Every day people spend almost as much time watching YouTube as TV. And now they can watch TV on YouTube.
On Tuesday YouTube debuted a cable TV-style subscription service so that people can pay to stream live and recorded shows from the four broadcast TV networks, and roughly three dozen cable networks through YouTube’s site and a new YouTube TV mobile app.
Called YouTube TV, the service will cost $35 a month for six accounts and will become available “in the next few months,” said YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who announced YouTube TV during an event at the company’s YouTube Space LA studio in Los Angeles. YouTube has published a page on its site for people to sign up to be notified when YouTube TV becomes available in their area.
YouTube TV will carry 40 total TV networks, including local broadcast channels and cable networks like Bravo, E!, ESPN, Fox News, FX, MSNBC, National Geographic Channel and USA Network. People will also have the option of paying an extra fee for Showtime and Fox Soccer Plus. And YouTube is bundling in the original shows it has produced exclusively for its existing YouTube Red subscription service.
Using YouTube TV, people will be able to watch live TV, check out an on-demand library of past seasons and record shows to watch later. There is no limit to how many shows people can record simultaneously, and setting a recording from YouTube’s mobile app won’t use the phone’s data or its storage, said YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan. YouTube will keep an account’s recorded shows for up to 9 months.
YouTube TV isn’t so different from YouTube proper, aside from a new “Live” tab cataloging shows currently airing. A home feed will list shows and categories that people might want to check out, like the videos YouTube features in its main app’s feed. People will be able to search for shows by title and keywords like the name of a sports team or a content category. YouTube TV will also work with Google’s Chromecast so that people can stream a live or recorded show from their phone to their TV.
This isn’t YouTube’s first subscription service. In October 2015 YouTube rolled out YouTube Red that has people pay $9.99 a month to watch all YouTube videos without ads, gain access to some exclusive original shows and download videos to watch offline. And a year before that, it introduced YouTube Music Key, a precursor to YouTube Red focused on YouTube’s music-related videos.
