US reports: YouTube subscription service next month?

Reports from the US suggest that the long-mooted YouTube ad-free subscription service will launch in late October.

What’s more, contrary to early speculation, users may be able to get the service as a 2-in-1 music and video bundle. Earlier it was thought the music and video offerings would be distinct services, to be paid for separately.

The service is said to be offered for US$10 a month. It would include access to YouTube Music Key, its music streaming platform in beta since last November.

How YouTube will make money with both music and video tied to one subscription remains to be seen. But perhaps its big picture is to start posting fresh original movie and TV content which can see it compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon. After all, the Google-owned company has over $4 billion in revenues and over a billion active users on the site watching video every month.

The rumoured October launch date sits in with an email that the company sent to its creators, giving them an October 22 deadline to accept new terms or face their videos no longer being “available for public display or monetization in the US.”

According to the email, “So far, 95% of content creators on YouTube have signed up to and agreed to the deal to allow their videos to be watched by subscribers. That’s up from the 90% who had agreed back in June.”

It added: “We want to ensure that fans who choose to pay for an ads-free experience can watch all the same videos that are available on the ads-supported experience”

The move comes as YouTube heads to a head-on confrontation with Amazon’s live streaming Twitch. Once they were different beasts. YouTube was for longer-form video clips that users uploaded. The four-year-old Twitch was about real-time video streaming, mostly video games, and with mobile game streaming since 2014.

In August YouTube launched a streaming service, called YouTube Gaming. Before then, users could only stream games from consoles and PCs, and needed extra software or peripheral devices to capture video from mobile games. More recently, in a keynote speech at the Tokyo Game Show, its Head of Global Gaming Content Ryan Wyatt revealed it is introducing mobile game streaming through its Android app, so players could share gameplay clips and live streams from “anywhere in the world."

Twitch is about to offer users the opportunity to upload archive video clips “starting in early 2016” and create playlists “soon”, co-founder and CEO Emmett Shear revealed this month at the inaugural TwitchCon convention in San Francisco.