I maintain that YouTube TV is the very best of the streaming TV services, but good grief is it getting expensive. Today YouTube announced the service’s latest price hike, which brings the monthly subscription to $82.99. The change is effective immediately for new customers and will be reflected starting January 13th for “most existing customers.” As usual, the company attributes this increase to “the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service.”
$82.99 is the same price as Disney’s Hulu + Live TV bundle.
YouTube TV last raised its subscription cost to $72.99 in March 2023. Before that, it was $64.99. The days when the service ran only $50 now feel like a lifetime ago. Some of you who got in early might even remember it costing a mere $35 per month.
But since then, YouTube has routinely found itself in carriage disputes with Disney, NBCUniversal, and other content owners, and those renegotiated agreements have led YouTube TV’s price to climb higher and higher. The YouTube TV of today is much different than it used to be; there are more channels, yes, but the service has also shed a number of regional sports networks.
The company is quick to note that none of the service’s core benefits are changing. The base subscription still includes over 100 channels, cloud DVR with unlimited storage, up to six user accounts per household, and the flexibility of three concurrent streams. But YouTube TV still charges extra for 4K streaming, which seems harder to rationalize after this $10 price bump.
Customers are predictably none too pleased about the news and are weighing whether a service that now costs more than double its original price is still worth it.
