Day: July 1, 2020

For the last three years, YouTube TV has been the affordable alternative to pricier live TV streaming services, such as Hulu and AT&T TV. But that price gap just vanished. YouTube TV is jumping from $50 a month to $65 due to the “rising cost of content,” the company announced in a blog post.

You’ll get eight new channels for your money—BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, TV Land, and VH1—with six more coming later this year, for a total of 85+ channels to watch.

But this isn’t exactly the cord-cutting utopia we once envisioned. It’s not a world in which you could ditch the expensive cable TV package and pick and choose the channels you wanted for a much lower monthly price. It once felt that way: Each service offered different bundles of channels, so you could decide which to subscribe to based on what you wanted to watch. Now what appears to be happening, FastCompany noted last summer, is that media company mergers are forcing streaming TV services to add channels—including ones many people might not want—and raising their prices in the process. So you have to pay more for a subscription bloated with options, with no choice to ditch the shit you don’t want to see. Kinda sounds exactly like cable, right?

Christian Oestlien, YouTube TV’s vice president of product management, acknowledged in the blog post announcing the price hike that some subscribers might want more affordable a la carte options.

“As the streaming industry continues to evolve, we are working to build new flexible models for YouTube TV users, so we can continue to provide a robust and innovative experience for everyone in your household without the commitments of traditional TV,” Oestlien said.

The new price is comparable to AT&T TV’s Choice package, which includes 90 channels and a free year of HBO Max for $65/month, and is $10 more than Hulu’s $55/month live TV package, which is Gizmodo’s pick for best live TV streaming service.

But those prices could easily change, too. In April 2019, YouTube TV jumped from $35/month to $50/month. Hulu’s Live TV plan increased by $10 a month last December. AT&T’s Choice package was $50 a month, until it too jumped by $15 to the now-current price of $65/month. How soon until every streaming service is $100/month and we all switch back to cable? What is the point of all this?

YouTube is trying to sweeten the deal with a few new features to keep you from jumping ship, in addition to all the new channels you probably won’t watch. You can now jump to specific segments in a live TV program, like a sporting event (not that there are many of those right now, but maybe one day!) or a newscast. You also still get free unlimited cloud TV storage space for recording your favorite shows.

If that’s not enough to make you want to pay more, the good news is that, unlike with a cable contract, you can always cancel YouTube TV whenever you want out. Or at least you can for now.

Picture this: a screen that doesn’t give you eye fatigue after staring at it for a long period of time, lasts for weeks on a single charge, and offers glorious full color.

Picture this no longer—this is reality. E Ink is finally in color, and 2020 could finally be E Ink’s year to shine. E Ink devices with color displays, like the Hisense A5C and the PocketBook Color, are beginning to hit the market, opening up the use cases for these devices. Imagine reading a comic book or manga on a full-color ereader. Pretty wicked, right?

E Ink was introduced in the late ‘90s, so this is isn’t exactly new technology blowing bloggers’ minds. But it is pretty damn cool, even today.

E Ink consists of basically the same type of liquid that comes in a pen. But instead of depositing the ink on paper like humans have done for hundreds of years, E Ink comes in tiny capsules the diameter of a single human hair. Within these capsules, pigments—commonly black and white—are bonded with a positive or negative charge. To make something visible on an E Ink display, an electrical field charge is sent to the bottom of the display, repelling and attracting the ink within millions of capsules until an image is produced.

So what’s the fuss over a decades-old technology? Look, eye strain isn’t getting any better. In 2019, American consumers’ average screen time on a mobile devices was almost 3 hours and 45 minutes per day. That doesn’t even include time spent watching TV—another 3 hours and 43 minutes per day. That’s a wild amount of time to spend staring at a screen, especially one that beams light straight to your retinas. No, thank you.

I suffer from eye fatigue from time to time, and occasionally it worsens into a tiny migraine. That’s no fun! But E Ink doesn’t cause eye fatigue. I switched from reading on my iPad Pro to flipping through pages on an Amazon Kindle, and I definitely felt the difference.

Then there’s the not-insignificant matter of battery life. E Ink displays take only a fraction of energy to power compared to other displays. I don’t know how many times I have left my apartment in the morning with a fully charged iPhone, only to have to charge it mid-day because I played too many rounds of Brawl Stars.

But E Ink displays do have a ways to go before they can actually compete with the all mighty LCD. Mainly, E Ink’s resolution is abysmal compared to LCD displays. The iPhone Pro 11 and the E Ink Hisense A5C are relatively the same height, but one boasts a 2.7K display with a pixel density of 468, whereas the other comes in at an underwhelming 720p with a 276 ppi—I’m sure you can guess which one is which. (Make sure to check out the video above to see a side-by-side comparison of an LCD and E Ink display.) E Ink displays are also not as ubiquitous as LCDs. Few consumer devices today use E Ink technology compared to LCD. In fact, there are no known upcoming products from U.S. tech companies that use full-color E Ink technology. But we have hope.

But picture this: an iPad Pro that could last a month on a single charge. Or a laptop that doesn’t cause eye fatigue. If the technology continues to improve, maybe the full-color E Ink tablet we long for will become reality in the not-too-distant future.