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."

Comments

guess they didn't listen to us

[Trepidity]

The Slashdot vote was pretty clear!

Ads

[Teppy]

I'd definitely pay $2/month to remove the damn ads. Same goes for Hulu - why don't they have this option?

Re:Ads

[rudy_wayne]

I'd definitely pay $2/month to remove the damn ads

Or just use AdBlock.

Re:Ads

[JWW]

Yeah, youtube has nothing that anyone wants to watch. They ought to just shut it down already, its just a wasteland with no viable content at all.....

Re:Ads

[Xemu]

I'd definitely pay $2/month to remove the damn ads. Same goes for Hulu - why don't they have this option?

It will go the same way as cable. First you pay $2/month to remove the ads. Then you pay $4,$8,$16 and then they put the ads back in as well.

Re:Ads

[cdrudge]

This. I wondered why people were complaining about ads before YouTube videos as I never got them. Adblock just transparently makes them disappear. Same goes for ads in Facebook, Google search results, etc...

Re:Ads

[dzfoo]

I think he meant it has nothing that anybody wants to pay to watch. It's popular right now because it's free, but cat videos may not pay the hosting service by themselves.

Re:Ads

[Seumas]

I'd pay $2/mo to get rid of all the "featured" panels on the interface and all the juvenile crap from teenage morons that cater to a massive mouth-breathing audience of children (I keep seeing shit from guys named Fred and Tobuscus and Pewdiepie and other crap all the time). For that matter, dump all the "boobs and brain-dead response videos" crap and I'll definitely pay $2/mo for what's left.

I primarily watch stuff like lectures from Stanford, hardware demos, high end hardware builds being benchmarked, etc. Yet, what do they keep spamming me with? Fucking idiot teenagers spending 20 minutes showing you how to do your makeup or spending ten minutes showing you everything they just bought at the mall (seriously, this is apparently a whole genre of videos now).

How can a company with such a claim to targeted advertising now get this shit right?

Re:Ads

[dunezone]

Because if everyone started using Adblock these websites would disappear or force people into a subscription. A large portion of their operating costs are supported by the advertisements that Adblock will block.

Re:Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

The mating call of the entitled narcissist.

Re:Ads

[gman003]

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.

Re:Ads

[lister king of smeg]

i remeber that using the experimental 64 bit flash plugin used to stop most hulu ads from playing when i watched hulu on ubuntu but maybe it was just me idk

Re:Ads

[gencha]

Yeah, exactly. He wants to pay for a service. LOL! What an idiot. AMIRITE?

Re:Ads

[24-bit Voxel]

What I do is when my show starts, I just take click toward the end of the show, after the last commercial but before the end. (Don't let it hit the very end.)

A commercial will play, then put I'll it back at the beginning. Enjoy a commercial free show from that point forward.

Hitting reload resets and you have to start over. I use Opera but I imagine it works with any browser.

Re:Ads

[drinkypoo]

Because if everyone started using Adblock these websites would disappear or force people into a subscription. A large portion of their operating costs are supported by the advertisements that Adblock will block.

If they can't exist without ads I can't block, then I don't care if they can exist. I simply refuse to give up my brain to advertising. I need that space for minecraft and Doctor Who.

Re:Ads

[hedwards]

I'm pretty sure they've got it right. Those things would likely make you less unfriendly and a bit more socially acceptable.

Re:Ads

[Mashiki]

Please, someone mod parent up. I can't believe people are so selfish: These sites give you content in exange for ads, if you don't like the deal just don't go there.

I'd happily accept ads, providing that I knew they weren't going to infect my machine with malware of some kind. So until that happens, no ads. Perhaps said companies should get their act in order, and fix the "we're going to let shady companies advertise on our networks" problem. There's nothing selfish in that, it's prevention and removal of a headache. In the very worst cases with that malware mentioned above, it requires a nuking of the OS. I have no desire to deal with that anymore.

Of course not

[chromaexcursion]

While the poll may be a valid indicator of what the tech crowd desires, it's not a good indicator for the general public.
Plus, the rules are different now.
It seems clear that the basic YouTube service will be free. The pay service will be for premium content. There seems to be less resistance to that.

Re:Of course not

[rudy_wayne]

It seems clear that the basic YouTube service will be free. The pay service will be for premium content.

"Premium Content". I laugh every time I hear that phrase.

What exactly would this "Premium Content" be? What do they have in that crappy little window that is so wonderful and "Premium" that I will gladly pay them for it?

Re:Of course not

[HaZardman27]

TV shows and movies I would suspect.

Re:Of course not

[stfvon007]

Extended editions of cat videos.

Re:Of course not

[Black LED]

I doubt it will really change much because people can still monetize their channels with adverts. Some will try to make the extra money grab with premium content, as you say, but I doubt many will.

So long as the subscription is actually monthly and doesn't require any long term commitment, I wouldn't have a problem paying if I noticed something that I really wanted to see. It might even provide motivation for better content.

Re: Of course not

[Runaway1956]

Well, dude, high school really is unfair! Hey, kids studied the multiplication table in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL! In high school, it's just assumed that you should be able to multiply without resorting to a verbal recitation of the table. The least they could do, is to post the table at the front of the room.

But, worse - they expect you to divide, add, subtract, AND multiply, all in the very same equation! It's INSANE, I tell you! Stupid formulas, new rules, geometry, trig, calc - it just goes on and on, with no end in sight!

Re:Of course not

[tepples]

What exactly would this "Premium Content" be?

Videos that are more expensive to produce than advertisers alone are willing to pay for.

Re:Of course not

[TapeCutter]

I can see organizations such as the BBC warming to this, I'd pay $2/mo for access to the BBC Earth archives and I'm sure UK taxpayers would gladly take it.

Re:Of course not

[BasilBrush]

Sport seems the thing that an awful lot of people are prepared to pay stupid money for.

Youtube could potentially dominate all other video

[Dr. Spork]

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.

Re:Great Content

[Hatta]

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.

Youtube streaming sucks.

[csumpi]

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.

Re:Youtube streaming sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blacklist your ISP's local mirrors.

Re:Youtube streaming sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

How to stop ISPs sucking at Youtube

Re:Youtube streaming sucks.

[Monkey-Man2000]

If you're in the EU, and specifically using France's Freebox, the ISPs are basically are at war with Google and neither Google or the ISPs want to pay for the pipes required to access Youtube comfortably. I have Free, and during peak times, there is definitely a slowdown in Youtube.

Re:Youtube streaming sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

That nonsense has been debunked numerous times. Reddit latched on to the "workaround", but if you actually read the full thread -- not skim it -- you will find intelligent network-savvy folks commenting on its idiocy. The person who came up with this "workaround" doesn't understand things like DNS load balancing, anycast, and other methodologies Youtube deploys (including back-end stuff) to accomplish load balancing. You might also be surprised to know Youtube's Flash applet (not sure about the HTML 5 stuff) has rate-limiting implemented in it as well (really, it does).

Here are two forums threads I've been involved with now where in both cases asking people to step up to the plate and provide hard proof (specifically of TWC implementing some kind of throttling) resulted in them admitting the supposed "workaround" doesn't work at all, not to mention contains references to netblocks that have nothing to do with Youtube, and netblocks of the wrong size (based on ARIN WHOIS, rather than what's advertised on the Internet via BGP):

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28102912-Heads-up-guys.new-trick-to-eliminate-Youtube-throttling-
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/youtube-loading-issues-possible-solution.68493/

I wish that Mitch Ribar guy would take down that blog post already.

Re:Youtube streaming sucks.

[AmiMoJo]

It's probably your ISP's fault. I know my ISP, Virgin Media, breaks Youtube.

What tends to happen is that the ISP notices a lot of traffic coming from YouTube. So they call up Google and get some caching servers installed inside their network just to handle YouTube video. All YouTube traffic is intercepted and redirected to these caches and for about five minutes all is well. Then YouTube traffic doubles in a year but the ISP makes no effort to upgrade its caches and everything grinds to a halt.

Re:Youtube streaming sucks.

[swillden]

YouTube is all inside Google's infrastructure so anything you stream from youtube you use your ISP's internet backbone.

Google also has caching servers forward-deployed with the major ISPs. Also, Google peers directly with many ISPs, so data doesn't flow over the ISP's connection to the backbone.

http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/04/googles-peering-and-caching-strategy.html

Re:Youtube streaming sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind elaborating on this and how it relates to youtube vids?

Obligatory

[CriminalNerd]

You're just one step closer to the dystopian future of the all-despising baby skull: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2490

Try different DNS settings

[Anonymous Coward]

A common trick used by content providers is to have the same DNS entry resolve to different IP addresses in different parts of the internet so that you'll get content from a sever close to you.

This doesn't seem to be working out for you.

I suggest trying a different DNS provider and see what happens. Try using google's own DNS if you're not (set your DNS to 8.8.8.8) or, if you are, try using the ISPs.
You'll probably need to flush your DNS in the operating system and probably restart your browser to clear its own DNS caches before this has any effect (on a mac you can flush your dns cache with the sudo dscacheutil -flushcache command from the terminal)

ERBH

[schlachter]

Epic Rap Battles of History.

the psychology of it all

[schlachter]

Paying even a trivial fee like $1.99/month will lead users to claim higher levels of satisfaction with the service which is good for Google. It's been shown empirically over and over that we come to value those things which we pay for more than those which are free.

Re:Youtube could potentially dominate all other vi

[OptimalCynic]

Some of us have been doing that for years with torrents and RSS.

Wrong

[Triv]

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.

Re:Untargeted

[omglolbah]

They are in Norway.

In an evening of watching VOD starcraft matches I would get the same 2-3 video ads on every video change.

It is not that the ads are THAT annoying, it is that you've already seen em 8-10 times already in a single day...