Aviously

I’ve had YouTube TV now for a few weeks, and here is the good and bad/strange of it:

• The service is smooth. The startup is quick, the channels all run smoothly (I’ve had internet connectivity buffering, but never buffering because of YouTube), and the app is easily laid out.
• The Channels are seemingly in a random order, which doesn’t make scrolling through for a channel easy, but the search is simple enough to find what you are looking for.
• The DVR is just plain weird…YouTube is big on “Unlimited DVR”, so much so that it leaves a few features to just be head scratchers, some of which make it difficult to figure out what you’ve seen and what you haven’t. For example:
  • They feel the need to record every instance of a show. If MasterChef is new on Wednesday night, they record it. They rerun an older episode Friday night, they record it. This means the DVR is overloaded with episodes of MasterChef. Shouldn’t really be a big issue, except…
  • They don’t let you delete anything. If you delete something from your DVR it deletes all episodes of it…past, present, and future. And you need to “re-add it” in order to record future episodes.
• They record whichever instance of a show they feel like, not necessarily the one you choose. An example from this week:
  I recorded the Home Run Derby Monday night, off of ESPN, a 2-hour program.
  Tuesday morning I watched it, and it all worked fine.
  Sometime in the day on Tuesday they decided to replace it with a 2 1/2 hour version of the program off of ESPN 2.
  This doesn’t seem like a big deal…except ESPN 2 was the Spanish language Derby, while ESPN was in English. Bye-bye English commentary.
• I wish they had more in app settings. For example, let me choose to “stream only over Wi-Fi”.
  I log into the app over 4G, just to add something to my DVR, and instantly it starts playing the first channel in the queue, which burns through unnecessary data. And yes, I’m gonna hit my limits for the month.

I plan on keeping YouTube TV for two months total, and unless they really wow me, I’m going to give Hulu TV a try as well.