youtube TV

youtube-fixes-glitch-that-wrongly-removed-accounts,-deleted-videos

YouTube fixes glitch that wrongly removed accounts, deleted videos

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As a message highlighted above the thread warned YouTube users that there were “longer than normal wait times” for support requests, YouTube continually asked for “patience” and turned off the comments.

“We are very sorry for this error on our part,” YouTube said.

Unable to leave comments, thousands of users mashed a button on the support thread, confirming that they had “the same question.” On Friday morning, 8,000 users had signaled despair, and as of this writing, the number had notched up to nearly 11,000.

YouTube has not confirmed how many users were removed, so that’s likely the best estimate we have for how many users were affected.

On Friday afternoon, YouTube did update the thread, confirming that “all channels incorrectly removed for Spam & Deceptive Practices have been fully reinstated!”

While YouTube claims that all channels are back online, not all the videos mistakenly removed were reinstated, YouTube said. Although most of the users impacted were reportedly non-creators, and therefore their livelihoods were likely not disrupted by the bug, at least one commenter complained, “my two most-viewed videos got deleted,” suggesting some account holders may highly value the videos still missing on their accounts.

“We’re working on reinstating the last few videos, thanks for bearing with us!” YouTube’s update said. “We know this was a frustrating experience, really appreciate your patience while we sort this out.”

It’s unclear if paid subscribers will be reimbursed for lost access to content.

YouTube did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

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YouTube TV is the US’s 4th-biggest cable TV provider, with 8 million subs

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Still not covering that $2 billion-a-year Sunday Ticket deal, though —

Google’s $73-a-month service is going toe-to-toe with the cable companies.

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YouTube TV is the US’s 4th-biggest cable TV provider, with 8 million subs

YouTube is still slowly dripping out stats about its subscriber base. After the announcement last week that YouTube Premium had hit 100 million subscribers, the company now says YouTube TV, its cable subscription plan, has 8 million subscribers.

Eight million subscribers might sound paltry compared to the 100 million people on Premium, but Premium is only $12. YouTube TV is one of the most expensive streaming subscriptions at $73 a month. The cable-like prices are because this is a cable-like service: a huge bundle of 100-plus channels featuring cable TV stalwarts like CNN, ESPN, and your local NBC, CBS, and ABC channels. $73 is also the base price. Like cable TV, there are additional add-on packages for premium movie channels like HBO and Showtime, 4K packages, and other sports and language add-ons. Let’s also not forget NFL Sunday Ticket, which this year became a YouTube TV exclusive, as a $350-a-year add-on to the $73-a-month service (there’s also a $ 450-a-year standalone package).

The subscriber numbers come from a “Letter from the YouTube CEO” blog post for 2024 from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. With YouTube basically unable to get any bigger as the Internet’s defacto video host, Mohan says the “next frontier” for YouTube is “the living room and subscriptions.” Mohan wants users “watching YouTube the way we used to sit down together for traditional TV shows—on the biggest screen in the home with friends and family,” and says that “viewers globally now watch more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on their TVs every day.”

YouTube TV’s 8 million subscribers make it one of the biggest cable TV providers. Leichtman Research Group‘s subscriber numbers for “Major Pay-TV Providers” (that means cable companies and their competitors) in Q3 2023 had No. 1 Comcast and No. 2 Charter both in the 14 million user range, with DirectTV in third with 11.9 million, and Dish in fourth at 6.7 million customers. Leichtman had YouTube TV in fifth, with 6.5 million users. With No. 4 Dish losing customers every quarter, YouTube TV is in fourth place now. It might be No. 3 soon. Leichtman’s numbers had YouTube TV as the fastest grower of the bunch, adding 600,000 customers in Q3, while DirecTV was the biggest loser, with half a million customers dumping their satellite dishes. Q3 marked the start of NFL Sunday Ticket moving from DirecTV to YouTube TV.

Naturally, these are all US numbers, and being nationwide puts YouTube TV on the same playing field as satellite companies, a big advantage compared to regional cable TV providers. YouTube TV has bigger ambitions than just the US, though. During the January earnings call, Google said it was “looking closely at” expanding the service to more countries. YouTube TV would need to clear an expansion with every single channel partner on the service, though, so it has a lot of negotiations to work through.

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YouTube TV starts testing customizable 2×2 multiview options

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Just in time for football to end —

YouTube TV has been promising customizable multiview for 10 months.

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For the NBA YouTube launched

Enlarge / For the NBA YouTube launched “Multiview,” which is coming to Sunday Ticket. It’s four games in a split screen.

YouTube

YouTube TV may finally get a configurable split-screen mode. Google’s cable TV replacement service launched a 2×2 “multiview” feature in 2023, but it relied on pre-made choices cooked up by some person (or maybe AI) inside Google. It’s 10 months later, and now some users on Reddit are seeing a “Build a multiview” option that would let you pick which four channels you want to watch. Cord Cutters News got confirmation from Google that the feature is now being tested.

The current multiview is a fun way to stay on top of multiple games, but getting the games you want is an awkward experience. I’ve been watching NFL Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV this year, and there will be times when there are nine games on simultaneously, and you get only a handful of pre-made multiview options to sift through. Is your desired combination of four games in one of those multiview options? You’d better hope so! The canned combinations only get more awkward as the day goes on: one game ends early, and the station cuts to coverage of another game, and now two of your four windows have duplicate games. If an early game runs long and you want to watch the end next to an already-started late game, that was never an option either. The canned options were always four NFL games, too. If you wanted to watch the NFL and some non-NFL content, you were out of luck. You were easily looking at hundreds of multiview possibilities, so canned selections don’t scale well at all.

The Reddit user claims to have access to the feature and says that, during NBA games, the feature is limited to only selecting other NBA games, but at least that is better than scrolling through random pre-made combinations.

YouTube told Cord Cutters News that the feature would roll out to all devices that currently support multiview, but YouTube did not say when that would happen. YouTube has been promising customizable multiview since the feature launched last March. It also promised mixing and matching content types back in June, but that feature hasn’t widely launched, either. Testing is a good sign, at least.

The calls for customizable multiview have been so loud that the feature request once made it into a Deadline interview with YouTube Chief Business Officer Mary Ellen Coe. Without explaining too much, Coe called the feature “a very hard thing to do technically.”

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