Fubo adds one of YouTube TV’s best features

In a chnage that might actually move the needle toward taking over the No. 3 spot in the (don’t call them) Streaming Wars, Fubo has added a feature that until now has been reserved for the No. 1 player.

That is, you can now record as much streaming TV as you want on Fubo. As in unlimited. As in the same as what YouTube TV has had the whole time. And that’s a pretty big deal for a number of reasons.

First is that, frankly, the idea of “limited” cloud-based recording — by which you’re not playing back anything locally on hard drives with finite storage, but instead using whatever servers the service uses — has long been antiquated. Whether you’re streaming something live or streaming something on demand, the cloud is the cloud. You should have access to all of it.

Then there’s the fact that all of these live streaming services compete with each other. Fubo has been slowly working its way up from the bottom and closed the first three months of 2024 with 1.5 million subscribers. Sling TV has long been in third place (most recently with 1.92 million subs), but has been slowly and consistently growing smaller over the years. Hulu With Live TV has 4.5 million, and YouTube TV has more than 8 million, so they’re very much in a different league. But the simple fact is it remains easy to switch from one service to another, so they all have to continue to compete on price, channels, and features.

Buy at fuboTVThat’s ultimately good for the end consumer, which brings us back to the unlimited recording on Fubo for new and existing subscribers. The pricing information notes that unlimited recording is normally $17 a month, and if you’ve tracked Fubo for a while, you’ll recall that its plans previously topped out at 1,000 hours a month. It’s possible that Fubo found that subscribers weren’t actually using those 1,000 hours, so a move to “unlimited” really doesn’t change things. But it definitely sounds better, doesn’t it? (Recordings also will expire after 9 months. So it’s not unlimited in duration.)

In any event, Fubo’s plans start $80 a month (after a free trial) for 184 channels and the ability to watch on up to 10 devices at once. Things tier up from there to $100 a month for 260 channels.