YouTube’s $73 TV

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 17, 7:30AM EDT

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YouTube’s $73 TV — © ozgurdonmaz / Getty Images

Google’s YouTube has a TV service. It has several things Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Netflix do not have. First among these is over 100 live channels. These include CNN, ESPN and local news channels. To assemble these, YouTube has spent hundreds of millions of dollars. The collection of channels costs YouTube more than it did a year ago. It recently raised the service’s monthly price from $62.99 to $72.99. (Here are the most watched Netflix original movies and TV shows of all time.)
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Streaming services like Amazon Prime Video offer movies and TV shows primarily. People who want to watch CNN live are out of luck. YouTube does not release subscriber counts but estimates the figure is under 6 million. The number of channels YouTube Video offers may cost more to collect than the content Netflix provides.
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Google has a problem with YouTube TV. The number of people who want to watch live TV on a computer is small, and $72.99 is much higher than the $12.99 most people pay monthly for traditional services.

YouTube described the problem to its customers: “As content costs have risen and we continue to invest in the quality of our service, we are updating our price to keep bringing you the best possible service.”
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Very few people have heard of YouTube TV. Its visibility cannot be compared to that of Disney+, which charges $9.99 for Disney’s Duo Basic, Disney+ and Hulu. This includes content from Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. While it has some of the most well-known movies in history, it cannot compete with people who want 100 live channels.
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YouTube TV is among the reasons Google has struggled to add revenue to its business. It also demonstrates how much those efforts have expanded. However, 6 million subscribers are far fewer than the 220 million Netflix has. And there is no evidence that YouTube TV is growing rapidly.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.