Why I Cancelled My YouTube TV Membership
YouTube TV showed up in my inbox (actually, my Gmail Inbox – powered by Google) one day, and it was football season.
I had been rooting through sites that were probably illegally streaming football games (I use the word “probably” for legal purposes, we all know what those sites are doing) and just wanted a way to watch football in my van while traveling around that didn’t involve getting smashed at a bar and paying $75 to do so.
It was great.
At first.
And then it wouldn’t load on my one year old iPad Pro. It would simply eternally look for my current location. Perhaps this was because the iPad gets its internet via my iPhone’s AT&T tethered connection, I don’t know. But…it didn’t work.
And then it did. On my phone, on my iPad, and if I was at an AirBNB or something where there was some type of larger screen with a web connection, sure, it worked there as well.
And then I remembered…I hadn’t had a TV in years. Nine years to be precise. And I never missed one. I found websites where you could stream TV shows, sometimes for too much money, sometimes for just the right amount, commercial free, and lived that way for nearly a decade. I raised three children this way, watching TV on iPads with no commercials. It’s a pretty beautiful thing about the web.
So why in the world would I pay $37 / month to watch the same shows, but with commercials?
The days of “unlimited TV” are over for us. We don’t need to know that, just in case, we can watch TV at any time. We watch television when we want to, and pay for it at that time. We purchase seasons of television for our children when they absolutely love them, and they watch them like we might listen to records–over and over again. Our bill is far less than $37 / month, and that I’m missing every single episode of all five hundred versions of CSI: Whatever?
I could care less.
And while I can see the “revolutionary” part of all of this, the fact is that Google should have more power, or less greed, whichever contributed to the high monthly price. Frankly, TV should be free if we have to watch commercials, or for $37 / month I should not have to learn about how the secret to a Subaru being some bullshit thing my mom used to tell me made soup taste good (the answer is “love”).