MotorTrend+ is Shutting Down

I may spring for YT Premium too. It's pretty much all I watch aside from Hulu and Max. I can sit down every night and find an easy 2 hours of content worth watching.

Uncle Tony's Garage, Sleeperdude, Vice Grip Garage, NNKH, Pole Barn Garage are ones I'm subscribed to. I also watch a lot of Arkansas police chase videos. 

Then there's the motorcycle channels like Classic Motorcycle Channel, Spite's Corner, Missenden Flyer, Bullpen Cycles.

Plus a once per week hit of Updating (talk about a guilty pleasure) and I've got a full plate of entertainment.  At this point, though, the mid-roll ads are becoming pretty irritating instead of just mildly annoying.

Time spent on this channel has been dropping drastically for the last year.  So no great loss. Car TV shows are like cars, not every type is for every one.  

Can we just go back to reading magazines?

I totally missed the email & news about MT + going away. I saw something about it a few weeks ago on a youtube channel...disappointing.  My account was just transitioned to Discovery +.  I thought they were going to automatically refund everybody...guess not.

It was a great deal when it was $15 or $25/year.  I was happy to pay it, becasue on cable or Hulu the commercails are unbearable.  At ~$50/year I had to stop & think before I let it auto-renew.  I find myself watching youtube more often.  Youtube commercials continue to get worse & more frequent.  I think discovery + is >$60/year...so unless I find a compelling reason, I probably won't renew. 

Seems like all of the Freiburger/Finnegan/Dulcich shows that were on MT+ have been transitioned over to MAX.   That's where I've been watching them. 

Finally got the switchover notice from MToD to Discovery+ with the huge price increase. Immediately canceled and told them why.

Man this sucks. No more Hoonigan, no more Freiburger & Finnegan, no more Grand Tour, all the good car stuff is dead and gone.

I wish I could say I am going to miss their content but they screwed the pooch when they left broadcast TV and youtube and tried to make everything reality TV with fake drama.  

I have not watched anything that they have produced in 3-4 (may be 5) years now.  Not just their car-related content I mean anything on Discovery and its associated networks at all.  It is a broken business model.  How does a place like Discovery spend 10's of thousands of dollars on an episode of some show and only get 200-300K views when people on YouTube are spending the cost of electricity to charge an iPhone and to power a small shop and are getting the same or more views. And arguably putting out better / more watchable content.  Tony's YouTube channel comes to mind. 

Tyler Hoover's other channel "Good Morning Youtube" recently did a thing about this and he has had a bit of an insider look at the actual numbers due to him having a show in cable tv.  A good watch if you are interested in that stuff.  

DasAuto said:

Finally got the switchover notice from MToD to Discovery+ with the huge price increase. Immediately canceled and told them why.

Man this sucks. No more Hoonigan, no more Freiburger & Finnegan, no more Grand Tour, all the good car stuff is dead and gone.

I don't recall getting a notice. Email? Snail mail? How'd they let you know? I'm ready to drop it.

vwcorvette (Forum Supporter) said:

DasAuto said:

Finally got the switchover notice from MToD to Discovery+ with the huge price increase. Immediately canceled and told them why.

Man this sucks. No more Hoonigan, no more Freiburger & Finnegan, no more Grand Tour, all the good car stuff is dead and gone.

I don't recall getting a notice. Email? Snail mail? How'd they let you know? I'm ready to drop it.

I logged onto MToD to watch a show and it was Discovery+ instead. Then I checked my account and the renewal was $56/year instead of $20/year.

dean1484 said:

I wish I could say I am going to miss their content but they screwed the pooch when they left broadcast TV and youtube and tried to make everything reality TV with fake drama.  

I have not watched anything that they have produced in 3-4 (may be 5) years now.  Not just their car-related content I mean anything on Discovery and its associated networks at all.  It is a broken business model.  How does a place like Discovery spend 10's of thousands of dollars on an episode of some show and only get 200-300K views when people on YouTube are spending the cost of electricity to charge an iPhone and to power a small shop and are getting the same or more views. And arguably putting out better / more watchable content.  Tony's YouTube channel comes to mind. 

Tyler Hoover's other channel "Good Morning Youtube" recently did a thing about this and he has had a bit of an insider look at the actual numbers due to him having a show in cable tv.  A good watch if you are interested in that stuff.  

And what really beggars the mind is that the high-paid TV execs can't figure this out.  Perhaps they aren't really as smart as everyone has always told them.

rustomatic said:

Can we just go back to reading magazines?

Oh lord no.  I bet I threw away over 1000 a few years ago.  It that database was searchable I'd be all for it.

DasAuto said:

vwcorvette (Forum Supporter) said:

DasAuto said:

Finally got the switchover notice from MToD to Discovery+ with the huge price increase. Immediately canceled and told them why.

Man this sucks. No more Hoonigan, no more Freiburger & Finnegan, no more Grand Tour, all the good car stuff is dead and gone.

I don't recall getting a notice. Email? Snail mail? How'd they let you know? I'm ready to drop it.

I logged onto MToD to watch a show and it was Discovery+ instead. Then I checked my account and the renewal was $56/year instead of $20/year.

Where and how did you check your account? Did you go to Discovery +? Or look it up on a browser? I don't need to spend that kind of money when I can find other, better, less scripted stuff on YT.

I was a Hot Rod magazine subscriber.  When the magazine went to quarterly, they gave me a free year of MotorTrend+.  Then, when they moved the video content to Discovery+ they gave me a free year of that.  The magazines and news updates are still on MotorTrend+.  They have all issues of Hot Rod and Motor Trend back to Volume 1, Issue 1; along with a ton of other magazines with varying amounts of back issues.

I've seen most of the car shows on television by now, and most of the other existing content on Discovery+ doesn't interest me (I'm NOT going to watch episodes of Dr. Pimple Popper) but I see they have all the old episodes of Mythbusters so I may go back and watch some of them.

In reply to vwcorvette (Forum Supporter) :

I went to MToD on my browser and was redirected to discovery+. Same login info. 

Their first strike for me was when they srarted buying the exclusive rights to motorsports events. We watched World RX. Even SWIMBO liked it. had her own driver and everything. MTOD bought exclusive rights and then didn't broadcast the races, just uploading all the races every 6 months or so. not the way I want to follow my sport.

I finally dumped MTOD when they decided to stop supporting the XBOX app.

You can cast it from your phone they said. Yeah sure, but last week I could just watch it on my TV. This is a step backwards.

I miss the early golden era of netflix before every lousy corporation decided they needed their own streaming service.  EnE36 M3ification is ruining everything.

AClockworkGarage said:

Their first strike for me was when they srarted buying the exclusive rights to motorsports events. We watched World RX. Even SWIMBO liked it. had her own driver and everything. MTOD bought exclusive rights and then didn't broadcast the races, just uploading all the races every 6 months or so. not the way I want to follow my sport.

 

I finally dumped MTOD when they decided to stop supporting the XBOX app.

You can cast it from your phone they said. Yeah sure, but last week I could just watch it on my TV. This is a step backwards.

 

I miss the early golden era of netflix before every lousy corporation decided they needed their own streaming service.  EnE36 M3ification is ruining everything.

I quite MT+ for a while when they stopped supporting x-box.  Eventually, SWMBO bought a ROKU so I subscribed again.  Generally discovery is trash.  Every show basically shows a preview of the prior 10 minutes  before each commercial and a recap of the prior 10 minutes after each commercial.  For an hour long show there's probably 40 minutes of broadcast, and an actual 15 minutes of content. the MT+ stuff doesn't follow this format, but pretty much everything else on discovery channel does. 

They made such a huge fuss about getting top gear UK on it and it lasted a few months.  Then roadkill started becoming stale and they cancelled dirt every day.  They shot themselves in their own foot.

camopaint0707 said:

.... they cancelled dirt every day.  They shot themselves in their own foot.

True.

I logged into the Discover + site for the first time over the weekend.  The only thing extra worth watching on there is American Pickers.  As soon as I watch all the back episodes (I'm on season 3 now)  I'll be canceling my subscription. 

R.I.P. MotorTrendonDemand.

Ahoy, Mateys!

For those who don't like ads on youtube, a few options for you:

SmartTubeNext if you have Android TV, either native or set-top-box.  This solution has been rock solid on my Nvidia Shield.  

ReVanced if you watch from a phone or tablet.  This solution is a little more jank, you have to download an APK, patch it, and side-load it along with some google service mods to make it work, but once its running its tip-top.  Fortunately the patcher walks you through the steps to get the correct APK and how to patch.

Using ReVanced, you can use 3rd party downloaders to download full res, full content youtube videos that can be watched offline - very nice for times of little to no signal or if you want to download via Wifi.

To date I have not found a great solution for TVs that run WebOS, thats why our primary tv (LG OLED) runs an Nvidia Shield.  There are modified youtube apps but they only run for about 2 days because they have to be run in Dev Mode and Dev Mode has a timer on it on the LGs.  I havent looked in about 6 months though either.

Regarding MTOD/D+, I got that email that they were switching to D+ and thought my account got hacked when I got the "you have been subsribed" email.  So I cancelled it.  Then I went to watch Roadkill via Amazon Prime Video and MTOD was gonezo.  

I try to sail the high seas as much as I can.  For some reason, Roadkill and Roadkill Garage are tough to find on the ocean, so I pay for D+.  What I *should* do is get my trial month and pull all the new content down locally then cancel, but I am a lazy, lazy dude.  

camopaint0707 said:

They made such a huge fuss about getting top gear UK on it and it lasted a few months.  Then roadkill started becoming stale and they cancelled dirt every day.  They shot themselves in their own foot.

They canceled Dirt Everyday?!?  I thought we were just waiting for another season.  I didn't like it at first...but it really grew on me to the point it became one of my favorites.   I really don't watch a ton of TV anymore, but do still watch most of the roadkill stuff & wheeler dealers.  Frankly, I could probably live without all of it and just binge watch periodically.

In reply to 93gsxturbo :

I wish those tips were in English. I understood about half of that.

In reply to 93gsxturbo :

+1 for SmartTubeNext on Android TV.

For Android phones/tables, you might also want to look at NewPipe. I've been using it for years; it works great and doesn't require many of the steps required by Revanced. 

Hoondavan said:

They canceled Dirt Everyday?!?  I thought we were just waiting for another season.  I didn't like it at first...but it really grew on me to the point it became one of my favorites.   I really don't watch a ton of TV anymore, but do still watch most of the roadkill stuff & wheeler dealers.  Frankly, I could probably live without all of it and just binge watch periodically.

Both guys from Dirt Every Day have their own YouTube channels, so you can keep up on what they're doing.

The lack of any kind of evolution in any of the channels is a turnoff. Its like discovering a new favourite restaurant, after 4 or 5 times of going there you have eaten what you are going to eat off the menu, The menu ain't gonna change so time to find a new place.

I like that Finnegan and De Angelo have shown up on YouTube.

Killing Dirt Every Day was real sad for me.  Fred and Dave were as good as Freiburger and Finnegan with their antics and chemistry and the show was a lot more grassroots and less "produced" feeling.

Dirthead Dave (The Dirthead Shed) on Youtube is pretty good.  Dave has some good production values, decent mix of tech and entertainment, and is genuinely fun to watch. 

Fred Williams.....I try.....  I just can't get into Fred's content, not sure why.  I feel legit bad for the dude.   He is funny, good with tech, and a good storyteller but the content on his channel is not ideal.  The lack of good production kills it for me.

Finnegan's Youtube channel is meh.  I can't watch 1:15 of Finnegan derping around, if the episodes were 20 minutes I would watch every one.  

Roadkill and Roadkill garage are worth watching, get some genuine tech and genuine laughs.  But we should pour out a 40 for all the good E36 M3 we have lost.  Junkyard Gold...Dirt Every Day...is Engine Masters cancelled yet?

On the NewPipe/ReVanced discussion I had Newpipe on my tablet and I am not sure if I got a bad APK or what but it did not play nice on my decent tablet (top end Galaxy Tab).  Lotta crashing, some weird adds and missing stuff that looked like ads should have been there, etc.  ReVanced just works, as long as you are OK with patching it from time time time as Youtube comes out with new updates.