I had a chat session today with YouTube TV customer support. I wanted to find out the latest information on when they might support 5.1 channel surround sound. The representative confirmed that they don't support surround sound today, only stereo, and they have not projected date when thy will support surround sound.
I'm disappointed. Since we first subscribed, YouTube TV has introduced two large price increases, but still no surround sound. I don't understand what makes this difficult. Over the air broadcast TV supports surround sound, and the number of bits required to encode sound is much smaller than the number of bits required to encode video.
Our YouTube TV "pause" goes into effect in a couple days. Implementing surround sound would be an incentive to reactivate the service.