they think they can fool the post-cable generation that hasn't seen a cable bill before, won't work for too long.

      Yes it will.

      You vastly underestimate mass ignorance. And a matching desire to not merely keep up with the Joneses, but beat the living shit out of them with narcissistic one-upmanship.

      People will stream 4K from their phones and not even watch it, just to show they have 4K.

    • The media companies are the main culprit for high prices and shitty programs.

      • They are still figuring out that their product isn't worth the price they want, including annual increases no matter what the economy as a whole is doing. In 5 years the top tier of YouTube TV will be in the $150 range (for on demand, 4K, whatever you'll pay extra for), mark my words.

        I just don't want the cable experience, even if tis streamed. And frankly I don't want to give YouTube my money at all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      That's because it is cable, just with extra steps. These OTT linear TV packages are cable TV packages, just delivered by a different company and over the internet instead of direct from a cable company. They will have the same issues every cable package has, the same fights with content producers and the same price hikes. Right now their only redeeming quality is there are no forced contracts. Anyone who thought they were going to be able to keep offering those dirt cheap OTT plans was fooling themselves.

      • Honestly, OTT seems like a bullshit industry term that centers around classifying streaming in way media companies can understand to apply the right fees. Netflix is just another Internet site, it happens to specialize in high quality video.

        I don't want bundling no matter how its delivered. Again, part of the point of cutting the cord. Having to pay for streaming service individually (a la carte) means that I'm going to have fewer of them, if for no other reason than to keep the cost down. I don't want s

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )

          Honestly, OTT seems like a bullshit industry term that centers around classifying streaming in way media companies can understand to apply the right fees. Netflix is just another Internet site, it happens to specialize in high quality video.

          I don't want bundling no matter how its delivered. Again, part of the point of cutting the cord. Having to pay for streaming service individually (a la carte) means that I'm going to have fewer of them, if for no other reason than to keep the cost down. I don't want some overpriced package curated by a profiteer.

          Netflix really isn’t a OTT service (no one cares how you feel about it, it is an industry term. Get over it). OTT generally refers to services like the article is talking about: linear TV packages of traditional cable TV channels delivered by a third party over the internet vs direct from a cable/sat provider. Netflix doesn’t do that.

  • When you are already ridiculously expensive why not double down.

  • Harbor for Rogue Mariners... (Score:3)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Monday June 28, 2021 @06:52PM (#61531616)
    Isn't the "Harbor for Rogue Mariners" free for offline viewing of a lot of content? Care and share.
  • Costs as much as ATT TV yet it has no sports. Stupid
  • I remember when cord cutting was first being talked about and people were begging cable companies to go ala carte so they could pay for the channels they wanted and that's it or have some kind of bundles that were cheap and not pay for 1000 channels only to watch 5 or 10. Well, here we are with streaming services and their prices along with internet costs are going higher and higher. You got ala carte for the channels and shows you wanted, so now you are going to pay way more than what you did for just cabl

    • Except we didn't get a la carte channels. You still pay for a whole mess of shit you don't want because of the carriage fees and bundling that the content owners demand.

      I don't give a fuck about HGTV, Food Network, Lifetime, Nickelodeon, etc., yet good luck finding a live streaming service that doesn't carry all of them just to get access to Discovery. You couldn't pay me to watch Fox News, yet I'm still paying Fox News. It's the exact same shit, just delivered over a public packet-switched network runni

    • A la carte has always been based on the idea that if you pay $50 for 100 channels, you could pick and choose the 15 or so you watch for $7.50.

      It doesn't work like that. They know full well that you only watch 15 channels, and to you, those 15 channels are worth $50. The other 85 channels are worth $0 or as near to that as makes no odds. If everyone were to pick the channels they wanted, they'd be paying the same amount as they are now. They'd find a way to make you pay the $50 you're already willing to p
      • You don't understand how cost and markets works do you. ESPN costs $$$ more than QVC, yet more people watch QVC. ESPN is subsidized by people who don't watch it. If less people watched ESPN, two things will happens: the cost of ESPN goes up in short term and the cost of ESPN goes down in the long term. It goes up because less people are paying and ESPN needs to make up for the lost revenue to pay for programming costs. The price of ESPN goes down because they priced themselves out of the market - peopl

    • I buy just the services I want, so I don't pay more than what I did for just cable. That's the entire point of ala carte.

      The hidden fees alone for cable cost more than a netflix subscription.

    • Youtube TV, Hulu Live, and really even Sling TV have basically just become streaming cable providers that we all tried to ditch. The fact is live TV carriage rates will always lead to this. The cord cutting wasn't just about the physical coaxial cable but really about the bundled dozens/hundreds of live channels that everyone had to pay for just to get the few they wanted. Now that the live content provider industry has matured in its understanding of cord cutters and the live streaming services they t
      • I would really like to see one regulation: no exclusive content. If you sell your content to one streamer you have to sell for the same price to the others. Possible exception for internally developed stuff, but if you buy rights to something you buy the right to show it, not the right to not have other people show it.

        Bad for Disney, as they barely have enough content to run a service as it is, but good for consumers.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          That's basically how cable works today, and you can bet you will get the same result: Content producers forcing bundles of shows (instead of channels) on streaming companies, and jacking up rates year over year. Just like they do with cable channels today. It won't be the race-to-the-bottom that everyone who thinks they want this system believes they will get.

  • Youtube pulled their feed off of Roku, cutting off access to 50+ million viewers.

    People nervous about cutting the cord eventually find the cnet.com channel guide ( https://www.cnet.com/news/hulu... [cnet.com] ) then pick through the list and find their choice.

    After getting local TV channels working, they take the plunge with Roku, then realize they can combine their existing subscriptions into one clean and simple to navigate interface. With Roku, you discover their own channel adds movies, but there are about a dozen

    • I have no clue what you are talking about. Roku and YouTube hit contract negotiation issues with the YouTube TV app. YouTube added YouTube TV as an option in the "normal" YouTube app, which Roku has no leverage to remove from the platform for new customers the way they did with YouTube TV. In the end, Roku forced Google/YouTube to integrate YouTube TV and YouTube into a single app, with one additional click to get into YouTube TV. Personally I like the portability of YouTube TV, and the number of stream

    • Re:Youtube has killed themselves (Score:5, Informative)

      by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @08:29AM (#61533274) Journal

      Except that everything you said is basically irrelevant. Every Roku user out there was not a YouTube TV subscriber, and every YouTube TV subscriber was not a Roku user. Sure, there was some YouTube TV subscribers using a Roku, but they can still watch their YouTube TV through the regular YouTube app. And then anyone with a Chromecast with Android TV, Nvidia Shield TV, AppleTV, Android phone, Android tablet, iPhone, iPad, or a web browser can still watch YouTube TV without ever hearing about one company's attempt to bigfoot the other in contract negotiations.

      In the end, the only change is that there isn't a big icon on the home screen for YouTube TV on Roku, just a YouTube icon that gives you both services in one place. The horror!

      Roku tried to play hardball, and they struck out because they didn't see the knuckleball where Google just combined the apps.

  • If YouTube eliminates the free stuff, I'll simply quit tuning into YouTube.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by codlong ( 534744 )
      I've got YouTube TV, my wife wanted it for sports. It really has nothing to do with YouTube "proper," the website to which people upload videos. In fact, they use separate apps, at least on my TV.

    • YouTube != YouTube TV.

  • Other cable gives you that with HD / basic service.

    and $20 /mo for 4K dish, comcast, and directv don't have an 4K fee.

    • 5.1 Dolby Needs an $20 4K fee? WTF?

      The summary is wrong. The article says the 5.1 Dolby audio capabilities will be a free addition for all YouTube TV members.

      Although why it took them so long is a mystery, when 5.1 at home has been a thing for over 20 years, ever since DVDs came out.

      • Cost, the patent people need to earn their keep for Dolby? I figured it was always a licensing thing.

      • Why it took so long? Bandwidth. Adding Dolby AC3 audio adds up to 6Mbps depending on the fidelity and compression. Multiply that by a few hundred thousand people streaming at any given point in time, and you end up with quite the chunk of bandwidth necessary.

        Now I have a feeling they'll have it turned off by default, so only people with 5.1 or better setups will go looking for it, but I'm glad it's finally here because it's been sorely missing in my setup. Every single other source of content I have has

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Megane ( 129182 )

          Adding Dolby AC3 audio adds up to 6Mbps depending on the fidelity and compression.

          Well first, AC3 maxes out at 640kbps. 6Mbps is "Dolby Digital Plus", which supports up to 15.1 audio channels, so I don't think you're going to see that coming from YouTube. Second, 384kbps AC3 is "good enough" for 5.1, just like the 128K MP3 that you usually get from YouTube for stereo is "good enough". There's nothing stopping them from down-sampling AC3 to 384K if they want.

          But I just don't see the value of video (as opposed to computer displays) beyond 1080p. In fact, I'm actually fine with 480p most o

          • Yep, my bad. 640kbps is correct. And multiplied by thousands of streams, it's still a shitload of bandwidth.

            4k resolution is what makes those large format screens worth buying, because you don't get screen door effect from having pixels the size of finishing nail heads. It enables a large screen in a mid-size room without degrading the resolution you actually see.

            That being said, I'm not throwing out my 1080p 55" until I have reason to, and 55" 1080p viewed at 10 feet has me not seeing individual pixels.

            • Are people streaming 4k with a lot of success? I have a 4k display on my laptop and 1440 works great but 2160 for whatever reason seems to be a bridge too far. Or maybe that's what paying $85/mo will fix? You can buy a lot of server resources for that.

  • It's Filling up anyway (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gonoff ( 88518 ) on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @03:08AM (#61532674)

    YouTube is filling up with ads anyway. Last night it got to the ridiculous stage. For a 15 minute item I got 2 long form ads at the start and short ?5? second ones every few minutes and then 2 long ones during the "credits" at the end. It is making the shorter videos not worthwhile any more.

    I can see why so many of them mention Patreon and other ways!

  • Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that as more streaming services come online, the price of all services increases. When it was just Netflix and Youtube offerings were comparable* (live TV not so much) and the prices were so affordable anyone could essentially access it. Now the selections on each service are decreasing with some series even split across multiple providers and the cost is now roughly monthly what I paid yearly for not so long ago...

    • You're seeing correlation, but you have the cause wrong. The content providers periodically will renegotiate their carriage fees with distribution services - cable, streaming, etc. And they always want to raise prices when they do.

      Thus all carriers have to raise prices as well, or eat the delta. Guess which one they are going to choose?

      • Yes and at one time those people looked at streaming as simple gravy. Like they were just happy to get paid anything for the content as it was supplemental to their main revenue sources. Now everyone has FOMO and invests in their own streaming service based on a few select hit titles. IDK how these changes will impact over time but eventually I see us paying more for less while providing even more analytical data for free.

  • >"YouTube TV announced [...] with offline downloads, 5.1 Dolby audio"

    I wouldn't pay for ANY service that didn't include at least 5.1 surround sound. Tried Discovery+ a few weeks ago. Everything on it is stereo. Yet every program was mastered in 5.1 and every one of those programs is sent through cable TV is in 5.1. It was like being transported back to the 80's. Called customer service, complained bitterly, sent them an Email, and then canceled the service. HD video with low-quality audio is like h

    • High fidelity 5.1 costs bandwidth. An AC3 stream can be up to 6Mbps just by itself without a frame of video attached. This is why 5.1 sound always defaults to off on literally every video app, and why it lags behind non-public video networks that planned for that kind of bandwidth when they did their frequency allocations.

      And unless you want to play games with latency or quality you can't really switch out the codecs, because your viewing device needs to be able to transcode back to Dolby AC3 or DTS so th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        An AC3 stream can be up to 6Mbps just by itself

        I replied to this another post of yours, but that is incorrect. AC3 goes up to 640k, but gives passable 5.1 at 384k. It's only "Dolby Digital Plus" that goes to 6Mbit, but it supports up to 15.1 channels of audio, which I don't think you will be seeing from YouTube any time soon.

        • You are correct. 640kbps is the right figure. However, when multiplied by tens of thousands of users, the effect is the same - just at a different magnitude.

      • >"High fidelity 5.1 costs bandwidth. An AC3 stream can be up to 6Mbps just by itself without a frame of video attached"

        Trust me, the 5.1 (AC3) they are sending over CATV is nowhere near 6Mb/s. ATSC and cable use UP to 448kbit/s, which is completely adequate. A reasonable quality 5.1 isn't much larger than stereo when compared to what is being using in the 1080p video.

        >"because your viewing device needs to be able to transcode back to Dolby AC3 or DTS so that you have proper passthrough support"

        Every

    • The 0.5% of the world who cares about watching Discovery in 5.1 enough to cancel doesn't show up on their RADAR.

      I remember when getting HD cost extra. At some point it was costing them more to also send SD on broadcast so they stopped offering it.

      The same will happen for 4K and 5.1 or Atmos or whatever. For now the price of bandwidth is still too high.

      A Redbox bluray is still the best value in bitrate.

  • I pay for my family to have YouTube premium. My main gripe is that despite being a paid customer, YouTube is too stingy with buffering. Once a week I have to drive through a rural area where I lose internet connection for 2-3 minutes. About 1 minute in, whatever video I am currently listening to will stop.

    I know they want to preserve traffic and not buffer an entire video in an age where kids (my niece included) just change videos every 5-10 seconds, but can they not detect I'm 7 minutes into a 50 minute v

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      Once a week I have to drive through a rural area where I lose internet connection for 2-3 minutes.

      Wait, you use YouTube while driving? I mean, okay, just maybe it's the back screen in a minivan, but even then, where are you taking your family that you "have to" drive through a rural area once a week?

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