But, Honestly, What Did We Expect?

How Google’s YouTube TV Coup Reminds Us That Nothing Really Changes

A couple weeks ago, I received an email from YouTube TV thanking me for my business as they entered their third year of providing what had, not long ago, been touted as the long-awaited, cost-effective alternative to Traditional Cable which, due to its exorbitant prices, ridiculously bloated channel offerings, and super sketchy contracts, was looking to be jettisoned by way more than just a small handful of Americans.

After assiduously emphasizing their steadfast attention to customer feedback and the genuine (HA) concern for the wishes of their passive revenue streams, er, I mean subscribers, the email explains that the decision has been made to graciously provide us with a new, exciting, and mandatory offer, intended to continue their mission of “building an experience that fits the needs of everyone in (my) household.”

The email announces that, effective immediately, all subscribers will have access to the following eight new channels: BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, TV Land, and VH1. Yippee. But of course this completely unsolicited and, at least from my perspective, emphatically unwanted “improvement” to their service offerings won’t be coming without a price. After pussyfooting from one vapid, PR-flavored statement to the next, they finally get around to admitting that the monthly subscription fee will, regrettably, and in order for YouTube TV (owned by Google) to keep providing quality content without contracts, be raised from $49.99 to $64.99.

That’s a yearly increase of nearly $200 for access to eight channels that many YouTube TV subscribers not only don’t want, but actively left traditional cable to get rid of.

After reading the email I, along with, I’d assume, most other subscribers who read it, was livid. I was an early adopter of YouTube TV, buying into their novel idea of paying less for a narrower selection of channels. During the 2017 MLB playoffs, Google advertised the shit out of their new TV service and hooked suckers (like me) left and right with the shiny allure of the apparent Holy Grail of television: a handful of frequently watched channels for a fraction of the cost of Traditional Cable. And what was the introductory monthly subscription price?

$35.

That’s right. In just three short years, the price of YouTubeTV has nearly doubled.

THE INEVITABLE TAILSPIN

Now, while this latest price gouge is obviously insanely irritating in and of itself, it becomes way more infuriating when you consider what really happened here. Back in 2017, as Google planned their hostile takeover of broadcast television, not a single individual in those Mountain View, CA offices had any illusions that they were setting out to provide a cheaper alternative to all-or-nothing cable. They knew that all they had to do was introduce the service with a low enough monthly premium to effectively lure away a significant number of dissatisfied traditional cable subscribers. People paying hundreds of dollars every month for hundreds of channels they never watched jumped at the chance to pay less for fewer channels. And the offerings they had in the beginning were great.

As someone who basically only watches live TV to watch sports, the package was amazing, it was exactly what I wanted. In addition to local channels, the first iteration of YouTube TV included almost every sports channel you could ask for, as well as a smattering of other popular cable networks, around 50-60 channels in total, and it was perfect. Ask anyone who knows me, I wouldn’t shut up about it back in those days. It was the future!

*Maniacal laughter at Google HQ*

And the people saw that it was good. Memberships skyrocketed and “cutting the cable” became hip and trendy. But we were all of us deceived…

Google giggled and patiently waited until they had lured a hefty number of subscribers away from Traditional Cable before generously adding a few more channels… and raising the price a smidge. A year later, more subscribers were still pouring in and signing up. After all, $40/mo. is still WAY better than what Comcast or TimeWarner were charging! Then another year goes by and the service is expanded again: more channels, higher monthly premium, some nervous head scratching from the wariest of subscribers. But even then, the incontrovertible truth remained: it’s way cheaper than the alternative and the best available option for live TV by far. 

Fast-forward to today. This $15/mo. hike is the canary in the coal mine w/r/t the insidiousness of this whole affair. It signifies the biggest hike to date, bringing the cost of YouTube TV from $35/mo. to $65/mo. in just three years. The bitterness of the move is compounded by the fact that the channels we’re getting in return are the epitome of the cable garbage we wanted to be rid of in the first place. It’s probably unfair and unreasonable to truly hold any company to their pledge of attempting to service the individual needs and desires of “every household”, but, since that’s exactly what they claim to be doing, then fuck ‘em, here we go...

SATISFYING EVERY HOUSEHOLD 101:

The obvious and instant remedy to this whole debacle is offering customizable service plans. If Google really is concerned (and they’re not, but let’s pretend for a moment that they are) with each of their subscribers’ households, then it’s clearly in their power to offer tiered subscription plans where customers can select which, and how many, channels they want access to. As Tech Gods of the Universe, Google could easily offer something like 30-, 60-, and 90+ channel plans with an appropriately tiered cost structure. PROBLEM SOLVED. 

Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking this option hasn’t been kicked around and eventually out the door of Google HQ. The obviousness of the idea, and the proof that something resembling a tiered subscription structure is clearly feasible, means that they are deliberately choosing not to go this route. There are two possible motivations for this:

One, they truly don’t care about their customers any more than the Traditional Cable Providers (TCPs) who they’re bending over a table right now. They know the service they’re offering is a vastly better option than those $200/mo., 200+ channel deals that people are leaping, as out of burning buildings, from. The alternative is so bad that subscribers will continue to come on board even with the writing on the wall detailed above in unmistakeable view. Google is settling into their role as the lesser of two evils and have no vested interest in offering what their customers truly want. To be fair, they did remove “Don’t Be Evil” from their, I don’t know, Mission Statement or Corporate Motto or whatever, so this could just be the natural outcome of the tech juggernaut finally coming to its senses and acknowledging that evil is way more profitable.

The other possibility, and I can’t tell whether this is a better or worse scenario, is that Google is going for the killshot w/r/t the TCPs. They’re waiting until they’ve taken everything from them, until the TCPs are simply hemorrhaging subscribers and revenue, until those poor little Mom ‘n Pop TCPs just can’t compete anymore and are forced to shut the doors of their cable-providing divisions and recalibrate their focus on the remainder of their multi-billion dollar empires. Once those pesky competitors are out of the way, there’s no real reason for Google to refrain from offering tiered subscription packages to their customers. Maybe they will, probably they won’t, we’ll just have to wait and see.

No one on my end, and hopefully no one on your end either, will be mourning or bemoaning minor inconveniences like these for companies like AT&T, (Time)Warner, Charter, Comcast, etc… Part of me wants to actually believe that if Google can pull off a heist like this, then good. The TCPs are all blights on capitalism and seem to take pride in, or at least willfully ignore the fact that they’re all ubiquitously loathed from Long Island to San Diego. Ain’t no violin small enough for that sad song.

But the problem is that I have zero faith that Google will be any better. Realistically, we have plenty of reasons to believe that they’re at least as nefarious as the TCPs and actually almost certainly worse, given the strip-search level insight into our collective psychology they’ve just so happened to accidentally and passively accumulate over the course of the past twenty plus years of being ostensibly the only search engine in town.

THE IMPOSSIBLE BENEVOLENCE OF ABSOLUTE POWER

Google knows more about “us” (ie. everyone in the world) than we know about ourselves when it comes to subconscious behavior, groupthink, “private” curiosity, and the scope of our interests. They have granular (cellular, molecular, quark-level) data on how we, undoubtedly the largest, most statistically significant sample size in history, behave and interact with these nubile technologies we’re so enamored with, the back-ends of which almost no one understands.

This information once seemed innocuous. “Who cares if Google is analyzing, tabulating, and keeping record of my personal searches and boxing me in based on that history?” “Who cares if Facebook is selling my Friends List to the highest bidder?” “Who cares if Apple is continuing to build a smartphone capable of (and/or designed for) tracking and spying on its owner?” Paranoid? Maybe, maybe not.

Without getting too far into the weeds on this, we should ALL care, a lot, about these questions. While it’s true that this sentiment has basically been drilled into our heads over the past few years, it’s important to not normalize these threats and simply reconcile them as the cost of technology growth. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. They are the new TCPs and we should treat them with a commensurate level of wariness, healthy distrust, and skepticism to any claims that they are trying to innocently serve our interests.

THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE

America’s pathetically ineffective and scantly enforced antitrust and anti-monopoly laws really only exist on paper. This is most noticeable when you move to a new city and begin to shop around for which electricity provider you want to go with. You’ll almost invariably find that after about five minutes of research, you have exactly one option. There is no competition for WE Energies in Milwaukee where I’m from, or for PG&E out here in the Bay Area. You deal with them or you cook your meals in a cast-iron over a fire. To be fair, I don’t know shit about the intricacies of operating an energy company. Maybe it’s just not possible for multiple providers to exist in a given area, having to split the power grid and whatnot. But the fact remains that without competition, there’s nothing stopping us, the customers, from getting bushwhacked by a monopolistic entity that has no reason to fear repercussions or loss of revenue for any degree of obvious or surreptitious malfeasance.

The second most impactful case of antitrust laws existing only in theory is broadcast television as we’ve known it. There’s an illusion that, with all these channels to choose from, too many to count in fact, that there must be hundreds of independent companies out there producing all the content. That’s simply not the case. Hopefully you already know this, but almost all of the most popular, most watched channels are owned by an incredibly small handful of ultra-powerful conglomerates (Disney, Fox, Comcast, Warner, AT&T).

So what happens when Traditional Cable goes the way of the buffalo and Streaming is King? Realistically, that’s probably still several years off, but the TCPs know it’s coming. They’re looking for a lifeboat in the form of their own subscription-based streaming services. As I write this, 15 Jul 2020, NBC (read: Comcast) has just launched “Peacock”, their very own streaming service, home to 20 gazillion hours of original programming, as well as (so far as I can tell) all of NBC’s live offerings. Peacock is “free” for now, but can be upgraded to avoid ads (which, mark my words, will be absolutely shoveled down non-premium subscribers throats until they bite the bullet and agree to forfeit $60/yr. or whatever it’ll cost to Comcast). 

As a big fan of Liverpool FC and of English Premier League football in general, probably 75% of the time I currently spend streaming YouTube TV is spent watching these games and related content. NBC (Comcast) has distribution rights for the EPL in America and, this pains me to admit, they do a great job. But now, with the introduction of Peacock, which is apparently where ALL of the 2020-2021 EPL games will be shown, my need for YouTube TV has suddenly plummeted. 

But that’s a good thing, right? Well, it’s far from obvious to me what this shift will mean. It remains to be seen whether NBC channels currently offered by YouTube TV will cease to be offered there in the near future. Is it fair to extrapolate this phenomenon and assume that similar network-specific streaming services will replace the need for any centralized TV provider? Is it possible to consider that in a positive light at all? Instead of managing one $65/mo. subscription, we’ll have to manage a dozen or more $4.99-9.99/mo. subscriptions? We’re practically right back where we started with TCPs from a price standpoint, and with the added hassle of juggling a slew of new logins and passwords and apps and trying to remember where the hell the show you wanted to watch actually even is and so on and so forth. 

It’s probably fair to assume that you are as sick of having scores of accounts, passwords, logins, subscription fees, and premium service packages as I am. If we, the customers, are situated smack dab between a rock (ie. choosing between TCPs or over-paying for YouTube TV) and a hard place (juggling a slew of nickeling and diming network-specific subscriptions), we will ultimately continue to be losers in this battle for reasonable access to the TV programming we want. And, the real bitch of is, it’s become insultingly obvious that the possibility of having exactly what we want already exists.

NOTHING EVER CHANGES

It bears mentioning that there are other alternatives that may be better or worse, depending on your preferences. Hulu (67% Disney-owned, 33% Comcast-owned) offers live TV. Sling TV (owned by DISH, remember them?) also may be a viable alternative. I haven’t spent a ton of time researching the pros and cons of these “alternatives”, because they’re not alternatives. They’re snazzily reimagined iterations of the crusty old TV establishment that, like Big Oil, won’t simply step aside to usher in the future technologies that the customers actually want.

But no one honestly expected them to, right? Even the most resilient optimists would likely admit that it’s not cynicism, but unbiased observation, that leads to the belief that these mega-conglomerates have no real intention of appealing to their customers’ actual interests. What we, the people, really wanted was someone to come along and supplant them, to knock them off their perch and create something better, something new. YouTube TV was the White Knight. And, in a matter of three short years, they’ve revealed themselves to us as being no different than the old guard they set out to kill.

These monstrously powerful corporations maintain an absolute stranglehold on the industries they’ve come to dominate. The only competitors or alternatives that aren’t immediately squashed beneath their mighty boots are either immediately hoovered up and forced into subsidiary slavery or, worse yet, are just silently and diabolically repurposed arms of the incumbent behemoths themselves. In the end, as always, we watch, red-faced and fuming as they lie to our faces and tell us they care and that this time it’ll be different. Yeah, right.