Slashdot Mirror
YouTube To Offer Subscription Service This Week
jfruh writes "According to an email from a Google spokesman, YouTube will be offering a $1.99/month subscription service as early as this week. This service will 'bring even more great content to YouTube for our users to enjoy and provide our creators with another vehicle to generate revenue from their content,' though there was no indication of what content will be offered through the service exactly. YouTube has offered rentals for specific videos before but this is the first time the service would go head-to-head with subscription services like Netflix."
The Slashdot vote was pretty clear!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd definitely pay $2/month to remove the damn ads. Same goes for Hulu - why don't they have this option?
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?
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.
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!
TV shows and movies I would suspect.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
Extended editions of cat videos.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
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!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
What exactly would this "Premium Content" be?
Videos that are more expensive to produce than advertisers alone are willing to pay for.
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
Sport seems the thing that an awful lot of people are prepared to pay stupid money 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.