YouTube Red is live | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Red is live

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"YouTube Red is not currently available in your country."

"YouTube Red is not currently available in Canada."

And they still wonder why people pirate things...

"YouTube Red is not currently available in United Kingdom."

Is this thing live anywhere outside of the US?

Edit: it looks like YouTube Red actually has a support system. It just popped up on the find out more page. I clicked it out of curiosity and was first in line and the chat connected before I could react.

As I was there I asked when YT Red would be available in the UK.

"Hello, as of the moment we don't have any other information when its gonna be available in other countries." - I'm guessing that's we as in support rather than GooTube as an entity

Well it seems reasonable that they might have chosen to launch in the US only. I think even Google might be leery of launching services to more than 300e6 people at the same time. ;-)

Anyhow, my snarky comment was more related to the fact that this is yet another streaming media service (Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon, Pandora, half of youtube, ...) that isn't available in Canada. Maybe Google will surprise me and offer it to us eventually /s

I do understand that they'd rather limit it than unleash it upon the world but it's unfortunate if lets say my favourite american YouTube channels start putting out Red content.. Let me throw money at you, Google!

You can try Youtube-Dl - also gives you adfree and offline. :-)

https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

Someone could (I think) write an extension to prefetch Youtube video links, download with youtube-dl to /tmp, and then re-embed the local file when you visit the page. Could be tuned to waste less space or use AWS for quicker download speed.

That sounds unnecessarily complicated. You should be able to write an extension that simply bypasses the Youtube player (possibly looking at the youtube-dl source to figure out how to find the video file itself).

"Bypass the Youtube player" is what I meant, but reasons to use as is: its interface is simple, it's maintained (this is a hack, why trouble yourself when youtube breaks things), and you won't have to read this: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/ext...

There's a greasemonkey script that replaces the video with a local player/html5/video plugin: http://isebaro.com/viewtube/?ln=en

I use it with the mpv option and mozplugger. It seems to work quite well.

VLC also plays Youtube videos.

You can either open them with CTRL + N, or just launch it with

    $ vlc https://youtube.com/foo/bar/

Well, if we're going to get our music via 'alternative' methods, I'd just cut to the chase and use What.Cd (or another tracker).

"YouTube Red is not currently available in Brazil."

sigh

Nor Canada sad-trombone.flac

Flac? Let's not get our hopes up too high before it's even available in our country ;-)

Not available in the UK either.

sigh

"YouTube Red is not currently available in Germany."

sigh

Not available in India

Not available in Finland.

Greece here, the same. Thank God there are proxies.

Not available in Austria

Also not available in Sweden

"YouTube Red is not currently available in Netherlands."

sigh, didn't even bother calling it "The Netherlands"

Interesting nugget: $9.99 a month unless you buy it through the iOS app and then you'll pay $12.99 a month. Google is making that Apple Tax quite clear.

Spotify is doing similar. I thought Apple had a rule that you couldn't price in-app payments differently, but maybe it changed at some point?

Word is Apple relaxed the requirement as otherwise none of these services would permit iOS purchases at all. Basically, Apple changed the rules for specific companies in order to make money. And most iOS users are unlikely to be concerned with the price difference.

Isn't that against AppStore rules? It used to be that you couldn't charge a different price for an equivalent purchase.

I assume you can't mention it in the iOS app (it says $12.99 there, no mention of $9.99), but it mentioned in an email I got from YouTube:

http://i.imgur.com/90fJxMS.png

IIRC that's for services and digital products only available inside the app store app, but not for external services and physical goods. This is an external service that happens to also be available via an app.

Interesting that Google Play Music subscribers get this for free. IMO it's a huge mistake on Google's part to make them separate yet somehow intertwined memberships - Google Music is the same price as Spotify, but this is a huge extra that many people won't realise they have.

EDIT: I'm not saying that tying them together is bad - quite the opposite - that having them as separate subscriptions that are also the same subscription is weird.

Maybe it's an attempt for the YouTube Red developers to boost their out of the gate numbers?

It seems like it must have something to do with different departments tracking revenue, but the way this is being rolled out is pretty strange. There's no mention of it anywhere on the YouTube homepage, so you would have to search for it specifically, and it's not even the top result on Google when you search for "youtube red." To know that you have access to Google Play Music, you have to scroll all the way down to FAQ point 5. Maybe the subscriptions were integrated recently and the administrative barriers to approve new marketing materials prevented them from being ready for launch. But I can only speculate.

Maybe. It's also a pretty fair acknowledgement that Youtube Red is bundling Google Play Music in for the exact same price so "Why should people with Google Play Music have to cancel their subscription to GPM and sign up again for Youtube Red?". Instead just give it to them as part of their current subscription.

I think with this initial pool of already signed-up users, Red effectively skips the first stage of user attraction.

I am not familiar how accounting works for this, but Red would have a pool of revenue to distribute to from very early on, so the creators would have more incentive to create Red-exclusive content. Nice bootstrap strategy indeed.

Except it can be irritating.

I'm a google play music subscriber.

Previously, I could open any youtube link and expect it to play, often with adverts but that's not a big deal.

Now, I open a youtube link and if it's a music video I get told, "You cannot view this video because you are playing music". So I have to stop my music playing to be able to watch the music video.

With youtube red, will it now mean that any video I watch I'll have to stop playing google music, dare I use my subscription in more than one browser at once?

Eh, they could send out an email and add a banner to the site.

Tying them together makes sense to me in a way. A lot of people (myself included!) use YouTube to listen to music and watch YouTube videos.

The Google Music app nags you about this. I think many will realise they have access.

It is super frustrating that they hold out on being able to continue playing music while the screen is locked, etc. so that they can monetize it like this.

If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense.

I was trying to think as why they did this. At first I thought it may have been licensing related, but I'm guessing that's not the case. I primarily think is that you will be able to bypass visual aspect of ads if your screen is locked. It could also just be that they want to "create value" with the subscription.

Still the "content providers" feel that region locking is the way to go. Yay, future!

Does anyone know how is the interaction with the Chromecast Youtube app queue?

When I have friends over we use the youtube app to queue videos for the Chromecast, if one of us has the Red subscription I would expect no adds, so what will happen if a friend with no subscription queues a video? will it display ads?

I believe a friend with no subscription queuing a video will display ads, as that friend is now the one logged in.

I think the Chromecast uses whatever account the person casting is logged in with, things casted to other people's chromecasts show up in your history, so I'd expect to see ads if the person casting doesn't have Youtube Red. Also I don't see or recall associating the Chromecast with any Google accounts during setup so I'm not sure they have that information to make the link to allowing all videos played through a particular Chromecast to use the Red of the owner.

Mostly guessing though until someone tries it.

there is a lot of frustration that it launched only in some countries and not in others. i see why that would be a bummer, but is it reasonable to expect that they should (in some vaguely moral sense) launch everywhere in the world at once?

Yes, of course. Unless you're living in the past.

I can't think of a single product / service that went live in every country on the same day. Not saying it hasn't happened, but I stay pretty current. Can you?

So they should delay the US launch because of bureaucratic nonsense from other nations? Which include attempts at censorship, exploitative taxes, byzantine regulations, etc? No thanks. Getting a little sick of every service coming out and then endless "NOT AVAILABLE" comments on HN and Reddit. US companies have easy and native access to US markets. That will never change. Let's stop acting surprised, especially when we're all against free trade agreements.

Why doesn't Europe/EU have its own Google and its own competitve products in this space? That seems to be the real question and pressing it just results in endless downvotes from Euros offended anyone question their business culture, lack of innovation, lack of ability to compete, etc in several spaces the US does well in. An EU Google-like entity would solve all these problems. I find it hard to believe search engines and music curation services are natural monopolies.

The more countries you add the longer it would push out the launch date. Youtube Red required content owners to sign the new contracts to allow for ads free + offline play. Trying to get this done at a world-wide scale will be much more time consuming compared to going country-by-country and getting the required rights and contracts to launch this service. So they either have to push out the release date or do what they did.

The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of Google.

i totally agree! not sure if it came through, but this is exactly the tradeoff i was hinting at

Why pay for features that should be free, and are free with 3rd party tools?

To support content providers for one... as opposed to just mooching. Now viewers have a choice... watch/listen to ads and get the content for free or pay a small monthly fee and get your music and videos ad-free.

If you object to seeing ads and were using an adblocker, you now have a legitimate way of compensating the creators for the content you are enjoying.

YouTube Red is not currently available in Canada.

Can someone sell me on this?

Why would I want it when I already download all YT videos without ads before watching them already?

You are a very atypical user if that is the case. So maybe Youtube Red isn't for you.

That's the equivalent of "Why pay for TV when you have BitTorrent?"

You are not the target market

1. You're supporting content creators as they make a cut of your monthly fee. Creating content costs money as well as creative time and effort.

2. It allows you to watch YouTube legitimately ad-free across all your devices. This includes the YouTube app on Android and the YouTube app on your Xbox/Playstation. Adblockers weren't available on either without rooting Anrdoid using a proxy with your console.

3. It allows you to access Google Music and stream tens of thousands of songs to all your devices. Also while compensating content creators (though the compensation level of streaming is quite low).

YouTube Red is not currently available in Sweden.

I guess people at Youtube HQ spent to long reading Youtube comments and assumed everyone that usues the service is stupid and would pay for a bunch of pointless crap.

""Scare PewDiePie" is a reality horror series that puts the most popular YouTuber PewDiePie, also known as Felix Kjellberg, into terrifying situations, inspired by video games. "A Trip to Unicorn Island" is a movie that follows YouTuber IISuperwomanII, also known as Lilly Singh, on her world tour. "Sing It!" is a scripted series about a fictional vocal competition from the Fine Brothers, who are famous for their "Kids React to..." videos"

What!? Who is going to watch this!?

What!? Who is going to watch this!?

Well, 300,000 people have already watched the trailer for that PewDiePie thing since it was posted a week ago, so...

Perhaps the millions of their subscribers?

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