This service seems squarely aimed at mobile users- blocking ads and allowing YouTube to play in the background are two functionalities that are already enabled on desktop (with the addition of a browser-based adblocker). I'll be honest, it took me a minute or two to wrap my head around paying money to block ads on YouTube since I already do that with a browser extension.
Is YouTube really that popular on mobile? With Netflix and Spotify already having mobile apps I don't see many people paying $10 a month for the ability to skip ads and play YouTube music in the background. And as for "exclusive YouTube content" it makes zero sense to have the same monthly fee as Netflix and somehow think that PewDiePie is going to compete with Orange is the New Black or House of Cards.
I'm guessing that YouTube is quite popular on mobile devices. Beyond that, though, I think the fact that this service is bundled with Google Play Music is a big deal. There's a market already for $10/month music services... now, your $10/month gets you the music service and ad-free YouTube.
I don't know how Google Play Music stacks up against the others, but it's something I would consider.
Exactly this--the value isn't just Youtube--it's Youtube plus streaming music. If you are paying for a streaming service, switching gives you ad free YouTube "for free".
Also, being able to take videos "off line" seems like it could be pretty useful for some people.
I didn't see myself jumping from Spotify/Netflix to this bundle because Spotify has a lot more niche content than the other services, but Google could gain a huge market if they collect the music library for the younger, YouTube-obsessed demographic who would care about PewDiePie's exclusive content.
> And as for "exclusive YouTube content" it makes zero sense to have the same monthly fee as Netflix and somehow think that PewDiePie is going to compete with Orange is the New Black or House of Cards.
The (mostly teenage) audience for Youtube celebrities is massive, and is probably mostly invisible to you if you don't know any kids. I don't know whether they'd be willing to pay for a subscription service, but regardless of whether you think Netflix is higher quality than Youtube, there are many millions of people who get their entertainment mostly just from Youtube.
And your parents weeped for a generation raised by MTV. It is very easy to mis-characterise and or dismiss the younger generation's content, it is also ironic as your parents and their parents did exactly the same thing.
I'd laugh if I wasn't crying. Let me try it in essay form.
The quality of the medium has gone up in 200 years; the quality of the message, down. This is documented. Read old literature, if you can. Its hard for us, with our 9 second attention spans, to follow the thread in old books with their page-long paragraphs. Not because they wrote badly; because we're no longer trained to understand complex ideas. Instead 4-minute songs with one lyric, distilled one-note thought pieces with sophomoric moralizing, videos pandering to the lowest emotion.
Folks reading this will dismiss it as maudlin ranting, misplaced nostalgia. The trend has exceeded a single lifetime. Generations decry the drop in standards, because the standards drop. They had a long way to go, and we near the bottom.
Its not about hair and noise. Its about the message. Which there's no longer any room for.
It is easy to create content now, so yes, there is a proliferation of low-quality content.
That in no way implies that high quality content has been pushed out. There's still great literature, music, and yes even online content that is as great as or greater than anything created 200 years ago. Let the noise not mislead you into thinking that there is no signal behind it.
Those who seek good content will still find it. Keep in mind that all these improvements in the medium have made content accessible to a much larger section of society than was possible a few hundred years ago, so society as a whole is better read, better educated, and more aware than this good old world of yore.
I read a bit of philosophy. It's a delicate balance, because while I feel philosophy cover the truly important questions, some philosophers feel the need to inspect points I don't care much about (and ignore the big points to do so).
Overtime, I came up with a theory - if you can't explain your theory in 2 pages, it's bullshit (or: the communication of it is bullshit). You might have a deep, layered theory, but every two pages I should be getting some jolt to my brain. Some pull it off, others do not.
Am I showing a lack of patience and respect? Or are they simply being poor or inefficient communicators? I consider the most likely scenario to be that both are in play. And the former, in moderation, is necessary to address the latter.
So while I strive to accept that my boredom or frustration is unjustified and should be reined in, I also (easily) accept that sometimes I'm right, and what's being done is longer/slower/off-topic too much.
Your comments betray a profound ignorance of historical fact. The "old literature" you refer to is a carefully curated set of highlights, the loftiest and most sophisticated work collected over a span of centuries, written at a time when literacy was largely confined to an elite.
Disposable pop culture has always been with us, we just have much poorer records of it precisely because it is disposable.
I have a particular interest in broadside ballads, cheaply printed song lyric sheets that were made between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. All the critiques of modern pop lyrics are equally applicable to music that is older than the American republic. It's all there - sex, violence, drunkenness, repetitive lyrics, rehashed old melodies.
For example, are you dismayed by the crass sexuality of "Anaconda" by Nicki Minaj? Take a look at "The Maid's Complaint", a charming ditty from the late 17th century that features lyrics like this:
For I am a Maid and a very good Maid,
and sixteen years of age am I,
And fain would I part with my Maiden-head
if any good fellow would with me lye:
But none to me ever yet proffer'd such love,
as to lye by my side and give me a shove
With his dil doul, dill doul, dil doul,
O happy were I, etc.
The impression most people have of history is mere propaganda, a self-aggrandising origin story. Our past was systematically bowdlerised by generations of puritans and reactionaries. By any conceivable standard, we have not degenerated from some halcyon ideal; rather, we have advanced greatly, becoming more educated, more civilised, more peaceful, prosperous and decent.
You missed by about 20 years, but yeah. And no, I watched the same things as my parents on an old B&W TV every evening. This fracture has not been going on forever; its not healthy or natural; its only happened since TV hit the mainstream. For the first 1M years we all heard the same stories; we shared a culture.
I think you underestimate both the different sort of people in the word and the sheer volume of human art and expression available.
There will undoubtedly be kids "raised on LolCatz and FailzTeenThrob", but those will be a very tiny slice of humanity. And really, it's not anybody's place to say what someone else should or should not enjoy.
PewDiePie - just one Youtube channel - has almost 40 million subscribers. Even if a very small percentage pays the $10/mo subscription fee, the numbers here are still huge.
I watch way more YouTube than regular TV and I'm in my mid 30s. I'm not really a PewDiePie fan - he's OK - but I'd rather watch him screaming and playing games than most of the dull US drama that passes for "good TV" nowadays..
I didn't realize how big youtube was until I found out my girlfriend uses youtube to get ideas for makeup and how to apply it, clothing, recipes, reactions to things. Basically anything in real life has a reviewer, tester, or expert on it in youtube. There is a whole world on youtube.
>"I make a little bit of money from ads, not much, but something," she recently explained. The real money these days is in product placement"
Why doesn't Google just buy https://famebit.com/ ?
My main question is: How is my money distributed? If I only watch a single video in a given month, will that creator get my $10 (usually called "subscriber share model") will my money go into a big pool which is distributed equally by clicks, in which case the creator of my favorite video will get almost nothing?
I wonder the same thing. My assumption is that it will (unfortunately) be similar to Spotify's model. Distribution of those subscription dollars will be based on total views platform wide rather than on your individual views. So even if you only watch videos from one channel, they will only get a piece of your $10 proportional to their total views among all videos on Youtube. Who knows though, being a Google property, it wouldn't surprise me that they have a more complex algorithm.
If the payment is proportional to the view distribution among Youtube Red subscribers, I'm not sure whether the methods would work out very differently.
Actually I guess one way it could get skewed if the viewers of one channel on average watch more/fewer videos than the population at large. Hopefully they figure out how to weight the value of a given minute of "view time" for fix-it videos etc vs music videos which are running in the background.
Google should consider lumping in membership of Contributor in with YouTube Red for the $10 a month fee. That would be a great product - (Google) ad-free web plus ad-free YouTube that works in the background on mobile devices and offline (as long as you download the video first).
I'd be more likely to pay for that than the two services separately. This feels a little too close to the scenario where you're paying every advertising network in the world a subscription each month.
I guess I don't understand what's supposed to be so great about this. Youtube is going to the cable subscription model. Hooray?
Everyone knows that the next few years is about consumers "cutting the cord" from cable bundles so they can pay the same amount for bundled streaming services. So Youtube is joining the list of paid streaming services. Not surprising, or exciting.
Everyone already seems to acknowledge that paid streaming services will go the same way cable TV went: first you're paying for no ads, but in a few years you're paying with ads, too. This goes beyond "not exciting" and right to "bad for consumers."
The only big question for me is, if "information wants to be free" really is baked into the digital world... who's going to do to Youtube, what Youtube did to cable TV?
Brand's complete quote is more illustrating of the dilemma:
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other"
What are they going to do about the ads creators do inside their videos? Unless they ban "This video is supported by..." type content inside videos there will still be ads, just not Youtube separate ads. And banning those ads will probably end many channels who rely on them to make up for Youtube's pretty lousy ad pay-out.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadIs YouTube really that popular on mobile? With Netflix and Spotify already having mobile apps I don't see many people paying $10 a month for the ability to skip ads and play YouTube music in the background. And as for "exclusive YouTube content" it makes zero sense to have the same monthly fee as Netflix and somehow think that PewDiePie is going to compete with Orange is the New Black or House of Cards.
I don't know how Google Play Music stacks up against the others, but it's something I would consider.
Also, being able to take videos "off line" seems like it could be pretty useful for some people.
The (mostly teenage) audience for Youtube celebrities is massive, and is probably mostly invisible to you if you don't know any kids. I don't know whether they'd be willing to pay for a subscription service, but regardless of whether you think Netflix is higher quality than Youtube, there are many millions of people who get their entertainment mostly just from Youtube.
The quality of the medium has gone up in 200 years; the quality of the message, down. This is documented. Read old literature, if you can. Its hard for us, with our 9 second attention spans, to follow the thread in old books with their page-long paragraphs. Not because they wrote badly; because we're no longer trained to understand complex ideas. Instead 4-minute songs with one lyric, distilled one-note thought pieces with sophomoric moralizing, videos pandering to the lowest emotion.
Folks reading this will dismiss it as maudlin ranting, misplaced nostalgia. The trend has exceeded a single lifetime. Generations decry the drop in standards, because the standards drop. They had a long way to go, and we near the bottom.
Its not about hair and noise. Its about the message. Which there's no longer any room for.
That in no way implies that high quality content has been pushed out. There's still great literature, music, and yes even online content that is as great as or greater than anything created 200 years ago. Let the noise not mislead you into thinking that there is no signal behind it.
Those who seek good content will still find it. Keep in mind that all these improvements in the medium have made content accessible to a much larger section of society than was possible a few hundred years ago, so society as a whole is better read, better educated, and more aware than this good old world of yore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
I read a bit of philosophy. It's a delicate balance, because while I feel philosophy cover the truly important questions, some philosophers feel the need to inspect points I don't care much about (and ignore the big points to do so).
Overtime, I came up with a theory - if you can't explain your theory in 2 pages, it's bullshit (or: the communication of it is bullshit). You might have a deep, layered theory, but every two pages I should be getting some jolt to my brain. Some pull it off, others do not.
Am I showing a lack of patience and respect? Or are they simply being poor or inefficient communicators? I consider the most likely scenario to be that both are in play. And the former, in moderation, is necessary to address the latter.
So while I strive to accept that my boredom or frustration is unjustified and should be reined in, I also (easily) accept that sometimes I'm right, and what's being done is longer/slower/off-topic too much.
Disposable pop culture has always been with us, we just have much poorer records of it precisely because it is disposable.
I have a particular interest in broadside ballads, cheaply printed song lyric sheets that were made between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. All the critiques of modern pop lyrics are equally applicable to music that is older than the American republic. It's all there - sex, violence, drunkenness, repetitive lyrics, rehashed old melodies.
For example, are you dismayed by the crass sexuality of "Anaconda" by Nicki Minaj? Take a look at "The Maid's Complaint", a charming ditty from the late 17th century that features lyrics like this:
http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/21716/citationThe impression most people have of history is mere propaganda, a self-aggrandising origin story. Our past was systematically bowdlerised by generations of puritans and reactionaries. By any conceivable standard, we have not degenerated from some halcyon ideal; rather, we have advanced greatly, becoming more educated, more civilised, more peaceful, prosperous and decent.
Pretty much any anthropologist is going to tell you that culture used to be hyper-local. And still is, in remote areas.
― Socrates
There will undoubtedly be kids "raised on LolCatz and FailzTeenThrob", but those will be a very tiny slice of humanity. And really, it's not anybody's place to say what someone else should or should not enjoy.
Find someone with a 12-year-old kid, and ask them about the popularity of using mobile devices to watch YouTube stars.
I watch a few short series on youtube while working... it's a fine medium for content. 10 bucks seems steep to me... but I also don't pay for cable.
I can see this working.
1. http://techcrunch.com/video/youtube-red-strips-out-ads-but-b...
Actually I guess one way it could get skewed if the viewers of one channel on average watch more/fewer videos than the population at large. Hopefully they figure out how to weight the value of a given minute of "view time" for fix-it videos etc vs music videos which are running in the background.
I'd be more likely to pay for that than the two services separately. This feels a little too close to the scenario where you're paying every advertising network in the world a subscription each month.
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
Everyone knows that the next few years is about consumers "cutting the cord" from cable bundles so they can pay the same amount for bundled streaming services. So Youtube is joining the list of paid streaming services. Not surprising, or exciting.
Everyone already seems to acknowledge that paid streaming services will go the same way cable TV went: first you're paying for no ads, but in a few years you're paying with ads, too. This goes beyond "not exciting" and right to "bad for consumers."
The only big question for me is, if "information wants to be free" really is baked into the digital world... who's going to do to Youtube, what Youtube did to cable TV?
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other"
The original context of this axiom was that information will tend towards making itself free of confines, not cost.
The free-beerness is a consequence of this liberation, not the goal.
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html