YouTube TV Arrives TodayPromising, But A Work In Progress – Fast Company

By Harry McCracken 04.05.17 | 1:00 pm

Back in late February, YouTube unveiled YouTube TV, a new streaming service featuring the same big-name TV networks that most people get via cable or satellite. The company said that it planned to launch the servicewhich competes with AT&Ts DirecTV Now, Sonys PlayStation Vue, and Dishs Sling TVin the coming months.

A little over a month later, YouTube TV is here, in limited fashion. The service is debuting today in five marketsChicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Areawhere it offers local stations as well as big cable channels, with more cities to come. Ten of its 50+ networks, including AMC, ESPN 3, Sundance TV, Telemundo, and The Weather Channels Local Now, are coming soon. (The fact that AMC and sister channels such as Sundance will be part of YouTube TV at all is news.) YouTube is offering an unusually lengthy 30-day free trial, and will give a free Chromecast TV streaming gizmo to subscribers after their first paid month.

Ive had a couple of days of hands-on time with the service, on a Pixel phone that YouTube provided, preloaded with the YouTube TV app. What Ive seen represents only a slice of the YouTube TV experience, which will be available on Android phones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, and the web. Among other things, I couldnt try one of its most intriguing aspects: For $35 a month, the service will offer six accounts and up to three simultaneous streams, allowing individual family members to watch and record their own shows without it all getting tangled into one giant hairball of content.

Thats not counting the gaps in YouTube TV that we already knew aboutmost notably the fact that it doesnt include any channels owned by Time Warner or Viacom (such as CNN, HBO, MTV, and Comedy Central), and only lets you watch on a TV by beaming content from your device to a Chromecast. (I did so using the Pixel, and it worked fine.) YouTube hasnt said anything about availability on other TV-streaming devices such as Roku boxes, but the service will need to be in lots of places to be competitive.

With all this in mind, I wasnt able to fully test the service as it will arrive today in its first five markets, let alone judge where it might be going. But I was able to form some first impressions, and they were largely favorable, with a few caveats.

Its about what you might expect from YouTubeclean and straightforward. Each show and network has a page of its own that bundles up a schedule for upcoming live airing with any on-demand episodes that are available. I did find it odd that theres no easily-available-anywhere way to return to the home screen, which is how you get to stuff youve recorded using the DVR feature; it sometimes takes a lot of presses on the Back button to get there. (YouTube says this design is specific to Android and doesnt affect the iOS version.)

In my time with YouTube TV, the quality of the video streams has been buttery smooth, and I havent noticed any of the technical glitches that plagued DirecTV Now after its launch. The fact that YouTube already knows as much about delivering video over the internet as any company on the planet presumably helps.

All of YouTube TVs competitors have search features, but calling them rudimentary might be erring on the side of politeness. DirecTV Now, for instance, responds to a search for Jerry Seinfeld with Jerry Maguire; Sling TV, meanwhile, doesnt seem to be aware that the man was a regular on Seinfeld.

YouTube TVs search, by contrast, feels like its creators actually expect it to be a primary form of navigation. You can enter TV shows, episode titles, movie names, people, and channels. More impressively, you can also search for concepts such as comic books, which pulls up Arrow, Gotham, Supergirl, and other programs. Its a better solution to the challenge of wrangling vast amounts of stuff on a tiny screen than Ive seen elsewhere.

In one form or another, Google has been trying to make it easy to hunt down TV content via a search field for many years. Its come a long way since the era of Google TV, but the more you play with YouTube TV search, the more youll realize that it still isnt anywhere near as smart as the search in YouTubes main app or Google search. For example, Donald Trump may be omnipresent on TV, but YouTube TV doesnt understand that: When I searched for his name, I got only three results. (Presumably thats because YouTube TV doesnt really know much about the subjects of individual episodes of shows, other than their titlesand news shows dont have titles.)

The search feature wasnt aware that John Dickerson is on Meet the Press, even though his name is mentioned in the description on the page for that program. And when I searched for Simpsons monorailhoping to find my favorite Simpsons episode of all timethe app told me that it didnt have The Simpsons at all. (It has the show in profusion in on-demand formbut not season four, which is when Marge vs. the Monorail aired.)

One of YouTube TVs major distinctions is its cloud-based DVR, which lets record as much live TV as you like and only erases your saved shows after nine months. (PlayStation Vue has a more limited DVR feature; Slings DVR is still in beta; DirecTV Now doesnt have one.) Use YouTube TVs DVR to record your favorite series and movies, and you might end up being able to treat it like an on-demand video service rather than one that makes you keep track of TV schedules.

Its a feast. But when I tried to record individual episodes of shows, I discovered that I couldnt. With YouTube TVs unlimited DVR storage, it assumes that youre going to want every episode of a program. Maybe my brain has been trained by using a TiVo for years, but there are instances when Id like to record a single episode of a show rather than wallow in it.

The fact that YouTube decided to build a separate YouTube TV app rather than cram live TV into its main app is an acknowledgement that the new service has a different set of design needs than YouTube in its classic form. And while the company did incorporate some standard YouTube offerings into YouTube TV, they feel more like a garnish than an entre. YouTube Originals, such as the Gigi Gorgeous documentary This Is Everything, otherwise available only on YouTube Red, are here. So are Related on YouTube videos on the pages for specific shows. But when you do a search, you often get only a smattering of YouTube results even if the service has gajillions of videos that match the queryand if you choose to watch any of them, you get booted out to the main YouTube app.

YouTubes approach to advertising on its main service is innovative and consumer-friendly, with ads that are brief and/or skippable. By contrast, YouTube TVs ads reminded me more of those on other services such as Hulu. Theyre higher in volume and lower in variety than you might prefer. For example, I kept seeing the same Starbucks spot about a nice old retired man. And when I sneakily tried to fast-forward deep into The Tonight Show, I had to watch five commercials in a row.

In the end, this whole category of services is a bit of a puzzlement: The contenders seem like commodities on the surface, but each is a subtle blend of pros and cons, and theres no runaway winner. The fact that YouTube TV doesnt have Time Warner and Viacom deals leaves its lineup incompleteat least if youre thinking of it as a full-blown cable substituteand it could use more ways to watch it on a TV beyond using a Chromecast. But whats there shows plenty of potential. Maybe by the time YouTube rolls it out across the country, itll have filled in some of the holes and worked out some of the kinks.

Harry McCracken is the technology editor for Fast Company, based in San Francisco. In past lives, he was editor at large for Time magazine, founder and editor of Technologizer, and editor of PC World.

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YouTube TV Arrives TodayPromising, But A Work In Progress - Fast Company