What Happened
On Wednesday YouTube officially launched its live TV streaming service YouTube TV in five regional markets, including New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area. This marks yet another high-profile entry of a tech giant into the OTT streaming market, as the battle for retaining TV subscribers and, more importantly, selling TV packages to cord-cutters and cord-nevers, continues to heat up.
Announced a little over a month ago, the “skinny bundle” from YouTube will cost $35 per month and cover live TV programming from all four major U.S. broadcasting networks — ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC — as well as their affiliated cable channels such as ESPN and Bravo. YouTube also says it will soon add several AMC Networks channels, such as AMC, BBC America, BBC World News, IFC, Sundance TV and We TV to the service’s standard tier. Previously, the AMC Networks was reportedly working on an ad-free streaming service of its own for cable subscribers.
What Brands Need To Do
This launch marks another channel for brands to reach the audience that has abandoned linear TV viewing in favor of time-shifted viewing, as YouTube TV will carry all the live TV ads. Taking the vast user data and the sophisticated ad operations that Google owns into account, it seems likely that the search giant will be offering some ad tech integrations with the streaming service and allow brands to target audience in a more granular, personalized manner.
Source: Marketing Land
Header image courtesy of YouTube
