*By Carlo Versano* Cord cutters, rejoice! YouTube TV, Google's ambitious live-television streaming service, is going nationwide. The platform will soon add 95 new markets, making it available to 98 percent of U.S. households, Google ($GOOGL) announced Wednesday ー just one of several major announcements in the streaming industry this week. Viacom, which does not make its content available on YouTube TV, agreed to buy PlutoTV for more than $300 million. Meanwhile, Hulu lowered the monthly subscription price of its basic plan while raising the price of its live TV plan, days after Netflix ($NFLX) announced it would raise the price of some of its plans. Those developments follows recent announcements from Disney ($DIS), Warner Media and NBCUniversal about their own proprietary streaming platforms. And, of course, there's the dark horse: Apple, which is expected to roll out its own global streaming service in the first half of this year. For Google, the timing of the expanded availability comes just before the biggest sporting event of the year. That's no coincidence. Consumers repeatedly cite the ability to watch live sports as one of the last remaining reasons to keep their traditional cable packages. Among the live TV streaming services, YouTube TV is unique in that it has already been able to lock down carriage deals with ESPN, Major League Baseball, and the NBA, among others. At $40 per month, YouTube TV still presents a not-insignificant cost for many consumers ー especially when bundled with any of the other existing on-demand services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon ($AMZN) Prime Video. And now, with legacy media companies realizing (perhaps too late) that the future is in owning both the content and the "pipes" to deliver it, the monthly buy-in for popular programming may soon overtake the cost of a traditional cable contract. For Google, it will come down to skinny bundles and scale ー and whether it can get YouTube TV's [reported](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/youtube-tv-shows-tough-economics-of-skinny-bundles) 800,000 subscribers to something approaching Comcast's 20 million. As of now, most streaming platforms are still losing money on each new customer as they build out their content libraries. Even Netflix, the envy of the media world, burns cash at a staggering rate.
