YouTube Debuts YouTube TV in 5 Cities, Includes Free Chromecast

While the experience is mobile-based, you can use a Chromecast to beam shows and movies to the living room television. Will the many young viewers who watch YouTube videos actually consider paying for a streaming service to see more conventional TV? As Wired points out, though this may be Google’s biggest swipe at Comcast yet, YouTube has struggled to get customers to pay for content that’s typically been free. Other channels will be available for an additional fee. At launch, YouTube TV has 40-plus channels, including the five broadcast networks and local and national sports channels. “Our goal from the beginning was to really listen to our users and understand from them what they loved about TV and what they want changed”. What’s more, whereas the other services provide new subscribers with a free trial period of seven days, YouTube TV’s introductory offer is free for a full month. In the future Google will add AMC, BBC America, BBC World News, IFC, SundanceTV, Telemundo, and WE tv, YouTube TV head engineer Andrew Jeon wrote in a blog post.

YouTube said it plans to gradually roll out YouTube Go to more and more people over the next few months, getting their feedback and improving the product before launching it widely early next year.

Unfortunately, the downside of all of this is that YouTube TV isn’t available everywhere yet, so you can only get it in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia for now. Every service suffers from either high cost, limited offerings or restricted access.

YouTube Go is still in an “Unreleased” state on the Play Store and will probably show as incompatible with all of your devices if you don’t live in India. You’ll need to sign in from your home area, and it must be from one of the cities with service. Google is also providing unlimited DVR storage on its servers as well, allowing users to watch and record content no matter where they are, creating stiff competition for its rivals in the space. Further, YouTube Go has social features that enables you to share videos quickly and easily with friends and family.