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YouTube TV adds Magnolia Network and other FAST channels

By Phil Nickinson June 1, 2023

YouTube TV on Roku. — Phil Nickinson/Digital Trends

YouTube TV has added a handful of channels of the FAST variety — that is, the sort of thing you’d find on an ad-supported service like Tubi or The Roku Channel. The additions are hardly the only FAST channels on the largest live-streaming service in the U.S., which has more than 5 million subscribers as of June 2022.

New to YouTube TV are Magnolia Network, Charge!, TBD TV, and T2. The CW also makes an appearance in the list of new channels after a new deal was reached earlier this spring.

Charge! (which usually is stylized in all-caps, but we’re not animals here) is “your television home for action, adventure, explosions, spin kicks, regular kicks, punches, gun fights, more explosions, action-stars, ninjas, tough cops, nice cops, motorcycle cops, even more explosions, and every once-in-a-while, a tender kiss … Followed quickly by a punch and a really big explosion!” So there’s that.

T2 is an offshoot of the Tennis Channel that expanded coverage of the sport and made it available as a FAST channel, outside the traditional cable/satellite realm. It first was available on Samsung TV Plus in early 2022.

TBD TV is one of those “best of the Internet” channels that “handpick[s] the most entertaining stuff from the most creative creators and put it on your TV for a new adventure every day.”

And Magnolia Network likely needs no introduction, but we’ll do so anyway — it’s the standalone channel featuring Chip and Joanna Gaines that first debuted as part of Discovery+ and is now available as part of the service previously known as HBO Max.

YouTube TV is available on every major streaming platform in the U.S. It costs $73 a month, and has options for some content in 4K resolution, and numerous add-on services — and it’s the exclusive home of NFL Sunday Ticket starting this fall. (Well, alongside YouTube proper.)

And as a reminder: If you customize your YouTube TV live guide, you’ll need to manually enable the new channels to see them.

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Probably the most interesting is that YouTube TV is "testing transcoding changes, including a bit rate increase for live 1080p content." Resolution — that's the 1080p number — is just one part of what makes up the quality of the picture on your screen. Bit rate is another. Basically it refers to the amount of data being pushed to make up that resolution — like the difference between a 1,080-piece puzzle with a picture made up of five colors, or one made up of 500 colors. Think of it like that. The higher the bit rate, the better the picture. And as we've discussed before, we'll take a 1080p stream with a higher bit rate over a bad 4K stream any day of the week, particularly when it comes to sports (which is exactly what we've seen with Apple's excellent MLS streams).

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Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs were crowned the winners of Super Bowl LVII and closed out the 2022-23 NFL season. But that was the past. It's time to look ahead toward the 2023-24 season — and some massive changes already are taking shape. First, there's no more Tom Brady. And second is that NFL Sunday Ticket no longer will be on DirecTV and is making the leap to YouTube and YouTube TV.

That's a big deal for a couple of reasons. It'll make NFL Sunday Ticket — which lets you watch pretty much any NFL game you want every week — available to far more people because it no longer will be shackled to satellite TV. Meanwhile, YouTube TV last reported more than 5 million subscribers in mid-2022. (The company doesn't regularly give updates on subscription totals.) And then there's YouTube proper, whose availability and popularity are hard to quantify in the same terms as traditional television numbers because it's just there.

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The YouTube TV on a Roku TV.

When you think of streaming video, you think YouTube. And so YouTube TV — Google's live TV streaming service — very much just makes sense for a lot of people. Designed for those who want to cut the cord and ditch their cable or satellite subscriptions (and known in the industry as a multichannel video programming distributor, or MPVD), YouTube TV competes in the same arena as other streaming television services like DirecTV Stream (formerly known as AT&T TV Now and DirecTV Now), Sling TV, FuboTV, and Hulu With Live TV.

And YouTube TV offers a unique mix of features that make it very appealing, so much so that it's now the No. 1 service in the U.S. in terms of the number of paid subscribers, with some 5 million subscribers as of June 2022 — up some 2 million from the last time the service gave an update in October 2020. The popularity is due to several factors. YouTube TV is easy to use. It's got a selection of channels that's competitive with all its rivals. And the YouTube TV price is competitive, too. You're able to watch YouTube TV on pretty much any modern device. And the fact that parent company Alphabet (aka Google) has been marketing the heck out of it the past few years certainly hasn't hurt, either.