Youtube Red - No ad YouTube for $9.99 a month

They’re pretty much apples and oranges. Hulu is good way to stream a small subset of US television reasonably soon after it airs. If you like the shows they have deals for, it’s great, if you don’t, it’s pointless.

I like it.

I suspect YouTube wouldn’t lock content away from me watching it on my phone though, which is why I got the subscription to begin with and find there are like 2 of the 5 shows I can actually watch on my mobile device, the rest I’m stuck at my desk. :(

Kids under 15 don’t watch tv anymore. It’s all YouTube.

Wait, sorry to derail, but they still do this? I got the impression from the Hulu thread that they don’t do that anymore, and I haven’t run into that on the handful of shows I watch. But if that’s still going on, yes, I hate that.

If you’re gonna subscribe to Google Play Music, which is as good as Spotify/Apple/Rdio, etc, w/ the added bonus of syncing your own library, having this feature is great!

The ad-free/offline video is more of an add-on for the music service. The press release markets it in reverse order of cool-ness making one scoff, whereas marketing this as a GPM perk makes it seem awesome.

Watch videos offline? You mean like downloading them with any number of tools that have been out there for years, for free?

Seriously, google should just do this.

Google bought RedTube?

It’s going to be a lot easier to do, and manage, on a mobile device though.

That was my thought as well, but I think this announcement is focused towards Youtube users. I think they’re horribly under-selling the value of the GPM subscription though. It’s basically a minor bullet down in the FAQ, but it’s a huge part of the value equation.

What Gedd said. Unless I’m doing it wrong, the only way I’ve gotten this to work is to use a site to pull down the video (which can be hit or miss in my experience and painfully slow in every case) and then use something like (edit) Handbreak to put it into iTunes and then from there plug the device into the PC and move the video to the device through iTunes. It’s not a super long process, but it’s a PITA and you need to plan quite a bit ahead.

If they have something built-in that let’s me just mark a video I’m watching on my iPad for “offline use” and it silently and quickly downloads it so I can move to my porch to keep watching, that’s worth the money alone to me. I have quite a few things (Spellslingers, Critical Role, countless Let’s Play videos) I’d love to be able to do that with, and many more if this becomes a service I subscribe to.

There were some really nice paid jailbroken YouTube apps that did most of this functionality. YourTube and ProTube I think, back in the iOS 6 days.

I block all youtube ads anyway, using kodi on my HTPC and the usual browser ad blocker on my computers. I don’t bother to do it, but if I watched much youtube on mobile, it’s trivial to block youtube ads on android and (jailbroken) iOS too.

This does make their music server more attractive, certainly, and I like how they’re approaching exclusive content, partnering with Youtube content creators rather than going the Yahoo/Netflix/Amazon route and trying to compete with HBO on AAA original programming. That strategy may well work out. Just not yet.

The easy ability to download and store a youtube is nice, as is ad-block, but you can do all that already, more or less well enough, that paying $10 for it seems a bit meh. The quality of the unique content (PieDiePew etc!) would probably not be that enticing for me personally.

I’m sort of more interested (concerned?) in the way content creators get paid from it. With Google taking a 50% cut (i think that is the number?) then ‘sharing’ the rest around, i’d be a bit worried as a youtube content creator that that would be enough vs the current model? So i hope this does not mean a possible end/reduction coming in the good youtubers as their margins get squeezed? …and RPS had a short article about it (comments too):

That sucks, but I guess they get more money that way then they would from people with adblocker.

LOL That NSFW is a nice touch.

I have the Google Play Music service at $8/month as I signed in at launch. Ad-free Youtube out of the blue is a nice perk, that’s for sure!

It definitely gives google’s music platform an edge over spotify and apple, no doubt about it.

PewDiePie’s take on Youtube Red. He polled 8,000 of his Twitter followers on whether or not they use AdBlock. 40% do.

http://pewdie.tumblr.com/post/132147138150/thoughts-on-youtube-red

I can also confirm with my own Google statistics that, that 40% is a correct estimate.

It’s a number that has grown a lot over the years, from roughly 15-20% when I started. And it’s not unlikely that it will keep growing.

What this means is that YouTubers lose about 40% of their ad income.

Personally, I’m ok with if you use adblock on my videos. Ads are annoying, I get it, I’m not here to complain about that.

But for smaller channels, this number can be devastating.

I think what many people still don’t realize is that:

YouTube Red exist largely as an effort to counter Adblock.

Using Adblock doesn’t mean you’re clever and above the system.

YouTube Red exist because using Adblock has actual consequences.

I think ad blocker is only a small part of it all. The real problem is that few people make moneh on youtube and ads are pay nothing. Youtube red might drive up the price of ads, at least a little, since there are fewer ad slots available.