 YouTube is the world's most popular online video platform. It's bigger than pretty much everything. Everything except television. Now, traditional broadcast and cable television are increasingly less popular with young, millennial viewers, but TV is still the biggest game in town. Today, those two worlds are coming together with the launch of the new YouTube TV service. For $35 a month, subscribers get access to all four of the big broadcast networks plus 30-something cable channels. For the traditional television industry, this is a chance to grab those elusive millennials who are too busy staring at their smartphones to notice there's a TV set on. And for YouTube, this is a chance to get people who have always watched for free and turn them into paying subscribers. Now, when you open up the mobile app, the first thing you see is a selection of live broadcasting. If one of those shows has been selected as your favorite, it'll automatically be saved to your cloud DVR. You have an unlimited amount of storage, free on Google, and you can keep anything there for up to nine months. Now, if something's been favorited and it's going to my DVR, I can scrub through live programming. So if I show up in the middle of an episode, I can just scroll back to the beginning. Now, everything you save in your DVR is stored in a section of the app called your library. It's smart enough to know that if I search for a movie, say, No Country for Old Men, I'm going to want that no matter what channel it's playing on. So it'll search around, and the first time that broadcast comes up, it'll save it to my DVR. Now, there are blackouts here for things like regional sports or news, but once a game is saved to my DVR, I can watch it no matter what location I'm in. The other big feature, not surprisingly, is search. Now, this is a place where YouTube has a lot of experience. You can do search by genre, by show, or even by keyword. If I search for time travel, the app is smart enough to show me movies and TV series that have this theme involved. Say I search for Tom Cruise. It's going to come up with shows he's been in recently, films, and of course, related episodes. But it's also going to show me highlights from the web, YouTube stuff I wouldn't ordinarily see on television. YouTube is far from the first service to come to market, offering to combine streaming video with traditional television. But a lot of other players have stumbled during big events. Have you ever tried to stream the Super Bowl? What YouTube does have is global infrastructure and a lot of experience with big live events, so it seems well poised to finally solve this pain point. YouTube has built a massive global audience, primarily by offering entertainment for free. A lot of that stuff has even come from traditional television. Now it's trying to marry those two worlds together, and it's betting it will be enough to get young viewers to finally pull out their credit cards.