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Posted on [14 juillet 2009] | [sic] by Kirk Hiner
This means that there are significant advantages to being a cord cutter.
YouTube TV customers who experienced the World Cup this week experienced a service outage during the match between England and Croatia. This is obviously not a good timing, and Google has been quick to communicate with customers via Twitter during and immediately after the outage. This does not make up for lost time, however, especially since World Cup coverage is the type of content that will force people to choose a live streaming service rather than another.
Google now offers a free week of service to those affected. In an e-mail addressed to customers, Google states:
All records of the entire game or other record you have [sic] must now be available without interruption in the Library tab. If you still have problems, please let us know by email, phone, live chat, or @TeamYouTube on Twitter.
To help make this right, we would like to give you a week of free service. You will soon receive another e-mail confirming that your account has been credited.
They end the e-mail by "Thank you for staying with us", and that says just about everything.
New. I saw them several times with Time Warner Cable during the day, and more frequently with DirecTV during the heavy rains. But did one or the other company ever offer me anything in compensation? Of course not. This is partly due to the fact that outages were isolated and / or regional, affecting a relatively small number of subscribers.
The main reason, however, is that we could not do anything other than complain. Termination of a cable or satellite service is a major problem involving phone calls, hardware returns, cancellation penalties and more. In addition, options for replacement were few and might require digging your yard to run lines or mounting satellites on your roof or walls.
In other words, you were trapped, and the cable providers knew it. This is no longer the case. If YouTube TV customers are not happy with the World Cup interruption, canceling subscriptions is quick and easy, and creating an account with a competing service is even more fast and easy. You can subscribe to a new service and watch content through them within 10 to 15 minutes, often for free when you start. I would not be surprised if football fans did exactly that during the shutdown of YouTube TV.
This amount of control provided to the consumer is something new for the television industry, and it was interesting to see how they responded. The week of free service offered by Google is not great, but it's definitely something. I have been subscribing to DirecTV Now since December, and have not yet received AT & T recognition for their uneven service. I've recently canceled the DirecTV satellite for it to be fully streamed, and DirecTV Now, led by a company still steeped in this old-school-cable-empire mindset, will likely the next to go.
streaming service will be noticeably better right now, but at least now I have the power to find this by myself.
About the Author
Kirk Hiner writes for the Apple Web since 1997 after having been editor of Applelinks and Technology Tell Apple Channel. In addition to his work with BEST Apple TV, Kirk currently contributes to Mac Gamer HQ and Pure Nintendo. He lives with his wife and three children in a small town in Ohio where the land is cheap and the air is (relatively) clean.
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