youTube TV ?

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I have been using YouTubeTV for the past year and I really love it. Much better than cable. Better channel selection, cheaper price and you only get channels that actually produce a picture. About 70 of them. Whenever I travel and stay in a motel I am always amazed at how horrible cable TV is. 1000 channels but 950 of them are just ads telling you how to pay for the movie, concert, sporting event or debate so you can watch it. Just whip out your credit card. YTT arranges the channels in logical groups. The first few channels are the local channels, then the sports channels, then the news channels, etc. And it remembers everything. You start to watch a show and then stop it will remember it and put in the continue watching list. Allowing you to restart exactly when you left off.

What I don't like about it is that the price at launch was $35, then they raised it to $40 then they added a bunch of channels and raised it to $49.

The nice thing is you can start it and stop it at will. So sign up and try it for free.
 
The YouTubeTV streaming service has been around for awhile now, and like all streaming services requires a good Internet connection, typically the faster the better. Streaming TV programming also eats tons of data, making an unthrottled plan pretty much mandatory for extended viewing.
 
It all depends on what channels you actually watch. Statistics show most people only watch 6 or less channels on a regular basis. So figure out what those are and go shopping for the best streaming provider.

2 years ago I cut my $210 per month cable and the DirecTv Now $35 "Live a little"  package was the best option for me. But new subscribers can no longer get it. The new packages are missing AMC, Discovery, and History. That is a deal breaker for me so if I lose those channels I will seriously consider UTube TV although it is still missing History. Other serious contenders for me are Philo TV and AT&T WatchTV. But they don't have sports channels. The link to good recent reviews of the top streaming services is below.

https://clark.com/technology/tvsatellite-cable/best-streaming-tv-services/
 
We are not able to get Tv YouTube in Canada yet. Do you guys know if they are planning to offer this service to Canadians? I can't wait.
 
TheBar said:
It all depends on what channels you actually watch. Statistics show most people only watch 6 or less channels on a regular basis. So figure out what those are and go shopping for the best streaming provider.

^^ Best advice! I can't imagine paying any substantial amount for TV anymore. For many years we paid nothing, free OTA channels with a digital antenna and lots of DVD movies. As the streaming revolution has taken over, we used Amazon only for a few years (more movies and now lots of TV shows too) and then got Netflix. Less than $20/month for both. We still get local networks for free with the antenna, but rarely watch them.
 
scottydl said:
We still get local networks for free with the antenna, but rarely watch them.

We still use the antenna for local news and weather, but the Internet (Roku, Netflix, Amazon) for everything else - and an occasional DVD for movies. 
 
I like VUDU,  Walmart's streaming service.  The service is free and they have lots of movies and TV shows.  Many are available free with commercials or a couple of bucks without commercials.
 
I have You Tube TV and it's OK, not really any better than the other streaming services, but not worse either. It's gotten a bit pricey at $50/mo. I had Hulu and it was OK but it wouldn't allow you to access it outside your billing area to view on a TV. You could get Hulu on a mobile device and cast it to your TV anywhere. You Tube TV says that you need to connect once every 3 months from a TV in your billing address, but we just got back from a 4 month trip and were able to get TV the entire 4 months. One nice thing about You Tube TV is you get local channels from your billing address wherever you are.
All streaming services allow you to stop and start without penalty, you just finish out the month and it turns off if you don't pay. Most streaming services have cloud DVR and this allows you to record programs even if you don't have a internet connection for viewing later when you do.
 
SeilerBird said:
YTT arranges the channels in logical groups. The first few channels are the local channels, then the sports channels, then the news channels, etc. And it remembers everything.

Actually, you can arrange the order in which you can see the channels and you can remove those from the display those that you don't watch.  Having an infinite capacity DVR means you can be rather indiscriminate about what you choose to record.
 
docj said:
Actually, you can arrange the order in which you can see the channels and you can remove those from the display those that you don't watch.  Having an infinite capacity DVR means you can be rather indiscriminate about what you choose to record.
Yes you can rearrange things but I like the default order. Actually there is no infinite capacity DVR, all of the programs are recorded by YT and if you want one on your DVR then it just makes a note of that program for you.
 
docj said:
Actually, you can arrange the order in which you can see the channels and you can remove those from the display those that you don't watch.  Having an infinite capacity DVR means you can be rather indiscriminate about what you choose to record.
Yes you can arrange the channels but I think only from a computer, not from the TV or mobile device.

I found the user interface on You Tube TV the most un-intuitive of the streaming services I've tried. Probably just me.
 
SeilerBird said:
Actually there is no infinite capacity DVR, all of the programs are recorded by YT and if you want one on your DVR then it just makes a note of that program for you.

However, I think there's a difference between the shows stored in my Library and those I access from the Home screen.  If I watch a show I didn't DVR using the Home display then will contain ads that I can't skip through.  Those ads are inserted by YTTV and aren't the ads that would have been shown during the broadcast.  OTOH, if I access a show that I have recorded through my Library, the recorded version will contain the original ads and I can use my fast-forward button to skip through them?  Here's what YTTV says about that:

If you've added a program to your library, you'll be able to watch DVR recordings by default in most cases. This means you can skips ads, as well as pause and rewind your recording. In certain rare cases, recorded content may still have unskippable ads. This is because the network requires the video on-demand version to be played back instead of your recording.

As for the issue of whether or not you actually have a recorded copy of the show "in the cloud",  my computer scientist son was working on cloud DVR issues last year for one of the major cable companies.  The way he explained it to me is that once you "record" a show on your cloud DVR, from a DRM perspective, you actually do have your own copy of it.  From a perspective of royalties, I'm pretty sure the service provider has to treat each recording as a separate copy rather than claiming there is only one "master copy."  As I recall, YouTube TV "erases" your DVR recordings after ~9 months or some such period.
 
timjet said:
I found the user interface on You Tube TV the most un-intuitive of the streaming services I've tried. Probably just me.

No offense, but my wife is one of the most "challenged" computer users on the planet and she's handling YouTube TV without any serious issues.  She knows how to access the Live channel list and find what she wants to watch.  It's not really any different from accessing a Guide on DirecTV or a cable system.  Except that I've grouped all the channels she likes to watch at the beginning of the list so she doesn't have do search through a guide or remember channel numbers.  I'm not sure how much easier it can be made to be.
 
I am having a hard time believing that YT would record thousands and thousands of copies of a program it has on it's servers already. That would be a massive waste of bandwidth.
 
SeilerBird said:
I am having a hard time believing that YT would record thousands and thousands of copies of a program it has on it's servers already. That would be a massive waste of bandwidth.
And you are right. In the link below it explains it is actually a mixture of personal recording space and video on demand. The advantage is you can keep your recordings much longer and has no storage limits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nvbFUZY2ts
 
SeilerBird said:
Hulu TV is offering a package for $50 with 60 channels and Hulu. I have not used it but I did see ads for it.

Hulu with Live TV cannot be setup from a cellular internet connection.  The Hulu FAQ clearly states that you have to use a "fixed" internet connection.  This makes it unsuitable for many RVers.  See the attached screenshot

 

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