Someday YouTube TV may be great. That day, however, is not today. In less than 24-hours, I went from a trial subscriber to “no way.” Here’s why.
First, you can only watch live tv in certain regions. Even if you sign up in a region which supports live viewing of the major networks you’ll be unable to watch if you travel outside of a region which supports live viewing. This is not a terrible issue, however, the inability to watch the major networks live means that for me YouTube TV is not any better than existing options including DirectTVNow, Sling, PlaystationVue.
The big problem I have is the service offers up to 5 additional shared accounts. Three of which can simultaneously stream content.
The hidden gotcha – true of many of Google’s services – is the family sharing won’t work with G-Suite (aka Google Apps) account.
If Google can figure out how to navigate rush hour traffic in a driverless car they certainly should be able to figure a way to allow G-Suite account holders to check a box in their account which lets G-Suite accounts be treated as if they were “regular” Gmail/Google non-business accounts.
These G-Suite account limitations are just dumb and bad for business. I refuse to support dumb moves like this. I canceled my account immediately upon discovering this hidden defect in YouTube TV family manager.
To sign up for a family group, you must:
- Be 18 or older and have a Google account
- Live in the United States
- Not be part of another family group
- Not be signing up with a G Suite account
Also, forget about buying a YouTube TV subscription and sharing it with friends who are not located in your same region.
From the Google help site:
YouTube TV is currently available to residents of the following areas:
- Chicago
- Los Angeles
- New York City
- Philadelphia
- San Francisco Bay Area
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I agree. The app is a big heaping pile of nope. Even more frustrating is I have been trying to cancel it but the app won’t let me complete the process. Just stays on the page asking for a reason why and never goes to the next step.
So frustrating… It was exciting when they finally made the move to unite G-Suite and Google Accounts many years back. Now we’re back to the waiting game.
Joined and unsubscribed this morning.No local news where I live, deal breaker. I’ll stick to cbs live for 10 bucks with local cbs news.
I often think there’s a team at Google that does nothing but take great ideas and comes up with ways to screw it up.
I too have a G Suite account. For the life of me I don’t get why Google wants to treat us as second-class citizens. Yes, give us a switch that says treat these accounts like normal Gmail accounts!
Our local NBC affiliate wasn’t offered.
I have a first generation Chromecast. Literally everything else works just fine with it. With Google TV it took at least 5 minutes to start streaming and more times than not just timed out. Sorry Google, I’m not going to replace perfectly good Chromecasts that work just fine with YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, etc. so I subscribe to your lackluster service.
Still not fixed for Gsuite. So dumb. I started working on moving my DNS which Google manages to my normal registrar so I am more free to move to O365 if this nonsense keeps up. There is much to like with YouTube TV but these artificial limits like G suite sharing just kills it.
Yeah… Wow. GSuite accounts not allowed. I used and paid for my gsuite domain for over ten years now…