Here at Uptodown our crew has been making bets for over a year now on what YouTube’s premium service would be like. Finally now we have something to go on from its official blog: YouTube Red will launch on October 28th and will offer, besides the removal of ads, exclusive subscriber content and several other interesting features.
To start the service will only be available in the United States, although you can check when it will come available in your country on the official website. The cost will be $9.99 a month, although you can get the first month free. These are some of the announced features:
- Ad removal: with what’s happening in the world of ad blockers this might not seem like a super great idea, but it seems that, in the absence of more concrete details, the system won’t penalize content creators, who will keep getting revenue per view, so everybody’s happy.
- Offline video playback: Note that this is not about extracting and downloading videos for your own use as on tools like SnapTube. Actually it just pre-loads the video locally to play even when you don’t have a connection, which isn’t the same thing.
- Background playback: As is already the case on Google Play Music and its Music Key complement, you can play videos on your mobile device even when you have the screen shut off. In fact, it’s quite silly that such a simple and recurring feature is not included by default for all users. Have to leave something for YouTube Red, I suppose.
- Exclusive content: Some people will love this and others hate it, but it’s true that YouTube Red will offer exclusive subscriber content from famous YouTubers like PewPewDie and much-loved channels like CollegeHumor. It’s to be expected that such content will be adapted to suit the interests of different countries. A first step into turning YouTube Red into a new Netflix? Time will tell.
