Last summer YouTube TV, a cable TV service that comes in via streaming instead of a physical box, hiked up its rates by fifteen bucks. Once $49.99, it was now $64.99 and the outrage was immediate. Many chose to switch to its slightly less expensive rivals, like Hulu’s Live TV. It didn’t keep their wallets safe for long….Hulu just announced their own price hike, to the same level as YouTube’s service.
The last time we went over the consumer options for dropping cable TV and getting channels streamed from the Internet, we said that in the absence of Playstation Vue, YouTube TV was now the best of the existing services. Looks like we’re going to have to evaluate that again.
It’s becoming more common (thankfully) for streaming services to offer feeds from local network affiliates, with the exception of two: CBS (because CBS expects you to pay for their own separate stream) and The CW (we don’t know the exact reason, but CBS owning 50% of the network may have something to do with it).
Consumers now have a wide range of choices if they want to get their cable TV through the Internet, ranging from the great (Playstation Vue) to the not-so-great (Sling TV) to the awful (DirectTV Now). We’ve been waiting eagerly for Hulu to throw its hat into the ring ever since they announced they were looking into it. After all, a company that is already devoted to streaming content couldn’t possibly mess up, unless they really try.
YouTube revealed today its own plans to enter the expanding market of live TV streaming with its own service, YouTube TV. What makes it unique? Read on…
Tomorrow (November 30) the growing market of non-contract, price-reduced cable over the Internet will become a three-horse race. On that day phone giant AT&T will launch DirectTV Now, an off-branch of the DirectTV satellite service it owns. This move would seem like shooting themselves in the foot since the new service is undeniably better and cheaper at the same time, provided you can get Internet from another source.
Sling TV is Dish Network’s $20 streaming service that delivers a couple dozen cable channels to your devices without the need for a cable subscription or contract. On just about every newspost we’ve published about Sling, we’ve lamented the lack of Viacom channels on the service. Viacom owns a mess of established cable institutions: Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Spike, MTV, MTV2, Nicktoons, Nick Jr., VH1, CMT, and TV Land, plus possibly others I can’t think of at the moment.