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YouTube Considering an Ad-Free, Subscription-Based Version
Walking The Walk writes YouTube is looking at creating a paid-subscription model that would allow users to skip the ads on their videos. (A more condensed summary from CBC.) No firm date has been announced, and it sounds like tentative steps right now, but YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki did mention that ad-enabled music videos would still be offered.
How about removing ads on videos that don't have any commercially copyrighted music in the first place?
is this november fools?
who is going to pay money for russian driving and ice bucket challenge videos?
My current problem with Youtube isn't the ads, it's that Youtube runs like crap on my AT&T Uverse connection at home.
I'm sure this is a problem with AT&T and not Youtube, however. :-(
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
I thought they already offered this?
A YouTube paid channel is a channel for which users pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee to watch its videos
Maybe if the paid version allowed channel design customization like before vs all channels looking the same shade of bland.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It's already ad free for me...
Still doesn't change that proxies are necessary to get around the region restrictions of some videos.
All-you-can-eat monthly subscription with download links for all videos (including commercial music videos) in various formats (mp4, mp3, ogg, etc.).
Umm, more power to them I guess. So for money I get to skip the adds, or I don’t have to see them at all? Seems unclear. Most of what my wife watches only requires a 5 second wait before allowing a skip. I expect that wait will skyrocket if subscription fees don’t bring in what marketing thinks they should.
From TFA:
Seems to suggest other previously commerical supported feeds might no longer be available to non subscribers.
All and all sounds like a bumpy road ahead.
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Ads, even full top quality HD, load up just fine. Then when your video is actually supposed to play you just get that stupid waiting symbol. Then the video starts to play and just as it's getting to a good part it pauses while it loads again then rapidly skips the part you actually wanted to see. Maybe, just maybe, YouTube could make their site not suck before asking people to pay for it.
I wish Hulu offered something similar - I'd happily pay a higher monthly fee not to have the ads.
>> I'd happily pay a higher monthly fee not to have the ads
You must be new to the planet. Remember when the promise of cable TV was "you pay for it, so it's ad-free!" Once YouTube has a critical population writing monthly checks for content, they'll surely add the ads back in.
enjoy adblockers while it lasts. you know they'll embed the ads right in to the stream. then we'll have to resort to some dvr like client to fast forward.
Youtube has ads?
I guess my subscription free noscript/ABP must be ahead of the times.
I can't believe they're still making the mistake of giving an inferior product to what the pirates get... I don't use the service, is it paid? If you're paying to watch ads, yeah, I'd go right back to piracy too. As for me, I never left piracy, but I don't watch much TV or movies anyway.
I'd rather watch the ads. Though, annoying, I don't wait long. I don't need to pay another subscription service especially YouTube. I'd rather spend it on Hulu+ and Netflix.
For this to work and reach a mass market, the price needs to be (i) realistic and (ii) generate an impulse purchase.
There are too many subscription services out there; everyone wants their £5 per month or £7.99 per month or £9.99 per month, and it all adds up. I think an ad-free YouTube at £1.99 per month would entice a lot of people. Any more would probably not be worth it.
BTW, Adblock is great and I love it. But it doesn't stop the adverts which sometimes play before a video when I'm using the YouTube app on my iPhone.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
They already have an effective way to block Vimeo downloads. None of the in-browser extensions work. It's only a matter of time before that spreads to all of YT.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
What about paying us to watch ads? That would be a better incentive. Give the target audience a cut of the advertising revenue. I don't think we would mind watching advertisements if it was paying for our bandwidth.
How is it worse ? There is plenty of high quality contents made by professionals. YouTube is not just for cat videos anymore.
Of course, for these people to make a living, they need to monetize and it means you have to give something in return as neither producers nor Google are charities. It may be a bit of your person (that's what ads are for) or money. Google now considers the second option, which I think is a good one.
As for the time before YouTube was bought by Google, it was only better because there were plenty of unchecked piracy. Content owners didn't sue YouTube because it was a small company and there wasn't money to be made. The picture changed when Google, with its very deep pockets, bought it. But in this case, Google's only fault was to have money. Even if YouTube had stayed independent, copyright holders would have attacked as soon as it had became profitable, requiring similar changes.
He may actually be dead. It's obvious a bot sent these replies as it's happened several times within this thread.
Instead of selling this directly to customers they should work out deals with existing subscription services. Subscribe to Netflix and Youtube is add free. Subscribe to Hulu Plus and Youtube is add free. They would get less money per subscriber but have alot more subscribers.
Or they could increase it's value by making search also add free for subscribers. A subscribtion would remove ads from all Google products. Search, Google Plus, and GMail. No adds and no data collection for subscribers.
Well if his bot code sucks that bad, I'm obviously not going to trust his hosts file solution either.
Paying for car videos? No thanks, I have my own cat. So are most readers here.
Nice, so Google can just charge for everyone else's content they don't own copyright to now?
If this were any other company in the world talking about doing this they would be sued into oblivion.
But since Google is owned directly by the NSA and CIA, this is perfectly acceptable to you retarded sheep, and all copyright holders.
Maybe if this works, Google could offer a version of all of their services that no longer tracks your individual activity for ad revenue.
Of course, Google insists that their tracking is only done to make their services work better - and beyond targeted ads, which would go away, there are still many aspects of Google services that wouldn't work as well without tracking you. But at least the tradeoff would be clearer - and if you paid them, but still allowed tracking for the purpose of providing more appropriate search results, maybe they could re-establish a trust relationship where it's been lost (or deliberately eroded - e.g. the "Scroogled" ad campaign).
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Already does this. I haven't seen an advertisement on youtube in years.
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https://github.com/YePpHa/YouT... youtube fucking your way.
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Yes. Every online service should have this option. I would even require it by law. I don't mind to pay for my privacy and my time. This was my main gripe with Hulu for example. There has to be price that will make it worth it for them not to show me ads. I want them to take my money, but no... there is no option of that. So I am not customer. No service without this option would have me as a customer.
If you don't pay, you are the product.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
That was the big selling point of Cable TV when it came out in the 70's...remember? By paying a subscription fee, subscribers could watch ad-free TV. We all know how well that worked!
Remember when cable had no ads? Lets see how long the "no ads with subscription" lasts.
MABASPLOOM!
I thought the same. I'd like to see a control panel that lets you dial these settings if you were a subscriber. Unfortunately, you're still probably screwed when it comes to Google Analytics on machines you weren't signed into Google on.
It's exactly the opposite. You seem to assume Google wants to do bad things. They don't want to have as much information from everyone. Their business model isn't to be Big Brother and use this information to control us. They've built useful services that by their very nature need that information to work. Google Now would have nothing to show you if it weren't monitoring your email. Where this gets dicey is that Google has chosen to make these services 'free' by funding them with advertising. They don't want your information, they do want to place those ads. It's not evil - you're getting useful services, and the advertisers are getting ads that are theoretically more effective. But it can get creepy. That's why a non-ad supported option might be nice. Google gets their money from you, and the only thing they use your info for is to provide you with a great service that you're willing to pay for.
Certainly worth a thought experiment - and no need to derail that by indulging your paranoia.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Vimeo allows the video uploader to choose whether or not to permit downloads. If the uploader allows downloads, links to download the video appear right below the video.
However, it is trivially easy to download videos even if downloads are not allowed. Just use the HTML5 player and the link to the video in MP4 format is right there in the video tag on the page, easily obtained by viewing the source of the page or using a browser extension.
Now Youtube uses a totally different system and is a bit more complicated but not much. There are quite a few browser extensions that work well to download the videos.
In most cases you have to download the video and audio streams separately and then mux them together since most new videos are using DASH, but that is easily done using ffmpeg or any other MPEG4 compatible muxer.
to be posted here? Perhaps it is an example of online mob rule. Chances are, any response here will be along the same lines.
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