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YouTube TV is raising rates 25-43%, depending on your existing package.
Effective today, the company is raising the price of its YouTube TV package to $49.99 a month and is notifying customers it is ending grandfathered pricing arrangements that allowed some customers to pay as low as $35 a month for service.
The price change comes at a time when many of YouTube TV’s competitors have announced or implemented rate increases to cover the rising costs of programming. To reduce the sting, YouTube TV will coincide its rate hike with the addition of eight new channels from Discovery: Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, ID, MotorTrend, TLC, and the Travel Channel beginning today.
All existing customers will be billed at the new $49.99 rate beginning May 13. New signups will be billed the higher rate immediately. Customers billed by Apple will be penalized the most, with a new rate of $54.99/mo.
The company argues its new package price is still a good value because it now includes more than 70 channels, including robust carriage of local stations in more than 90% of the country. YouTube TV also offers unlimited cloud DVR service and up the three simultaneous streams.
Good lord. $40 was way too much. We quit cable the first time when it hit $16/month.
People cut the cord for a reason, high subscription prices! Content providers who raise prices also complain about the rampant piracy problem. This goes for CBS All Access, Amazon, Hulu and others. Content like Star Trek Discovery, Lost in Space, Stranger Things and many more have been ripped and can be downloaded from the internet at no cost. By raising prices like this, they create an incentive for piracy. Keep the costs down and folks will pay, rather than resort to sources like USENET and Torrents.
Still not a cable+dvr replacement for me. No live PBS, no commercial skip when some recorded shows are also on demand.
The price goes up, but the limitations remain.