YouTube TV — the most popular live-streaming service in the U.S. — had some major issues Tuesday evening.
The service has more than 5 million subscribers, many of which are vacant as of 6pm ET. The Channel Guide was live. But pick a show and you just get a blank screen. The culprit appears to be some kind of licensing bug across multiple devices, and we start seeing channels coming back around 7:25pm ET. YouTube TV acknowledges outage on Twitter.
If you’re having trouble watching @YouTubeTV rn, we’re currently experiencing some ~technical issues~ but we’re working on a fix! ! Stay tuned 📺
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) September 6, 2022
The YouTube team’s Twitter account states that it’s “working on a fix,” which could mean the service will resume as soon as possible. But no ETA was given. DownDetector, which tracks user-reported website outages, showed a spike in YouTube outages early Tuesday night. A post on the status page of competing service Philo (found on Reddit) also appears to have been affected, noting that Google’s Widevine DRM service was experiencing an outage starting around 6pm ET. According to its website, Widevine “provides the ability to license, securely distribute. and secure content playback on any consumer device.” In other words, exactly the kind of thing a streaming service needs — and the ability to single-handedly destroy an entire stream of media The kind of thing that serves. Not every channel on YouTube TV appears to be affected. We were able to watch some channels – including local broadcast affiliates. Others go blank before a playback error occurs on the screen.
- The blackout happened the same day YouTube TV announced that it now supports 5.1 surround sound on Apple TV, but there is no sign of any correlation . No streaming service (or any kind of web service, really) has ever had an outage, and YouTube TV has had some pretty serious outages in the past. But now that it’s the largest streaming service in the country — with about a million more subscribers than Hulu With Live TV — any disruption would be an even bigger deal. YouTube TV itself costs $65 per month for about 100 channels. It’s available on every major streaming platform, including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast with Google TV, various smart TVs, game consoles, and web browsers. Editor’s Choice YouTube TV now supports 5.1 surround sound on Apple TV, other Fire TV TiVo has partnered with Vestel in Europe to launch its first Smart TV LG The 42-inch LX3 OLED TV can bend at will T-Mobile adds a free year of Apple TV+ to its most expensive plan How to Get Disney+: Everything You Need to Know
