Can YouTube Beat Netflix?
Hello! Welcome back to the blog. Did you miss us? Well you should have. The DAILY FortySixFilms blog is kicking once again, and this time no breaks (we hope). Lets just say the last time we did this it was a trial run. This time it’s going to be different. No structure, no promised 8am release. The one thing you can count on is a new blog every day, and that’s it.
“But, Mike what will they be about?”
Excellent question! I don’t know.
“Wow! Sounds fantastic, can’t wait to read more!”
Thank you all for your kind words.
So lets talk about an ad-free YouTube. Did you know that it exist now? It’s called YouTube Red. You can read all about it HERE. But, just incase you’re too lazy to do that I’ll give you the low down. YouTube is facing more competition from competitors like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and HBO. People have actually been asking for this for a while. People binge watch their favorite YouTubers all the time, similarly to how you binge watch House Of Cards or Orange Is The New Black.
YouTube Red is a monthly subscription where you get AD FREE videos. It’s going to run you $9.99 a month, which I think is going to be too high and may lead to the service’s demise. Oh, and if you’re running it on an iOS device (aka an Apple device) the service is $12.99 to cover Apple’s in-app tax. With the ad free content you also get the ability to store videos offline to watch later on, very similar to saving playlist from Spotify for listening offline, actually it’s the exact same concept.
Probably the coolest feature about YouTube Red is that you get background play. Have you ever been playing a song through the YouTube app on your phone? You go to lock your phone and the song stops playing. Well for only $9.99 a month you can continue to play songs from YouTube in the lock screen! In all honesty that’s a great feature if it was around two years ago. I already pay $9.99 a month for Apple Music so that’s not going to cut it.
YouTube Red will also be focusing on doing more original content with some of the bigger YouTube stars. So you’ll get original content you can only see if your a subscriber. That has the potential to be good, but we’ll see. Why is YouTube doing this? YouTube made roughly $4 billion for Alphabet or Google or whatever you call them. But, it breaks pretty much even. It’s not a cheap operation to run the site. On top of needing more revenue, they need to make sure YouTubers don’t switch to mainstream television, and that they keep and grow the audience that provides that $4 billion in revenue.
Ultimately YouTube has officially missed the boat. The main demographic on the site are millennials. They don’t have the funds to pay $9.99 a month when they most likely already pay for Netflix or Amazon. YouTube should of did a free three month trial to prove the concept, like how Apple did with their music streaming service, or at least start the pricing at a lower dollar. That’s just my opinion though, take it for whatever you think its worth. YouTube Red launches on October 28th. Will you be a subscriber?
