YouTube unveils ad-free subscription service, YouTube Red

YouTube, the pioneer of free online videos, is jumping into the subscription streaming market with YouTube Red.

The new service, which will be available for $9.99 per month beginning Oct. 28, will give paying users an ad-free experience with access to YouTube videos offline, Google Play music and a slate of new YouTube original content. The Google-owned video giant also unveiled a brand new YouTube Music app.

“This marks an evolution in our desire to give fans more choice and features that they love and much greater experience they have been asking for,” Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer, said Wednesday at a news conference at the company’s 41,000-square-foot video production facility in Playa Vista.

Kyncl was joined by other YouTube execs including Global Head of Original Programming Susanne Daniels, who recently exited her post as MTV programming chief, and a handful of YouTube’s top stars, including Lilly Singh (known as Super Woman to her fans), Joey Graceffa and the Fine Bros.

Original content, which will begin rolling out in January, will include Singh’s documentary “A Trip to Unicorn Island,” a Fine Bros. show called “Sing It,” a PewDiePie show, a murder mystery show from Graceffa and a handful of other shows and movies.

“There’s no one recipe to creating appealing content,” Daniels said. “We have an incredible line up for subscribers and we’re just getting started.”

Kyncl emphasized that digital stars who have risen to fame on the platform are at the core of differentiating YouTube Red from other streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.

“We realized what we should be doing is we should be amplifying and funding efforts of these incredibly talented people [on YouTube] and just invest into that,” he said during a Q&A with reporters. “Just by virtue of that, we have a built-in talent system that we can amplify, which doesn’t exist on any other services.”

For creators, the new streaming service means the opportunity to produce higher quality content for their fans.

“It’s helping us expand our brand,” Singh told the Times after the press conference. “I think YouTube Red will get more eyes to YouTube in general. I believe it will create a larger community and in that sense, it’ll really help creators.”

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