Friday BP, 8/9/19

Good morning, McCoven!

I’m a day late and a dollar short on everything this week, but I wanted to rant a little bit about this whole YouTube thing. Sure, that game was yesterday but there will be more. And yes, it’s an improvement from Facebook games, I’ll give you that, since you don’t have to have an account to watch. But I’d like to revisit this from when they first started doing the Facebook games:

“What channel is the game on, Bob?”

“Well, it should be on NBC Sports Bay Area. Unless there’s a Warriors game, then it will be on The CW. Unless you’re out of market, then it’s on MLB.tv. Unless it’s a Tuesday, then it’ll be on Facebook. Except for every other Sunday when it’s on ESPN. Unless it’s a full moon, and then it’ll be on Twitter. That is as long as we’re not talking about a blue moon, and then it will be on Hulu.”

Almost all of the points I made in that post are still accurate. This doesn’t really target the youths, and while it may be a free game to lure people in, there is still no in-market way for people to pay to stream all of the games. So even if you get sucked in on a free YouTube game, you’re likely never going to watch another one if you don’t have some kind of cable subscription.

Where this improves, I suppose, is that YouTube TV is an alternative to cable, and that could be their way of trying to entice viewers to their service. But that basically makes the whole thing “free” advertising for YouTube. At the expense of everyone already paying to watch the games elsewhere who can’t when the games are on YouTube.

Last, but certainly not least, have you been on YouTube??? I’m writing this before Thursday’s YouTube game airs, but if it has open comments, goodness gracious, watch out. People feel free to be their vilest selves on YouTube comments. And no one wants to have to watch that garbage pour through in order to watch a baseball game.

This could just be me “get off my lawn”-ing, but I think the whole gimmick of streaming a few games on social media is dumb and while it may not be the hill I choose to die on, I don’t think anything will make me change my mind.