Slashdot Mirror
YouTube To Offer Subscription Service This Week
jfruh writes "According to an email from a Google spokesman, YouTube will be offering a $1.99/month subscription service as early as this week. This service will 'bring even more great content to YouTube for our users to enjoy and provide our creators with another vehicle to generate revenue from their content,' though there was no indication of what content will be offered through the service exactly. YouTube has offered rentals for specific videos before but this is the first time the service would go head-to-head with subscription services like Netflix."
If you know where to look, there's lots of great content on YouTube. Personally, I enjoy watching Matt Chat, Lazy Game Reviews, and Classic Game Room HD, more than anything on TV. If you're a smart person who wants to share your passion with the world, YouTube is a much better place to do that than any television network.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm on a 50 mb/sec internet connection and can't stream youtube movies above 360p without the movie stopping every couple of minutes due to buffer underrun. I've no issues with amazon prime, hulu or netflix movies. I don't know why this only happens with youtube. I don't see why I'd be paying $1.99/month.
What exactly would this "Premium Content" be?
Videos that are more expensive to produce than advertisers alone are willing to pay for.
This seemed fishy considering the market, so I did some poking around and, surprise!: not only does the summary totally mangle the facts of the rumor - Youtube is supposedly going to start offering premium CHANNELS for 1.99/month EACH, not a Hulu or Netflix-type broad subscription - but it's only a rumor that google has neither confirmed nor denied.
http://consumerist.com/2013/05/06/report-youtube-introducing-paid-subscription-channels-soon/
Good job.
Use the Firefox version. The Chrome version lacks several important features - the most significant one being that the Firefox version actually stops the blocked content from being downloaded, while the Chrome one only stops it from being displayed, due to Chrome not supporting that level of control in an extension. I would not be surprised if blocking video ads was also beyond the ability of the Chrome version.