YouTube is preparing to launch two subscription services | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is preparing to launch two subscription services

theverge.com

75 pointsMarkTee62 comments

> YouTube is still the largest music streaming platform in the world ... and still the place where teens get the majority of their music.

Why hasn't anyone jumped on this yet?

These kids aren't watching "music videos", they're listening to music which is only accompanied by video content because the platform is unapologetically focused on it.

Free, selectable music with a simple interface and all the ads you want, available on any PC. Still not solved in 2015...

Spotify addresses this really well. It has both desktop and mobile apps.

Spotify doesn't exist in dragonland, YouTube is basically everywhere.

The app requirement alone kills this demographic. Login nails the coffin.

These kids aren't going to install an application on a friends device and log in with their own credentials when they can search a .com instantly.

The household computer, the one with the bundled multimedia speakers, that's where you'll find them hovering, socially selecting and blasting main stream pop.

Teen parties are being DJed with YouTube! YouuuTube!

People keep underestimating this about the web. Sometimes people don't care how awesome your app is, they just want something that they can do that works every time. Something passable that runs on ever platform everywhere. That's HTML, and for music, that's YouTube

It will be interesting to see whether they enable filtering of search results to exclude or include the new subscription categories.

One frustrating aspect of YouTube today is the flat namespace, so if one's search terms coincide with the title of a popular song the results are a mess. Being able to exclude Music Key channel would be advantageous.

I've found using "site:youtube.com" on google can often improve the searching experience of youtube.

Am I wrong in thinking that paywalling videos is going to cut viewership for those videos by several orders of magnitude? Not good for, say, a band trying to build a fanbase.

So don't put the music videos behind the paywall. Wait till you're already popular, and then do a pay-per-view concert.

No. You're completely correct. Artists will hopefully see the writing on the wall.

I would happily pay a monthly fee to never see another advert.

If the fee is reasonable, say €10, I wouldn't mind paying. My "issue" is that I also don't want to log in.

Yeah, that's my issue too. Google's suggestions service is incredibly invasive, and does an utterly terrible job. I like to fall asleep listening to a variety of different relaxation videos, so that means any time I open up the youtube app on my phone, it bombards with me with nothing but weird looking ASMR videos that - to somebody who's never seen the concept - probably look like porn. I couldn't imagine hooking up my account to my TV and having people who come over look and think "what the fuck is this guy watching?"

Privacy goes beyond me being concerned that google knows my viewing habits... I don't care much about that. I care a lot about being pigeonholed into a certain type of viewer based on what I've viewed before. I don't want to be in an echo chamber, and I don't want google's view of "relevance" to surround me with only the types of videos I've watched in the past. It eventually becomes like breathing your own exhaust fumes.

Google could do better at this, but they seem to be misguided in thinking that people want this. The only solution right now is to not log in with an account, but even then they try and use cookies to get a fix on your viewing habits. It's really kind of sad that they don't see that this turns a lot of people away.

Have you tried to clear and disable your watch history under your Privacy settings (on a device) or History settings (in the left money on desktop)?

I think you hugely overestimate how measurable this concern is.

Netflix profiles are pretty helpful

I'd pay a reasonable (household if that's possible) fee out of principle, my family watches LOTS of youtube, we don't even watch cable, young kids watch a huge amount of content creator videos on youtube.

As a gainfully employed adult, i'd also pay for a reasonable service that would give me content that I want with less annoyances.

If I were still a teen or even a low-income college student, I'd still be exploiting all the things to get content for free.

You still see advertisements on YouTube?

“It’s a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can be paid to leave people alone.”

— Richard Stallman, 1986 (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview)

It's a form of price discrimination: charging rich people more than poor people.

The poor still pay, in the form of their attention, thus guaranteeing that they are distracted and consequently still poor.

Have been using MusicKey for the last few months with my Google Play subscription, it's changed how I listen to music where it's now almost exclusively through YouTube.

When music videos had ads I couldn't make it through to 2 music videos without being annoyed by intrusive ads which kills the music listening experience, ad-free music is now the most valued part of my Google Play subscription.

It seems like the move would be to try and spin off a netflix like service for videos > 15 minutes. Curate and invest in quality content and then charge for it. Google is the search engine of choice for most of the world and the lowest common denomenator when you type yourfav.newartist into your search bar because it is direct, frictionless and free. When Chris Sacca tried to monetize sports/content at youtube/google video they spent millions on a ~$200 dollar return.

Tough to charge for what has already been free. Interesting move.

It seems likely people would just divide their long videos up into shorter segments just as they do now. I think it's probably got more to do with how content creators monetize their work-you let them put it behind the premium service and pay them more per view or something similar. Then your content creators start pushing your subscription service for you, I'd expect putting most of it free and a section of it behind paywall.

Hmmm. Maybe I am an edgecase, but I only like watching videos > 20mins. I watch a lot of Kevin Rose's foundation series, interviews with entrepreneurs, how to videos, etc. I see the value prop in having longer well done, high production value material and that is what I would pay for. They could basically be television and curate google endorsed channels for entertainment, news, education etc. seems like they want to compete with twitch and pandora when they really should just help netflix kill cable.

The problem with Youtube as a music platform is the mobile app. Minimizing the app to do another task (like replying to a text) stops the video from playing and in turn stops the audio from playing. If they allow it to play in the background then a lot more people would use it as their music source.

They do - If you have a Google Play Music subscription. That enables the option to continue playing videos in the background, though I believe you have to set it in the settings page.

The Youtube app on Android is able to be minimized and will continue to play. However, it does not work on iOS.

I don't see such option

Another comment said you can only use this feature within the YouTube app with a Google Play subscription. Makes sense, as I cannot find the option anywhere.

I meant to include this: you need a Music Key subscription in order to play videos in the background with the Android Youtube app.

I seem to recall that this restriction was part of their agreement with rights holders.

To add to what the others have said - this is part of YouTube Music Key, included with a Play Music subscription.

I've gotten so used to this it's actually quite jarring when I want to background a video and I get the "rightsholder doesn't allow this" notice.

Great. I hope they offer the option to turn off both annotations and comments by default.

Annotations can already be disabled by default: https://www.youtube.com/account_playback

If you have an account or store Google's tracking cookies.

How would a website let you customize its default options without an account or cookies?

The could use a cookie with no tracking id for the default storage. Granted, it would just be for the specific device but there's nothing technical stopping them from making that option available.

Technical reasons are usually not that important to large business.

You would confuse like 20% of your users to add a feature that < 0.01% want?

There's a micro-industry of journalists who teach users how to express their consent, even if vendors use a dark-pattern privacy UX. If less than 0.01% know to request a non-existent option, more may choose that option once it exists and they have been educated on the benefits. Witness the rise of ad-blocking and past industry attempts like "Do Not Track" and "Do Not Call".

Ad Blocking stops ads from being shoved in your face. There's an obvious and immediate benefit to every user who tries it.

Do Not Call stops annoying phone calls from interrupting you. Again, people demand it, because it makes a real difference in their lives.

Do Not Track, on the other hand, seems to be a total flop. (In FireFox, 8% adoption rate and falling; in other browsers, presumably even worse.) I don't see how you could refer to "the rise of Do Not Track" with a straight face. This is due in large part to the fact that the vast majority of people aren't particularly interested in making the ads they see less relevant and don't really care about whether a website is giving them an anonymous cookie.

There's a long history behind the collective implementation failure of "Do Not Track". The point is that there was stakeholder demand for the feature, even if the demand was to avoid regulation, or even if the implementation was botched.

Which stackholders? I've never seen demand for DNT by the advertisers, it was an initiative by two researchers working for Mozilla and the ACLU, and which was then taken on by the W3C. From what I can tell, the industry mostly ignored it.

https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/10854/the-failure-of-do-not-tra...

"We first met to discuss Do Not Track over 2 years ago. We have now held 10 in-person meetings and 78 conference calls. We have exchanged 7,148 emails. And those boggling figures reflect just the official fora."

From what I can tell, an initiative by some consumer advocates (under the umbrella of the W3C) made enough noise and got a few people from some companies to join a mailing list and do a few conference calls. Most of the major ad companies (Quantcast, KISSMetrics, etc) didn't even join the group. Predictably, since the industry has no interest in advancing the issue, the group died without achieving anything.

That post just reinforces my view, in my opinion.

localStorage works quite well for this - the main difference being that data is not sent to the server when you make a request, as cookies are.

Those settings are reset at random. I don't know what triggers it. Really irritating with those bad defaults anyway.

I found that deleting cookies resets that setting (just like turned off autoplay, "worldwide" region settings and the like are reset).

They don't seem to be tied to your account (so they'd be reinstated when you log in)... :/

The option has never worked for me.

Interesting move on YouTube's part to launch the "unnamed service" with premium content creators on-board before releasing information to the users.

I feel fans trust and support creators more often than the providers.

This is how they launched gaming.

Interesting.

Just out of totally idle speculation, what's the Popcorn Time of Youtube?

The best we have is kodi and youtube-dl. If you want to slay giants, those are some good tools to start with.

YouTube is ripe for disruption. They added annoying commercials so they could charge you to take them away again.

Nowadays, I use youtube-dl and kodi more than the actual site. It'd be a few night's work to create a pulsar provider for at least the most popular videos on the site, and ads could be completely avoided.

Whether to show ads or not is the content creators' choice. My YouTube channels are ad-free. I don't get paid for my videos, but I don't care because I don't rely on YouTube as a source of income. On the other hand, I invest little time and no money in my channels, unlike the YouTubers who create content professionally.

How would you like it if you weren't paid for your work? At least now, YouTube is giving you a choice in how to compensate the creators.

There is no inherent reason why a person should be paid for work. In the tech sector if you can't effectively monetize the work you do then the attitude is very much "well do something else then", but for some reason media people seem to think that when they cannot monetize their work it is the fault of the consumer, not themselves. Some business models were just never meant to be, politely asking random people to download large adverts and watch them for example.

The two ways these "media people" on YouTube get money are exactly the same two ways that most "tech sector" people get money -- advertising or direct payment. In this case, the customer gets to choose which they prefer. What you're suggesting is exactly equivalent to software piracy or unauthorized access to computer services.

Yes, just because you can make a website that people view does not mean you deserve money for that, the days where eyes on screens == $$$ are rapidly ending.

People that cling to outdated business models are usually disrupted by someone that doesn't.

Does it mean, no more free music on YouTube ?

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