‘What channel is that on?’ How YouTube TV and others are rewiring us for more ads, less choice

For more than a decade after I graduated from college, I had DirecTV.

I’ve been without it for eight years now. I miss it sometimes.

Specifically I miss how much of a ninja I was flipping channels. Many of you, I suspect, were or are the same.

I’d start by going to 206 for ESPN, then hit ‘Guide’ so it’s on in the background while I look at the sports channels near it. Then I’d flip on, likely heading to the 240-250 channel area to check out USA, FX, Comedy Central, TNT, TBS, Paramount Network, AMC. Maybe check out MTV (until I grew out of it) and IFC in the 300s. Then it was off to all of the 500s, where I’d find a movie I liked that was halfway over. If there wasn’t a game or a show on that I wanted to watch, the 500s were a great safety net that I compared to cocktail hour, bringing out various hors d’oeuvres of movies that I like.

Streaming services have all these movies, and I begrudgingly have all of these streaming services. But the process of opening them up and finding something off a Cheesecake Factory menu takes mental energy.

There was something I liked about “It’s on, it’s right in front of me, if I click it, I’m set, and it’s at my favorite part already.”

It’s why I have watched Top Gun, Wet Hot American Summer, Rounders, Moneyball, White Men Can’t Jump, and Point Break, each at least two dozen times. Flipping led me there, and I was happy to be there. When I moved, I tried to take the DVR with me instead of returning it because I had collected the most incredible selection of movies on it.

If I needed a local channel, I knew the number. If I wanted local sports, I knew the channel. If I sought national news, I knew the number. I was never lost. I was never searching. I was flipping, and I was fucking good at it. Commercial break? Not me. I’m flipping and watching something else.

I switched to U-verse when I moved into a condo that mandated it. The channel numbers changed, but the routine did not. I could find the best thing to watch within a reasonable amount of time and rarely got caught watching more than a few seconds of ads.

Then I moved again, and I gave YouTube TV a whirl. I like it. I like it a lot.

But you know what I don’t like? There are no channel numbers.

They are not a thing on any virtual MVPD to my knowledge (Fubo, Hulu + Live Sports, DirecTV Stream, etc.). When my mom was in town a month ago, she asked, “What channel is The Weather Channel?” because she wanted coverage of a weather event. It’s weird to say, “There are no channel numbers.”

YouTube TV and other vMVPDs purposefully did away with channel numbers. Instead, they prefer home screens and tiles of suggested content. They want to push content to you. They don’t want you to bypass the channels you don’t want in your guide. They want their algorithms to steer you, versus you navigating for yourself. In fact, I don’t think they like it when you scroll through your guide at all. They want you to pick a tile.

Why is that?

On DirecTV, Dish, and cable companies, you used to recognize when a channel was in a carriage dispute easily. You typed in your channel and got something like this.

You KNEW the channel was gone because you had shown up at the place you knew where it was and were visually told “Sorry!”

On YouTube TV, there is no place on the guide for the missing Disney channels. They were quickly ripped from the guide, and since there is no channel number, you don’t realize they’re gone. I have a friend who is a big Cowboys fan, who made it all the way until last week’s Monday Night Football game without realizing he was missing ESPN.

He didn’t know because YouTube TV hides these disputes well. You open the app, and the tiles on the live and home screens still look the same. All is fine! Nothing to see here!

You’re just more likely to click on something that’s still available on YouTube TV before you make the connection. “Wait, I am missing channels?” which is perhaps the whole purpose of changing the interface to start with.

The lack of channel numbers not only hurts your ability to find content quickly and see what you might be missing, but also affects how efficiently you can flip between games. YouTube TV has its own version of a back/previous command, but it’s not as seamless. If you’re on Fox watching a game and want to go to ESPN and then NBC to check games, it’s a whole thing. It’s possible you might not make it.

The nerds decided we wanted a simple remote and numbered channels, and “last” buttons went away. I don’t know about you, but I miss these big old things and how efficient I was with these remotes and the channels they got me to.

Beyond nostalgia, YouTube TV and the other new wave of virtual MVPD providers know exactly what they are doing. They don’t want you to notice something you’re used to is gone, and they don’t want you mastering the channel lineup and being a wizard of flipping to what you want, when you want. They want you to be dependent on them to push content to you. They want you to feel more stuck and, therefore, watch more ads.

They want us to rely on algorithms.

Yes, let’s keep going down that road forever because it seems to be going so well…