I hate how expensive YouTube TV is. Here’s why I pay for it anyway

I love YouTube TV. Out of all the streaming subscriptions I pay for, it’s the one I use the most. Between watching live sports, throwing on HGTV for background noise while I do chores around the house, or putting Nat Geo Wild on for my dog while I’m out getting groceries, I use it multiple times per day every single day. That said, I absolutely hate how expensive it is.

When YouTube TV launched in 2017, the $35/month price seemed too good to be true. And as it turns out, it was. The service got a couple of modest price increases in 2018 and 2019 to $40 and then $50. It went up to $65 in 2020, and when I signed up for YouTube TV in 2023, it cost $73. Now, in 2025, YouTube TV costs a hefty $83 per month — meaning its price has increased by over 137% since its launch. That’s a genuinely disgusting number.

These price increases are the single worst thing about YouTube TV, and I don’t blame anyone at all for canceling their subscription because of them. However, I say that as someone who — despite how expensive it is — continues to pay for it month after month. As much as I hate the monthly bill, here’s why I’m still subscribed to YouTube TV in 2025.

I used to not care about sports at all. For most of my life, I ignored them completely and couldn’t be less interested in them. But over the last three years, I’ve gotten very into college basketball and the NFL. That means sports watching is a regular occurrence in my home, and this is an area where YouTube TV is exceptional.

When watching sports on YouTube TV, the app adds a few additional UI elements and features specifically for them. One of these is a dedicated stats page that shows the live score and team breakdowns for key events in a game. While watching basketball, for example, you can see how many turnovers, blocks, rebounds, etc., each team has gotten, plus their field goal and three-pointer percentages. You also get a breakdown of the players for each team, with individual stats for all of them.

One of the other pages lists key plays for the game. While watching the Colorado St. vs. Memphis game recently, I had to leave during it to walk my dog, and when I got back inside, my partner told me I had missed a ridiculous three-pointer that CSU made. So, I opened up the key plays page and immediately found the play my partner was talking about.

Could I have manually skimmed through the game to find it? Sure. But if you’ve ever tried skipping through a game to find a specific play, you know how much of a pain in the rear it can be. Being able to look at a list of key plays and pick the one I want to see a replay of is nothing short of magical.

And there’s more still. The scores page shows scores for related live games in the same league, which is particularly helpful during March Madness and the early part of the season in the NFL. You can even link your fantasy football account and see your fantasy stats right alongside a live game.

None of this matters if you don’t care about sports, but if you do, it makes watching them on YouTube TV far superior to any competing service. You may be able to watch many of the same games on Hulu or Sling, but they won’t be nearly as engaging as they are on YouTube TV.

Speaking of sports, another hook YouTube TV has in me is its offering of the NFL Sunday Ticket. I signed up for the Sunday Ticket for the first time about midway through this most recent NFL season, and, unfortunately for my wallet, it was phenomenal.

The Sunday Ticket gives you access to every single NFL game, and if you’re a football nut like I am, it’s simply the best. It’s the reason I was able to watch the Vikings pull off an unbelievable overtime win against the Bears during Week 12 last season, and that alone was almost worth the price of admission.

That price is pretty high ($378 for the season), but if you love the game of football, it’s worth it — and it’s something you can’t get with any other live TV streaming service.

While you could watch all these games individually and manually switch between them, doing it with multiview is the way to go. This allows you to watch two, three, or four games at a time, and it’s just as amazing as it sounds. There were multiple weekends last fall when my TV had four NFL games playing simultaneously, and it was a thing of beauty. It’s also come in handy right now during March Madness, where four or five games are happening at once during the first two rounds of the tournament.

Also, while I don’t use it as often for this, I appreciate that YouTube TV has some multiview options outside of live sports — including a news one with Fox News, CNN, MSBC, and BBC News, plus a business news multiview that includes CNBC and Fox Business. As someone who likes to keep tabs on all major news outlets, this is great.

I’ve talked a lot about sports, so let’s move to something more general. Whether you’re a sports fanatic or not, there’s plenty to like about YouTube TV’s app design.

While it may not be anything groundbreaking, YouTube TV does a great job of laying everything out in a simple, easy-to-understand manner. The Live tab is a traditional live TV guide, and your Library neatly organizes everything you’ve saved to your DVR.

Meanwhile, the main Home page shows recommended live TV channels, upcoming sports, and filters to browse through content by different categories (including reality, comedy, shows, movies, etc.). Whether you’re using the Android app or the TV app on something like a Google TV Streamer or Apple TV, it’s a clean, straightforward experience that I’ve never had an issue with.

One of the best things about YouTube TV is how much control you have over the guide. In addition to the main default view, you can also organize the order channels appear by A-Z, Z-A, or by your most watched. What I use, though, is the “custom” option.

Here, you can choose which TV channels you do (or don’t) want to appear in your guide, which ones you want to mark as your “top channels,” and completely customize the order in which every channel appears. There’s a lot to dig into, and setting up your guide exactly how you want it does take some time, but I absolutely love that Google lets you do this.

Having over 100 channels to choose from is great, but there are some I don’t care about and others I watch daily. The option to hide unwanted channels and make the ones I care about more easily visible is amazing, and it’s easily one of YouTube TV’s strong points.

YouTube TV is fantastic for at-home watching, but it’s equally great for use while traveling. I was going on one to two work trips per month last year, and I used YouTube TV flawlessly during all of them.

Surprisingly, YouTube TV’s travel restrictions are super reasonable. So long as you use YouTube TV once every three months in your home area, you’re free to use it anywhere and as often as you’d like throughout the U.S. I’ve even managed to get YouTube TV working on some in-flight Wi-Fi networks.

The best part is that YouTube TV doesn’t make you jump through any hoops at any time. When you first open the app outside of your home area, you’ll get a pop-up asking you to confirm that you’re traveling. Once you do that, you can start watching just as you usually would.

YouTube TV has a lot going for it, and for what I want from a live TV streamer, it’s about as perfect as it gets. The sports experience is top-tier, multiview is a godsend, the app is well-designed and wonderfully customizable, and the service is a great travel companion, too.

That all said, there has to be a breaking point sooner or later.

As much as I use and enjoy YouTube TV, there’s no denying that $83/month is a lot of money — especially considering just how cheap YouTube TV used to be a few short years ago. I could probably stomach another small price hike to $85/month, but if it goes any higher, I’ll seriously consider canceling and switching to another service.

Unfortunately, given YouTube TV’s track record here, that’s almost certainly what’s going to happen. When that next price increase does inevitably come, Google needs to make it justified. Include 4K streaming quality as a default feature. Give all YouTube TV subscribers a YouTube Premium or YouTube Premium Lite membership included. If we’re looking at another $10/month increase in the next year or two, it has to come with something more than Google’s repeated excuse of needing to “keep up with the rising cost of content.”

Google has something good going with YouTube TV, but price hike after price hike has — understandably — made it far less appealing to a lot of people. Google hasn’t priced me out of the service quite yet, but I’m not confident that’ll be true a year or two from now.