With Youtube TV Once Again Raising Their Subscription Price By $10 A Month, I Think It's Time To Admit That "Cutting The Cord" Was The Biggest Scam Of All Time
USA Today - YouTube TV announced Thursday that the price of its subscription service will be rising, again.
In an email to customers, YouTube TV announced that it will be increasing its prices by $10 starting next year, "to keep up with the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service."
Starting Jan. 13, 2025, YouTube TV's monthly price for a base plan subscription will rise from $72.99 per month to $82.99 per month.
YouTube TV told USA TODAY that users can pause or cancel their subscription service.
“We don’t take these pricing decisions lightly, and we give all members the flexibility to cancel their membership at any time,” Allison Toh, a spokesperson from YouTube, said.
Toh also shared that the new price will go into effect today for new members. All existing YouTube TV members will see the new price in their next billing cycle on or after Jan. 13, 2025.
After launching in 2017, YouTube TV gained popularity for its low-cost entertainment service that attracted many people to cut the cord on their cable.
"Cut the cord" they screamed. Internet television and streaming is not only the wave of the future, it's drastically cheaper they condescendingly lectured us. And like idiots, we obliged.
"Cutting the cord" was supposed to be the move that saved us all. Back in 2017, the pitch was simple: ditch those greedy cable companies and their $200-a-month bills, sign up for a sleek little streaming service, and bask in the glory of all your favorite channels for half the cost. Enter YouTube TV, the hero we didn’t deserve but absolutely needed, sliding into our lives for a cool $35 a month. Fast forward to today, and YouTube TV just announced they’re jacking up their price- again. Starting January 13, 2025, you’ll be shelling out $82.99 a month for their base plan.
Spare me the corporate spiel about “rising costs of content” and “quality service investments.”
Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we? When YouTube TV launched, it was a disruptor, the Robin Hood of streaming services, offering live TV for $35 a month. By 2019, that number jumped to $49.99. In 2020, it crept up to $64.99. Then, 2023 brought us $72.99, and now we’re looking at $82.99. At this rate, it’ll hit triple digits before we even get a proper NFL Sunday Ticket bundle. They’ve added Spanish-language networks, sports packages, and other bells and whistles, but here’s the kicker: not everyone asked for that.
A few years back Chief mentioned this on twitter and I agreed. I felt like a schmuck.
Not only was I being bent over every month by the 100 different streaming networks I had to have just to watch the shows I used to be able to find all in one place- but now, instead of searching for what you were looking for in Comcast or DirecTV's home screen, we have the hassle of having to exit one app, and then find and open another one. And heavn forbid if you got logged out of your account and need to log back in.
But I digress.
My friend the scholar and gentleman Rear Admiral jumped in the replies to tell me I was crazy.
He took it to text to tell me there's no way I could be paying that much and that streaming was the greatest thing that has happened since technicolor television.
The original appeal of cutting the cord was simplicity. Pay less, watch what you want, no extra nonsense. Now, we’re drowning in subscription services. Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Apple TV+, and God knows what else. Want to watch all your favorite shows? Great, just cough up $15 here, $20 there, another $10 for the “premium” version without ads, and boom, you’re back to spending more than you ever did on cable.
I'm no mathematician, but here's some basic numbers-
$83/mo for YouTube TV
$21/mo for HBO
$23/mo for Netflix
$13/mo for Paramount
$16/mo for Disney+
$15/mo for Prime
$10/mo for AppleTV
And those are just the base packages.
If you want to actually watch things crystal clear on your 100k, billion-megapixel television, that's an extra $9.99 per month.
Not to mention the sports packages and whatnot for your telvision service.
Also not to mention what it costs to watch the NFL across the 30 different services they're showing games this season-
And it’s not just the money; it’s the hassle. Remember flipping through cable channels? Easy, breezy, done. Now, you’ve got to dig through five different apps to find out who owns the streaming rights to The Office this month. Want to watch live sports? Good luck. Half the games are blacked out, and the other half are on some obscure service you didn’t even know existed.
YouTube TV’s price hike is just the cherry on top of this absurd sundae. They’re charging more while delivering the same product. Meanwhile, the execs are probably popping champagne in a boardroom, celebrating their “flexibility” while we’re stuck deciding which streaming service to cancel next.
And where does it end? That's the real question. What are our options? It's not like there really are any. All the services are basically in-line with each other price-wise, so you're basically left playing musical chairs as to which service you're going to jump to, while figuring out what you're going to lose vs. what you will gain. We are at their mercy, same as we were with the cable companies, expect now it's more spread out. They can continue to raise fees and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
“Cut the cord,” they said. “Save money,” they said. It’s a scam, folks. Cable may have been a pain in the ass, but at least it didn’t require a damn spreadsheet to keep track of your subscriptions. The revolution promised us freedom, but instead, we got a buffet of fragmented, overpriced options. If this is "progress", we failed big time. We should have known. Something that seems too good to be true, always is.