Chances are, if you pay for a streaming alternative to live cable TV in the United States, your bills are about to rise, thanks to a glut of ads on Tuesday.
The first is YouTube TV, which announced a 30 percent price increase, the highest since its product launch in 2017, effective immediately for all customers. The news came at the end of a long announcement of several new channels, which users are not eligible for, all from the CBS / Viacom family of cable television networks.
New customers can expect to pay $ 65 / mo for the service from now on, while existing customers will see a price increase of $ 50 to $ 65 on their July bill. Shortly after mentioning the new price, YouTube TV Vice President Christian Oestlien directed users to this landing page to pause or cancel their service if they so choose.
If this whole story sounds familiar to you, you’re not imagining things. In April 2019, Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica wrote an article titled “YouTube TV adds channels and increases the price, you cannot opt for any of the changes.” With that measure, the service increased its monthly price from $ 40 to $ 50 (25 percent) by adding nine channels. Today’s $ 15 jump adds the following eight networks: BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, TV Land, and VH1.
Higher prices for the AT&T family
The other family of broadcast and television services to see a price increase today comes from AT&T, whose AT&T TV (a broadcast-only product with rates and plans that resembles standard cable contracts) and DirecTV (a standard product. satellite television) are seeing their rates for new customers increase.
Without a formal AT&T announcement about these rate changes, we have referred to the TV Answer Man guide, which suggests a $ 10 increase in monthly cost for each level of service on the aforementioned services. However, current customer rates still don’t appear to be affected, and we have yet to see price increases tied to AT&T TV Now (a streaming-only product formerly known as DirectTV Now).
And if that number of product lines confuses you, remember, it also confuses AT&T executives. Maybe that’s why the company went to the trouble of killing a fourth Pillar of the pay TV service, AT&T WatchNow, which, as of Tuesday, informs users that “it is no longer available for new registrations or to re-subscribe.” Existing subscribers to AT&T supported unlimited plans are still able to access the service, but its previous availability as an on-demand add-on for $ 15, which offers live cable TV programming, has been phased out in favor of HBO. Max, a $ 15 / month video on demand service.
These price increases come less than three months after AT&T revealed a massive 890,000 drop in subscribers to premium TV services.
