A new post appeared today on the YouTube official blog revealing their new subscription service, YouTube Red. YouTube Red is going to be a subscription service that allows people to watch video’s ad-free and save them to their devices to watch them offline. This service is going to cost $9.99 a month and will start on October 28th.
But is this a good step forward for YouTube? It is obliviously Google’s attempt to compete with other streaming services out there, like Netflix and Amazon Prime. But why do this? Google is offering a subscription service to a website where all of its content is free to watch. What they’re offering for the $10 subscription is not really impressive, for right now.
In the blog post, it was also mentioned that starting in 2016, there will be exclusive content uploaded for YouTube Red. One of the shows they have announced is a reality show based around PewDiePIe.
This is not good for YouTube’s future
YouTube was originally set up for people who like making videos as a place to share them. A place where communities were allowed to grow and connect over the content they made, like gaming videos. YouTube’s whole gimmick is that anyone can start making videos, and upload them to the website where anything that is uploaded can be watched for free, not locked behind a pay wall.
Google could easily turn the whole website into a subscription service. Not overnight, of course, because the backlash would be immense, but slowly. It starts with making a couple of videos exclusive to the service, but before you know it, whole YouTube channels will be locked behind YouTube Red.
At the moment the service doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money, unless people want to help contribute to their favorite content creators. But a lot of them already have Patreon accounts for that purpose. Right now all we can do is to wait and see what happens.
Will Google make this work and our worries were for nothing, or will they turn YouTube into their own version of Netflix? Only time will tell.
