I’m in Canada, so I can’t try it yet, but I’m following the Youtube Red thing a bit. On the one hand, I’ve replaced my cable with Youtube and such ages ago (with Netflix added this year), and I could really do without the ads. On the other, if I had it it would be more expensive than my Netflix, and if I had to guess, I’d guess that Netflix would be paying more for their content.
I don’t know much about the music part of it… maybe that would tip the balance?
Some of the channels I watch shout out their sponsors in the video… that would get annoying if I was paying already. But the only alternative I can think of would be to crank up the ads for people without a Red subscription…
YouTube wouldn’t tell me, and the instructions they give to sign up don’t appear to work in the real world (they just take me to the page the OP linked to).
Googling tells me that it’ll be $10/month, however.
It comes with Google Play All Access. So ad-free streaming music (including listening to whatever you want) and ad-free streaming videos for $10 a month. It’s a fantastic deal.
My first thought is $10/month is way too much money. Netflix is only $7 and they have an established reputation thru starting out as a DVD rental site. And while (still) not everything they have is available via streaming you hear Netflix and you think ‘tons of movies & TV shows’.
YouTube is nothing like that. They are still thought of as a place to watch user-posted videos. And even though all the big media outlets have a presence there, their clips are still like everyone’s else’s: FREE!** Nor are they thought of as a music streaming site like Spotify or Pandora. At all, pay or otherwise.
You don’t go to YouTube to watch TV, movies, or listen to music, you go to watch free video clips. And if they try to hard-sell Red by increasing their already too numerous ads on regular YouTube they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot.
This makes sense to me actually - if the old contract didn’t allow non-ad supported videos, and Youtube wants to have that… then anyone purchasing doesn’t want to come across an older ad-supported video when they’ve paid not to. Video makers still collect $$$, it’s just some with contractual conflicts that are necessarily disappearing.
My first thought, yeah…
…so I guess I’ll have to check that out. I’ve said previously that since people are spending / making fractions of pennies per adview in my face, I’d much prefer to buy them all up myself and see none of 'em. This is possibly a start.
Apparently the subscription also works the other way around - in that if you have Google Play All Access, YouTube Red is automatically included. It seems like a great way to elevate Google Play All Access (which was the streaming service I was already leaning towards) over Spotify and Apple Music.
That’s kind of annoying. I’ve long wanted a non-ad version of YouTube so that I don’t have to keep playing Whack-A-Mole with the stupid pop-up dialogs. There’s little more crass than a music video that keeps popping up the same ad after I’ve x-boxed it a couple of times already.
On the other hand, I don’t watch that much YouTube, so $10/month seems unduly expensive, especially given my complete lack of interest in the streaming music part of the deal.
Not here. They’re trying to reinvent cable, which I stopped buying a long time ago. In particular, if I pay for it, and all I watch is one channel, my money still gets spread among all youtube red channels.
After years of people clamoring for a la carte cable pricing, youtube is taking a huge step backward.
Hm. I was originally unconvinced of the value ($10 seems like a LOT to just disable ads, unless it also allowed free streaming of the purchasable TV episodes already on YouTube). However, I already use Google Play All Access (I even have the promotional $8/mo rate), so if that means that I will automatically get ad-free YouTube, then that’s gravy.
However, my other main concern is how the revenue is being spread around to different artists. With ads, my favorite artist gets a bit more revenue if I rewatch one of their videos. With Red, the money gets divided up in some arcane way I have no visibility into. It’s probably still based on views and retention time, but I doubt that YouTube would be giving creators the strong-arm if the Red agreement was comparable or better than the existing system.
The aforementioned strong-arm treatment is kind of a jerk move. I wonder how much of this is Google wanting to make more money off of YouTube and how much of it is motivated by external pressure from Viacom and other copyright holders (just like the much-maligned ContentID system). I’m not going to unsubscribe from All Access because of it, but I probably wouldn’t pay extra for Red, either.
As it turns out, I DO get free YouTube Red on account of my existing Google Play All Access subscription. I have the promotional rate of $8/mo, so that’s even better. It’s nice not having ads anymore, I just hope that the artists aren’t getting shafted. Honestly, this might just move me to increase my Patreon usage,which I’m pretty sure is more supportive than Red and ad views.
