YouTube TV: A Cable Killer (If You Need It)
At $64.99 a month, YouTube is a steal compared to traditional cable. Whether it's still worth subscribing depends on whether you can live without ESPN and FS1.
YouTube TV is a highly evolved dinosaur of a sort: an intuitive, capable, less-expensive alternative to traditional cable, satellite, and telco service at time when households are dropping those service at the fastest rate since the cord-cutting era started a decade ago.
Pay TV peaked at 91% of U.S. households (105 million) in 2010, and Digital TV Research projects it will drop below 50% of U.S. households (60 million) by 2027. Comcast now has more paid subscribers to its Peacock streamer (20 million) than to its Xfinity cable service (15.5 million).
The narrowing use cases for pay TV — we’re down to sports, news, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and inertia — have made a $100 monthly cable bill a terrible value at best and wholly unnecessary at worst for everyone else. And even sports, news, and holdout cable shows have largely migrated to streaming the last few years.
Where YouTube TV excels and why you should consider it is as an aggregated, one-stop hub for most of what you watch if at least some of what you watch is on traditional pay TV. If you watch premium streamers like HBO Max and Showtime, subscribing to them within YouTube TV makes for a much better TV experience.
I’m not gonna lie: If you don’t watch much sports, YouTube TV is a terrible value at $64.99 a month no matter what else you watch on cable. You can get a cheaper, more comprehensive content selection by subscribing to however many streamers — Hulu ($7.99 a month), Paramount+ ($4.99), Peacock ($4.99), Discovery+ ($4.99), PBS ($4.99), etc. — it takes to replicate what you currently watch on cable.
There are a handful of one-off shows like Yellowstone and RuPaul’s Drag Race that aren’t yet streaming live or next-day on a streamer, but that list of shows got much shorter in September when most Bravo originals started streaming next-day on Peacock.
The Case for YouTube TV
If you watch sports, YouTube TV is the simplest, most intuitive, most comprehensive TV experience available:
The YouTube TV user experience is a better balance of function and simplicity than your cable set-top box, and it’s cheaper — a lot cheaper — at $64.99 a month than cable service. And that’s before you factor out set-top rentals, taxes, and hidden fees.
YouTube TV is available on every major TV and mobile platform: Amazon Fire TV, Samsung, Apple TV, Roku, Vizio, Samsung, Xbox One, iPhone, iPad, and Android.
The sports-viewing experience is terrific. You can sign up to get notifications when a team you follow is playing, and the ‘Top Picks for Your’ row at the top of the interface will learn what sports you watch.
The sports selection is comprehensive. You get everything on the broadcast channels, ESPN, FS1, Turner Sports, etc. NBA League Pass is available for $14.99 a month, and YouTube TV will be the home of NFL Sunday Ticket starting next season.
Everything, Everywhere, All in One Place
At the heart of most consumer frustrations with streaming — too many streamers, finding where particular movies are streaming, keeping track of weekly shows you watch across multiple streamers, etc. — is the fact that streaming is organized around apps rather than TV platforms.
Amazon, Apple, and Google have made significant progress toward a more unified experience by (1) recommending titles across multiple streamers, (2) tracking what you’re watching across multiple streamers, (3) displaying search results from across multiple streamers, and (4) allowing you to subscribe to streamers from within the platform.
YouTube TV is already a unified platform insofar as it brings broadcast networks and cable networks together into a single app that you can watch on any device. Add-on subscriptions like HBO Max ($14.99 a month) and AMC+ ($7.99) can turbo-charge YouTube TV into a one stop for everything (or almost everything) you watch.
Google recently launched the similar Primetime Channels for YouTube users to subscribe to streamers. There are only a handful of streamers currently available for Primetime Channels, but that will almost certainly increase as Google renegotiates carriage of add-on channels across YouTube TV and YouTube.
If you have a Chromecast or a smart TV that runs on Google TV, your YouTube TV subscription will integrate directly into the “For You,” “Live,” and “Library” tabs on the main screen after you install the YouTube app. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Google add more subscription integration across Google TV, YouTube TV, and YouTube over the next year.