Streaming Services
After five years of trying, I'm finally ready to cut the cord. [MUSIC] Thanks to some recent changes to YouTube TV's channel lineup, as well as some mergers, it seems like the service is all grown up and finally ready to be cable's first true contender. In this video, I'm gonna be comparing the cost of YouTube TV to traditional cable. Then I'm gonna go through the apps interface for the very first time. And finally, I'm gonna decided YouTube TV is finally worth the switch from cable TV. [MUSIC] Very recently there was some pretty. Large changes to YouTube TV both good and bad. Let's start with the good though YouTube TV now has Viacom CBS channels like Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central. This is the first time that those channels along with several others like ESPN and FX have been on the same service together. Full disclosure, Viacom CBS actually owns CNET as well as a lot of channels recently added to YouTube TV. But that got me nowhere when I tried to get a free account. So this is actually coming out of my pocket. But the addition of those channels came at a price. The cost of YouTube TV recently went up by $15. And at $65 a month, you can't necessarily call it cheap. That monthly price, though, includes all the channels available, unlimited cloud DVR, three simultaneous streams with six accounts per household, and you can cancel at any time with no contract. So that's mostly awesome. Now let's see if YouTube TV's gonna save me some money. Here's what I'm currently paying for cable TV. I pay for cable or promotional bundle, which includes TV, Internet and Phone. That promotion is about to expire. So my costs are going to go up. Now let's see what those individual services are gonna cost me after the promotion. Yikes, TV and DVR is gonna go up to $113 a month. Internet's gonna go up by about $20 to $87 a month. Phone is gonna be $10 a month and I don't even use it. It was just cheaper to include in the bundle. Taxes and additional fees are gonna be about $20 a month, which brings my total cost to $230 a month. I've already been offered new promotions from this company twice and each time it's never been a better deal. I've either paid more money for the same amount of channels I've lost I'm going down to a cheaper tier and since I already have the cheapest TV tier, I know I'm not getting my cost anywhere under $153. But for the sake of comparison, let's see if I can get these cost down to DVR remains unchanged because YouTube Cube TV has cloud DVR so I'm not sacrificing that currently the cheap internet package offered by this company is $50 a month so I can save some money there. As I said, I don't use phone so we can lose that and save $10 that's an additional fee will go down a little bit. So let's say it's going to $10 just to give it a little extra breathing room. Let me use my calculator because I'm pretty bad at math on my own. That brings my new monthly costs to $173, not as bad but I think YouTube TV can beat that. Let's see just how well it stacks up etc. TV cost $65 a month we already knew that and it remains unchanged at $60 a month I may upgrade the speeds later we'll see. Add another $50 a month for HBO max because I currently pay for through cable that gives me a total of $140. Much better than cable. I'll be saving about $30 with YouTube TV, but I've never actually used the app before. So let's see how it looks. [BLANK_AUDIO] Cable free live TV is here. Okay, let's click Sign In. Tv.youtube.com/startwfd. No, it's not wad, lo, success device connected, all right, continue on your device. There we go YouTube TV members can watch here YouTube TV can be viewed not purchased through Apple TV. Great. Well, let's go purchase it then. So now I'm using my third device to try to sign up for YouTube TV. It's not the most fluid experience, but I guess neither is signing up for cable. TV.youtube.com Try it free. Los Angeles, that's correct, that's where I live, start free trial. So let's just go through some of these and talk about the ones I'm interested, and see if I can notice any that are missing. So I definitely have the local channels, which, I'm actually a local news junkie, so these are good for me to have. Got ESPN, which is a sign of Disney own channels Cartoon Network is what I'm into. I watch reruns of sitcoms on TBS FX has a lot of shows that I love. I still love Hulu too. So to save money, maybe I'll scale that back to the commercial version instead of paying 12 bucks a month for the commercial free version. I'm not a sports fan. So I don't necessarily care about these FX x for when It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia returns, AMC I still watch The Walking Dead even though I don't think it's that good anymore but I have a really tough time breaking up with TV shows that I've invested a lot of time in Nickelodeon for nostalgia shows like hey, Arnold and Rocco's modern live Comedy Central is a big one for me. I pretty much fall asleep To The Daily Show every night. So I'm excited to have that on service. Finally, My wife is super into HDTV, so that's a must. Discovery Channel is always good for channel flipping and yeah, I can't really see anything missing from my personal needs. What about you? Are the channels missing from YouTube TV that you'd like to see added? Put it down in the comments. Let's talk about it. All right. So now let's go to next. Here are the list of ad on networks, which I will be adding HBO Max as soon as I cancel my cable subscription. Okay and start membership, success, three devices and a credit card later and now I have YouTube TV. Let's go through some of the setup because I actually like that stuff. Choose your favourites and then we'll record them. We'll add new recordings to your library as your programmes are on live TV. Great. I'm gonna be saving money not paying for a DVR and DVRs are really clunky and unreliable. Anyways, Let's do shows on Saturday Night Live, I don't watch late night talk shows on TV but I do watch a lot of clips of them on YouTube. So I'm not going to set those to record. A lot of this is network television which I love that into a Rick and Morty Finally, let's do that. Family guys old. I'm kind of a sucker for Shark Tank. So I'm gonna go ahead and record that. Always Sunny in Philadelphia Of course. Wow. I feel like that's gonna take too long if I just sit here and go through every TV show, so I'm not gonna do that. News, I don't like news programs I kinda just tune into the news as it's on. Movies, not gonna go to YouTube TV to watch movies. There's plenty of on demand streaming services. Family, not there yet. Sorry, mom. Let's go back to Apple TV now let's see what the interface looks like. Sign In. Managed my YouTube account. Device connected. Should yes, there we go. So this is the homepage. It's clearly showing me shows that I bookmark as well as some programming that it's recommending, including an on demand. Transformers live NBC Sports. I'm not a premier league guy. So I'm going to keep going past that got some more on demand movies from TNT. I'm assuming those have commercials because they would have commercials if you were to watch them on live TV. Cool. So it actually kind of knows what channels I generally aim for. Got some categories here based on genre. My favorite is comedy. So let's just go to comedy. See what it gives me. Things picked for me which is roughly the same as that last row. But just more focused on Comedy cranking gears is great practical jokers is good when it's on and I don't have to choose it from live options, movies. Some other suggestions outside of the genre. Some sub genres like sitcoms, so pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a digital service today, a lot of recommendations for new things as well as things that things you like over in the libraries. A lot of stuff that I've saved including new episodes of shows, some some things that are scheduled, shows that I've saved, movies that I'll save [MUSIC] Sports if I ever do say that, definitely a lot cleaner and more helpful than interface than the one that's on my DVR which always feel super slow and like it's making the most general recommendations to you. All right, let's go over to the live tab. I love that the guide has made it over to cord cutter packages because this is how I lik.e to just browse channels when I don't know what I wanna watch. I can just kind of scroll and this is awesome that it starts giving you a preview of what's. Currently live. Let's go ahead and play one of these channels to see what the picture and audio quality looks like. He's been the brains behind this operation since day one. Looks pretty good, it buffers pretty quickly, the image looks nice and crisp. Audio quality seems good enough as far as I can discern. Let's take a look what the interface looks like over the channel. Gives the information, progress, all the good stuff. Networks. This is cool. It's showing all of the channels I recently looked at, at least the last two I looked at. So it's nice to not just be limited to the last channel button and only have one option back and forth. I can actually go through several channels I recently looked at and I'm watching 2 or 3 different things at the same time, more episodes of the same show, which is really cool more to watch, including recommendations based on what I'm currently watching as well as clearly some Shows that I've bookmarked I can add Cleveland Show to my library. I'm not a big Cleveland Show fan though. Closed captioning, no captions closed captioning one that looks like. Pretty standard, black low opacity, background and edit style. Interesting. Okay, so you do get more control over how you want the closed captions to look if you don't like the standard black background box. Let's see what more options there are audio options, video quality. Keep your fingers crossed for 4k with that price increase stats for nerds. I'm a nerd. That's pretty cool. This could be trouble. I might start obsessively checking this. All right, let's try out some of these DVR features. So I can definitely pause live TV, basic stuff. Let's try rewinding [BLANK_AUDIO] Nice. This was the last channel I was at. So let's see if I can rewind like you can on a normal DVR [BLANK_AUDIO] Sweet, But can you rewind on a channel you haven't been watching? Theoretically, this is all streaming right, so you should be able to. Go over to NBC. [INAUDIBLE] Disappointing. It's going based on what you're watching. That's kind of a bummer. So I guess that probably means I can't record something that already aired if I forgot to set it. So in that regard, I'm going to be relying on what's on demand. Let's see what that stuff looks like. So if I wanted to watch the last episode of Rick and Morty, I'd go to the my library which I clearly just signed up so I didn't record it. And yeah, on demand content. Seems like it's the typical availability of what I get if I were on cable. No, I'm pretty impressed with this interface. And I'm excited to put it to a real world test when I sit down to watch TV tonight. Not on camera. So after using YouTube TV over the first night, I found a lot more than I actually liked about it. I love that you can customize the guide to hide the channels that you don't watch or move the ones that you watch more often to the top If you're watching on the Apple TV and you switch over to another app that actually saves where you were in the show, so when you go back, you can resume watching, whether it's live or on demand. It's also nice to have all my content needs all in one place. But a lot of people are really angry about that price hike, and I gotta say, You're not totally wrong. However, I will defend YouTube a little on this one YouTube TV has a lot of content to offer. It has more live TV channels than any other service. I've seen. Also the technology works really well. I'm really excited to be exploring what's on live TV in a way that I never have before. So for me, dollar for dollar, YouTube TV is actually the perfect alternative to cable TV. It's saving me at least $30 a month. It has a much more advanced interface than my DVR. And getting rid of that DVR means it's freeing up an HDMI port on my TV. For some of you, it might make more sense to take advantage of an introductory offer from a cable or satellite service. What do you think? Is youtube tv compelling enough for you to cut the cord? Let me know down in the comments. Thanks so much for watching. Make sure you subscribe to CNET for more great tech videos now I'm gonna go see what's on TV.