Former Aereo engineer here.
First off, there are really two main reasons for someone not to have a cable subscription:
1. They don't care about the content
2. Price sensitivity
At Aereo, we saw these sort of mix together to create hugely elastic demand.
For a while, we offered a $1 "day pass" that would give you access to live TV for 24 hours at a time.
During the Super Bowl and various award shows, we had crazy numbers of people sign up for these day passes. We actually had to stop offering them, because we literally couldn't build out the extra capacity in a cost-effective way (remember, we needed distinct physical antennas and transcoders for every user we served).
It was tough enough to get people to pay $8/month for access to live broadcast TV and a cloud-based DVR. I have no idea how YouTube will convince anyone to pay $35.
If they can work out the licenses, I'd imagine something like a day pass would work well with consumers – but it's probably hard to get the economics of that to work out.
First off, there are really two main reasons for someone not to have a cable subscription:
1. They don't care about the content
2. Price sensitivity
At Aereo, we saw these sort of mix together to create hugely elastic demand.
For a while, we offered a $1 "day pass" that would give you access to live TV for 24 hours at a time.
During the Super Bowl and various award shows, we had crazy numbers of people sign up for these day passes. We actually had to stop offering them, because we literally couldn't build out the extra capacity in a cost-effective way (remember, we needed distinct physical antennas and transcoders for every user we served).
It was tough enough to get people to pay $8/month for access to live broadcast TV and a cloud-based DVR. I have no idea how YouTube will convince anyone to pay $35.
If they can work out the licenses, I'd imagine something like a day pass would work well with consumers – but it's probably hard to get the economics of that to work out.