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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

(am googler, but don't work with any of the mentioned products)

Keep in mind that all of these products in many cases compete with other companies (music -> spotify, apple, ytr -> netflix/hulu originals, kinda, YTL -> twitch, YTTV -> cable providers). I, as a consumer, wouldn't want these things to all be bundled. I use spotify for my music, and I don't want to have to pay for Play Music or youtube red unless I use those services.

I can't even imagine how some kind of "unified google media" thing would work.

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> I can't even imagine how some kind of "unified google media" thing would work.

It's quite simple. Pay more than a few services (but not as much as all of them together) and get access to all of them. The concept isn't really hard at all. You can go a step further and give increasing discounts the more services you add if you don't want one package deal.

You guys already do it for Youtube Red/Google Play Music. It's not mindblowing to imagine it being expanded from there. There's a common account for all the services anyway, so from a technical perspective you'd have a common place to store subscription information if that's not already done.

Right, but from my perspective as a consumer, at least right now, the only service I'm even remotely interested in is YTTV, and the reverse would be even worse. If I didn't want the YTTV package, there's no way I'd pay $40/mo for play music or whatever. A la carte models are a lot more efficient, the reason I don't like cable (and comcast) is because of bundled services, why on earth would I want to move to another, even more bundled, service?

Plus you've only handled the subscription portion, even if somehow we fix that. Where do I view this content? Is there a unified media dashboard that connects to 3 parts of youtube, play, and such?

I guess my basic point is that these services seem useful for entirely different groups of people. Why would consumers want them bundled, either technically or economically, and similarly, why would Google?

Sure, but that's you. Another person who subscribes to Youtube Red and Youtube TV and <insert something else here> would be more inclined to get a package.

Nobody is advocating taking a la carte away, but packages are known to increase profits because people are going to think "oh I can pay only X more and get Y" instead of evaluating each item individually.

Amazon, for example, has done a great job of balancing between Prime, which is a package subscription, and a la carte subscriptions and addons. You get a Prime music library, and can pay extra to get access to a larger music library, or pay a different price if you don't subscribe to Prime.

Think about it this way. Netflix wanted to separate their DVD and streaming into separate companies, so there would be different websites for each. Consumers complained about that so much that they changed their mind and stayed with one. If Google/YouTube started with a single product and broken it out like it is now, people I think would rightly complain.

I think the most egregious thing is music, rather than YouTube Red or this service itself. There's Google Play where you can buy music, Google Play Music where you can subscribe like Spotify, and YouTube Red also includes unlimited music on top of the shows on Red but is somehow different than Google Play Music. I guess what I would suggest if I had any say in things is just killing the Google Play Music and Google Play Movie/TV brands, and moving the content to YouTube and maybe integrating YouTube into the Google Play app on phones. YouTube already has movies, so it would just be a matter of making the music and live streaming part of it more visible on the home page. I don't see any links to them on my front page.

I would say - just brand them as completely different services unless they are totally dependent. Just because movies are served on top of YouTube doesn't necessarily mean that they literally have to be part of YouTube website. Why not a website like "MovieTube" with its own website and brand? It makes YouTube a single focused website intended to find any/all random videos on internet and people understand when they hear "MovieTube". With YouTube Red, YouTube TV, YouTube Live, YouTube Movies, etc., it is hard to remember which is what.

> Plus you've only handled the subscription portion, even if somehow we fix that. Where do I view this content? Is there a unified media dashboard that connects to 3 parts of youtube, play, and such?

Why does there need to be? YouTube Red/Google Play Music All Access are combined in one subscription, but YouTube itself has a really large number of Google-provided front ends (just for apps, off the top of my head, there is YT, YT Music, YT Kids.) And Google Play Music has its own app, which also.links to video content in YT.

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