I maintain that YouTube TV is the very best of the streaming TV services, but good grief is it getting expensive. Today YouTube announced the service’s latest price hike, which brings the monthly subscription to $82.99. The change is effective immediately for new customers and will be reflected starting January 13th for “most existing customers.” As usual, the company attributes this increase to “the rising cost of content and the investments we make in the quality of our service.”
$82.99 is the same price as Disney’s Hulu + Live TV bundle.
YouTube TV last raised its subscription cost to $72.99 in March 2023. Before that, it was $64.99. The days when the service ran only $50 now feel like a lifetime ago. Some of you who got in early might even remember it costing a mere $35 per month.
But since then, YouTube has routinely found itself in carriage disputes with Disney, NBCUniversal, and other content owners, and those renegotiated agreements have led YouTube TV’s price to climb higher and higher. The YouTube TV of today is much different than it used to be; there are more channels, yes, but the service has also shed a number of regional sports networks.
The company is quick to note that none of the service’s core benefits are changing. The base subscription still includes over 100 channels, cloud DVR with unlimited storage, up to six user accounts per household, and the flexibility of three concurrent streams. But YouTube TV still charges extra for 4K streaming, which seems harder to rationalize after this $10 price bump.
The fragmented and frustrating nature of our current EV charging landscape has been widely — and correctly — cited as one of the most significant barriers to EV adoption. Why buy a plug-in car when every time you plug it in, you have to sign up for another EV charging app, fumble through your payment information, authorize the account, and pray it results in a successful charging experience?
“You just go anywhere you want, boom, you plug in, it accounts for everything in the cloud, charges your card, and you walk away,” said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation.
“It’s a security solution for EV charging,” added Tim Weisenberger, project manager for emerging technologies standards at SAE International.
The framework aims to deliver a truly seamless and hassle-free charging experience in which every electric vehicle can plug into any public charger without any additional steps required from the vehicle owner.
This was the intention of the official international standard (ISO 15118), also called Plug & Charge, that enables automatic charging and payment as soon as the car is plugged in. In vehicles with Plug & Charge, the charger communicates securely with the vehicle and bills the owner without the need for app signups or additional billing information.
The technology is currently available in dozens of models but hasn’t been embraced universally. Tesla helped originate the Plug & Charge experience by making its Superchargers interoperable with its passenger vehicles from the very beginning. But Tesla is a unique example as both a vehicle manufacturer and EV charging operator.
To adopt Plug & Charge, other automakers need to make individual deals with third-party charging companies to ensure their vehicles can communicate seamlessly with the charging companies’ equipment.
This new framework developed by SAE International and its partners aims to complement and enhance the ISO standard with a universal protocol that is both secure and simplified. This works because the SAE-led effort includes several unique features, including a Certified Trust List to enable secure, automated authentication right at the onset, when the vehicle is plugged in.
“A little bit more robust system would probably be appropriate,” said Sarah Hipel, acting chief technology officer at the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. “This group... they are focused on that authorization and authentication mechanism specifically, and that is unrelated to the ISO owned 15118-2 standard.”
And the trust list enables roaming, meaning the technology can use multiple PKIs, or Public Key Infrastructure, which describes a collection of tools and procedures that help secure digital communications and transactions. These PKIs can be used interoperably, meaning there can be competition in the marketplace. (The current ISO standard only describes one nonroaming PKI.)
“The trust list is kind of like a big file folder,” Hipel said. “And once you put your anchor in it and it’s been audited — it’s a very rigorous process in order for you to be able to put your anchor in there — but once you put your anchor in there... and they’ve signed their commercial business agreements that they want to access the different routes in the file folder, then you can free roam with anyone.”
Hipel said she expects most manufacturers to use the existing ISO standard for their charging controls and then the PKI mechanism to secure the charge through authorization and authentication.
The framework was an agreement reached between SAE International’s Industry Technologies Consortia, the group’s Electric Vehicle Public Key Infrastructure Consortium, and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which consists of employees of both the US Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy. Members of the SAE consortium include major charging providers, like BP Pulse, ChargePoint, and Electrify America as well as automakers like Ford, General Motors, Tesla, Rivian, Toyota, and BMW. More are expected to join over time.
But ultimately, this is an industry-led project that was initially requested by the automakers and is being funded by them, Weisenberger said. Thus far, the project has cost around $1.5 million, and future funding will be provided by the participating companies.
“Nobody’s free riding,” he added. “Everybody’s involved, working hard. It’s really cool to see that they’re all just in it to make this all work.”
And there will be benefits beyond seamless charging for EV owners, such as secure vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communication and bidirectional charging that will enable EVs to send energy back to the grid to help balance out power loads. This will help create a more resilient grid and should also head off criticism that the current energy system can’t tolerate an all-electric vehicle fleet.
Meta has cut deals for high-profile actors to lend their voices to its Meta AI chatbot, with Kristen Bell among the initial set of voices. Bell lending her voice is a bit of a surprise. Back in June, she openly expressed opposition to Meta’s AI using her data.
She reposted a popular Instagram message declaring that she refused to consent to Meta using her content and likeness for training large language models and demanding that Instagram “get rid of the AI program.”
Kristen Bell / Instagram
The prompt claims that by reposting, users deny Meta permission to use their personal data for these purposes. Celebrities such as Jessica Chastain, Sarah Paulson, and Ashley Tisdale have reposted a recent version of this prompt —...
Wind River's new Debian-based server and edge Linux distribution was born out of a need to create a CentOS replacement that would remove Red Hat from the equation.
Don't be fooled by some of the images you may have seen of the recently dropped second season of AMC psychological drama Dark Winds, which is now available to stream on Netflix. It's set in what could easily pass as a traditional Western atmosphere, but it's a show you can enjoy even if you're not necessarily a fan of the genre itself. Based on Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn & Chee series of novels created by Graham Roland, Dark Winds goes against type in almost every way and provides a terrific whodunit element, a bank heist, black magic, and an ideally used MacGuffin worthy of a nod from Alfred Hitchcock himself.
Log in
