I can see in the near future at some point that all Tv providers will moving to streaming this way they can do away will all of the hardware plus less overhead.
I don't think the model works for everything. There's one key problem that harshness alluded to earlier:
I expect that the whole unicast thing is going to start hurting badly as the number of those streaming increases and they're going to have to come up with something more localized or, heaven forbid, support buffering in the streaming devices. I know they'd love to multicast, but I think the cow is out of the barn with respect to pausing live TV.
Turning live broadcast TV into unicast feeds is insanely inefficient. The amount of head-end infrastructure capacity needs to scale linearly with the number of active
screens (not subscribers), so there's a threshold where streaming becomes more expensive to content providers, and costs continue to grow without an upper cap. In the long term, streaming will be more expensive than satellite or cable because the infrastructure costs are higher at scale.
Now to steer this back to YoutubeTV: if I think streaming is going to be more expensive long-term, and I think it's hugely wasteful from a resources standpoint, why am I using YoutubeTV (and a bunch of other streaming services)? For me it comes down to 3 key benefits: better user interface, use-anywhere convenience, and video quality. DirecTV (satellite) started to go down the path of use-anywhere convenience, but the mobile app has gone sideways or declined since the ATT takeover.
Say I want to check the score of a game while I'm out running errands. On the DirecTV mobile app, I have to open the app, select the "Watch on phone" tab, then select the guide, then scroll to the channel guide, then find the channel the game is airing on, then hope it authenticates and starts streaming. That process
blows. It's a terrible user experience. Meanwhile on the Youtube TV app, when I pop open the app, it already knows what teams I want to follow, and if one of my teams is playing right away on the home page it gives me the option to start watching that game. It doesn't matter what channel it's on (NBC, NBCSN, FOX Sports North, FOX Sports North+, whatever) -- I don't have to care about that. Even better, Youtube has started to pull in live stats for major sports leagues, so they can do things like index key plays in the game so you can jump straight to those video moments:
https://live.staticflickr.com/7850/47540999362_7f7913b8be_c.jpg Incidentally enough, it appears YoutubeTV is also using the game stats data to automatically extend game recordings that go beyond their broadcast timeslots. Since they know the game stats are still accumulating, they keep the recording going.
The biggest reason I'm starting to transition over to YoutubeTV is video quality. I don't know if DirecTV video quality is getting worse, or I just notice it more as I upgrade to bigger and better TVs, but the quality upgrade from streaming is pretty substantial. Here are a couple pictures I took last night of the Boston/Toronto game using DirecTV (C51 client in Native mode, sourced from HR44 DVR) and YoutubeTV (AppleTV 4k) on a LG OLED65B7P (2017 model) display. You have to look past the inherent issues of taking pictures of a TV to show video quality, but it's pretty obvious there are far more compression artifacts with DirecTV.
DirecTV:
https://live.staticflickr.com/7874/33712441738_d30851f0f3_o.jpg
YoutubeTV:
https://live.staticflickr.com/7818/40623425183_2f4ae976a5_o.jpg
Notice the text around the period clock. On the DirecTV feed you can clearly see compression jaggies around the text, while the YoutubeTV output has crisp text output. Also notice that once players start moving quickly, on DirecTV they start to become a human-shaped blob of mpeg compression goo.
