Time to try YouTube TV again

I'm going to start with stuff I say all the time. I don't need a year-round live streaming service. I'll subscribe to live streaming services during college football season in order to get the sports channels I want, and use that time to also catch up with anything else on the live-streaming service. While I'll often use Sling TV, I may switch to another service for a month if there is some content with which I want to play catchup on that other service. But, I don't always have time to do a proper evaluation of the service, since I'm really focusing on something specific, and that's my priority.

The rest of the year, I'll drop the live streaming services and rotate on-demand services. Paramount+ one month, Disney+ another, HBO Max another, and so on. But, I'll occasionally subscribe to a live streaming service just to check it out. And I'm doing that with YouTube TV.

For the next four weeks, I'll have a subscription to YouTube TV, simply to check out the service. It's been a while since I used the service, and I want to see if it's gotten better, worse, or about the same. And the only way to know is to actually try. Plus, it helps me get an better understanding of why people think they need a live streaming service. I think I know why they think that, but actually doing it for a month helps me stay connected to their mindset, at least a little.

Will I keep YouTube TV for more than a month? Nope. No way. I've been doing this long enough to know that I absolutely do not need a live streaming service. I know what it brings to the table -- it's like having cable -- and it's not that important to me. If I want to watch something specific, I am already able to do that. I can buy the shows cheaper than spending $65/month or $744/year. I can buy a lot of TV for $744, and keep it more than a year. And if I want to just put the TV on and let it play, there's Pluto TV, Xumo, Roku Channel, and others. Those are free. And so is over the air TV. I've already purchased the antenna, and can stream live over the air TV to any device in the house. Or one of my 1,748 movies I have on Plex.

And if I wasn't happy with the older content as background noise, there are cheaper ways to get live streaming content that is okay to be on in the background. Frndly.TV is only $7/month.

All that to say I won't keep YouTube TV for more than a month. But I'm going to give it another look, just to keep myself up to speed on what it offers and how well it works. While it won't be a regular part of my Streaming Life, I'll better understand why you might want it as part of yours.