YouTube already has a subscription service in the form of Music Key which enables users to watch music videos ad-free and download them to their device for offline viewing but Google wants to take things further. Apparently the company is working on a similar service where users pay a monthly fee to watch videos ad-free which will launch sometime in the next few months.
Google Inc is set to launch a subscription model for YouTube in a few months, CNBC quoted Robert Kyncl, the online video service’s head of content and business operations as saying at the Code/Media conference. The company was “fine-tuning the experience”, Kyncl said at the conference in California. YouTube has been exploring a paid, ad-free version of its service for some time. The company launched a pilot program in May 2013 that allowed individual content creators to charge consumers a subscription fee to access a particular “channel” of videos. The plan would represent a significant change for the world’s No. 1 online video, whose free videos, often accompanied by short commercials, attract more than 1 billion users a month.
