New Premium Content Pay-Per-View Youtube

Pessimists, start rolling out your “All good things come to an end” banners and get ready to march in protest. Optimists… good luck tryin’ to convince the pessimists otherwise. Because this time, they might actually not be exaggerating.

It turns out Youtube has decided to take the big, and sadly economically predictable step of introducing premium content in the well known pay-per-view manner that is probably loved only by well-to-do people who have tons of money and don’t care how they spend them. Certainly not the riff-raff mostly teenage broke-unless-I-get-my-allowance Internauts that were and are Youtube’s main audience.

In short, only if you pay a 10$/month subscription, you’ll have the option of seeing brand new content by several media companies. So far announced: 21st Century Fox’s Fox Sports, Comcast’s NBCUniversal, A+E Networks Inc. and Time Warner’s Turner cable unit, and even a rumored Disney, which is not yet confirmed.

Youtube assures us that those who aren’t willing to pay for the subscription will still be able to see the free videos, which will be uploaded in the usual manner on the free part of the website. But as a personal opinion, this whole duality of free and pay-per-view content can only bode ill for a site whose main asset and attraction was specifically the “free”, user-created content part, even with the annoying ads that came with the deal, so that it could be economically viable.

Speaking of which, said ads will NOT be part of the subscription paying users’ experience, but everybody else will still have to bear with them. Lovely. So, in effect, Youtube has not replaced one way of getting funds (the ads) with a new one. It has added a new way of making money to the old one. A risky maneuver, considering a fair number of users employ ad blockers when using Youtube, which would imply that they are interested solely in the video-sharing that stood at the company’s foundation and not in the commercial dimensions of an ads or pay-per-view Youtube.

But Youtube seems to know what its doing and is pretty determined, judging by the fact that industry sources expected to see this subscription service launched at the end of last September. Currently, the estimated time for some of the new premium content to become live on the site is 2016, but an exact date or an explanation as to why this delay from last month occurred were not given by a Youtube representative when asked.

And granted, the 2 classes of free and paying users could coexist in this new pay-per-view Youtube, with the former simply opting to ignore the new content. If the free one lasts.

What are your thoughts on this move?

Image source: 1.

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Roxanne Briean

I am a geek, a gamer and a writer. I have always been fascinated with the online community. At the moment I work as a full-time writer and study interior design. When I'm not scouring the net in search of interesting new gadgets and software I spend my time in MOBAs or drawing.