2018: Day 93 the one with some thoughts on YouTube TV
Word count 180,605 + 932 or 181,537 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Today was the day that my run with Google’s YouTube TV came to an end. Overall it was a great television service that worked out just fine for watching NCAA tournament coverage. We tested out the voice control using a Google Home Mini connected to my Chromecast Ultra for streaming in the family room. Using voice controls for a television is pretty easy and it worked well enough. One time I forgot to turn it off and it streamed for like 8 hours with nobody watching, but other than that one slight oversight on my part the service worked really well. Seriously, maybe it is not an oversight on my part… maybe just maybe the Chromecast should have an auto-off feature at some point. Maybe that is something that I can turn on as a feature or something.
We are back to having no television contact of any kind. Our internet service is still up and running, but that is about it. The only streaming platform I’m paying for at the moment is Netflix. Maybe at some point I’ll be able to cancel that service as well. Reducing ongoing monthly subscriptions has been my goal for the year. So far this year it is a goal that has been working out reasonably well. Last year I paid for a one year subscription to the Washington Post. That is not a subscription that will be renewing this year. I’m saying goodbye to that news service. Part of giving up on Amazon is also giving up on the Washington Post. Neither of those services need to be a part of my life. Right now I have the New York Times application installed on my phone and a carefully configured Google News feed.
My review of the YouTube TV service is pretty straightforward. Assuming you have enough bandwidth it is a great service. It was less than my cable television costs from before. I got the channels I needed to watch the NCAA tournament and some University of Kansas Jayhawks basketball. It worked great on my computer, but it was not in stunning 4K. We watched games on both the Google Pixel XL and Pixel 2 XL phones. That worked out well. It was pretty easy to setup the Chromecast paired to a Google Home Mini in the family room and have full voice control over YouTube TV. The application sent me alerts about things to watch and the DVR worked out well enough. It worked as described. The only real downside is that it eats bandwidth at a pretty decent rate. My cable modem is capped out at 1 terabyte of bandwidth per month. You could not watch television all day and hope to live under that cap.
At the moment we are back to using the over the air channels that our TiVo Roamio an pick up with an amplified indoor antenna that sits in the family room. That should be enough for now. I’m sure my purchase of a 4K television will correspond to the launch of 4K over the air channels. That is probably some time time off. One of the things that I have been doing during visits to Costco is to check out the 4K television. They really do look pretty good and the prices have come down a ton since they launched. Sometimes I wonder if maybe buying a really good projector would be a better option. At some point, I could imagine projectors replacing television screens as the default home entertainment option. That is not true at the moment. It will probably not be a something that happens anytime soon.
One thing that did happen is that the Google Home Mini that came with the purchase of my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone is now sitting on my dresser. It has replaced my original Amazon Echo. The sound quality would probably be better on a Google Home. The sound quality would be far superior on the Google Home Max. Either option would be better for home audio. The Google Home Mini tries to produce good quality music, but it a very small speaker. On the brighter side of things it knows how to play my Warren Zevon Radio Pandora station. I’ll give it a shot for awhile and see how I like the Google Play Music and Pandora services. The test it so help me understand if the purchase of a Google Home Max would be worth it.
Topic 1: What is advertising about anyway…
We have the ability to make choices. Some of those choices are related to spending money. Those choices are the ones that advertisers are typically interested in influencing. To that end the purchase of advertising time or space is about grabbing attention. That attention is treated like a commodity and is evaluated as such. In the end advertising is about buying attention. Take this Pandora internet radio station I’m listening to right now. My ability to listen to this streaming music is facilitated through segments of my attention being sold to advertisers. In this case the music stops and an advertisement plays. The hope would be that getting my attention and pitching a product of a service will be enough to influence my future buying decisions. That is pretty much the basic nuts and bolts of advertising. It is the art of influencing during the curious of capturing the attention of the audience.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
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