Gadgetory

Juan Carlos bag mail here for pocket now and I've been spending the last week or so playing with YouTube TV and the Dodgers are playing Chicago while I record this so I'm just going to leave this running on my phone while we talk about it starting off with 40 channels for 35 bucks a month this is not a direct competitor against the service like Netflix or Hulu more this is taking aim at DirecTV Comcast's new Xfinity streaming service or another third-party player or something like sling TV and that's backed up by an unlimited cloud DVR as many episodes of as many different TV shows as you'd want to keep captured but those shows will expire after around nine months on Google servers one more nice little perk though this is attached to a primary Google account that Google account can create a family plan which will allow up to five other users to share credentials and also stream TV and have their own cloud storage so your DVR isn't getting filled up with someone else's shows YouTube TV works with pretty much anything smartphones tablets laptops and then if you want to stream directly to a TV you can punch through something like a chromecast for exactly the same type of streaming solutions we've already been using with YouTube Netflix and Google Play now the funny thing is I actually wasn't super hyped up about YouTube TV but today it launched I get a flurry of emails from my wife who was super excited to give something like this a shot we're one of those families that's looking at paring back on our current cable plan we'd be getting fewer channels in our current cable package but we'd be saving about 50 bucks a month over what we're currently paying for in them and largely getting the channels that we actually do watch we just have to fill in the gaps for a few other channels like HBO Go and taking a quick look around the app this is extremely well laid out and it definitely fits that sort of aesthetic that we see from Google Play when you open the app you're greeted by this main home view it's sort of a general overview on the things you've already been watching with a few little recommendations sprinkled in there for things you might be interested in as wipe to the left gets you to your library I actually don't have anything in my library because we've been using my wife's account but then an additional swipe to the right will bring you into the live catalog of television that's available to you in that moment you get a little ticker list of all the channels that associated with your plan and as you scroll through them a live feed will start streaming through the title bar of that network compared to some of the other cable apps I've played with this is a really clean and playful way to kind of browse through content without having to fire up a channel wait for it to load then decide you don't want to watch that then switch to another channel and wait for that to load this is much cleaner and much faster and helping you find something to really watch and not just look at a bunch of options video quality does seem to come in better than what we currently get through cable when we're watching it on the same TV my super not techy wife was watching an episode of The Simpsons had to comment on the fact that it looked a lot better than when we were watching it on an HD channel through our cable package of course it's not all roses and this is still something it's not a beta service but it's early days for YouTube TV especially as Google has to hammer out market by market across the United States what channels will be allowed on some kind of streaming platform this has been one of the biggest hurdles biggest stumbling blocks in migrating this media from traditional broadcast through cable and then into a streaming solution and because it's not available in all markets it also means that this is a location-aware service for example our editor-in-chief Tony he tried to fire up YouTube TV using a VPN but again it was still tied to the GPS of his phone so even though he was going through some sort of American channel to end up in the United States digitally his organic location was still overseas so YouTube wouldn't allow him to set up an account and with any new Google service we always have to float that question just how much a part of the product are the users actually becoming that personal bucket of user information floating around on Google services about you that's how much of that information is really being used to sort of leverage against your own spending habits serving you more advertisements you still have to watch commercials through the service it's just like any other type of broadcast TV you can disable some of that tracking but then again that's going to cut back on the accuracy of the recommendations that Google is going to serve you and that also brings up one last interesting little con to the service as it's currently constructed for example I've got a big ol nerd crush on Sam Rockwell I think he's a phenomenal performer so I punch in Sam Rockwell's name in the youtube search app and it pulls up a couple movies that he's been in and it also links to a couple YouTube videos on YouTube YouTube TV it's a nice little synergy there but what I really like to do is set up an alert or set up a marker or set up an automatic record for every time Sam Rockwell's shows up say on the talk show if he's pitching a new movie maybe he's in some little indie joint I wasn't aware of and I want to know that he's in it that's not something you can currently do with YouTube TV so that's definitely some room to grow I would love to see that search better utilized for capturing content and the content that we don't even know has been produced yet but after the first week impressions pretty positive this is the service that we're looking at continuing I'm going to try and compare it against something like sling TV I know my wife is definitely more excited about the Google tie and the fact that we can keep separate accounts we can set up an account for our daughter and not get hit with a bunch of kids shows on our own personal accounts so that that could be really helpful and for us is we're trying to pare back kind of rein in some of those costs which have gotten a little out of control on our cable package YouTube TV offers up a solution which gets us most of what we want at a far lower price and what we're currently paying and of course we want to hear from you if you tried out YouTube TV yet fired up that free month to see what this is all about and what are your thoughts do you think Google's on the right track here or do you think a service like Netflix has more promise for a digital online streaming company like Google Drive is a comment down below because those are the kinds of conversations I love getting into as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more fun app review walkthrough tours like these and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for PocketNow i'm juan carlos bag now so i'm gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next review