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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."
I think that Google first proved that they are capable of delivering pretty 1080p video without stuttering, while leaving you the option for 720p if your internet or playback device can't handle 1080p. We'll see what content they will be offering, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: People are comfortable with Youtube as a video delivery system. You can bet that there will be living room devices that will seamlessly treat your subscribed Youtube channels as regular TV channels. Hopefully, future Youtube Android apps will allow you to pre-buffer the premium content so that you can watch it even when you don't have a good connection, for example, on a bus. If some of their subscriptions were things like Discovery Channel, ESPN and Comedy Central, how many people would drop their cable TV altogether? If these channels were on premium Youtube, the living room experience of watching them would be undiminished compared to cable TV, and all kinds of new options for VOD and watching on portable devices would open up. If Google does this right, the only people that will continue subscribing to cable TV will be luddites who can't be bothered to make Youtube work in their living room.
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