YouTube To Offer Subscription Service This Week 189
jfruh writes "According to an email from a Google spokesman, YouTube will be offering a $1.99/month subscription service as early as this week. This service will 'bring even more great content to YouTube for our users to enjoy and provide our creators with another vehicle to generate revenue from their content,' though there was no indication of what content will be offered through the service exactly. YouTube has offered rentals for specific videos before but this is the first time the service would go head-to-head with subscription services like Netflix."
Youtube could potentially dominate all other video (Score:5, Interesting)
Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
You're just one step closer to the dystopian future of the all-despising baby skull: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2490 [smbc-comics.com]
Re:Youtube streaming sucks. (Score:2, Interesting)
That nonsense has been debunked numerous times. Reddit latched on to the "workaround" [reddit.com], but if you actually read the full thread -- not skim it -- you will find intelligent network-savvy folks commenting on its idiocy. The person who came up with this "workaround" doesn't understand things like DNS load balancing, anycast, and other methodologies Youtube deploys (including back-end stuff) to accomplish load balancing. You might also be surprised to know Youtube's Flash applet (not sure about the HTML 5 stuff) has rate-limiting implemented in it as well (really, it does).
Here are two forums threads I've been involved with now where in both cases asking people to step up to the plate and provide hard proof (specifically of TWC implementing some kind of throttling) resulted in them admitting the supposed "workaround" doesn't work at all, not to mention contains references to netblocks that have nothing to do with Youtube, and netblocks of the wrong size (based on ARIN WHOIS, rather than what's advertised on the Internet via BGP):
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28102912-Heads-up-guys.new-trick-to-eliminate-Youtube-throttling- [dslreports.com]
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/youtube-loading-issues-possible-solution.68493/ [linksysinfo.org]
I wish that Mitch Ribar guy would take down that blog post already.
Re:Youtube streaming sucks. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's probably your ISP's fault. I know my ISP, Virgin Media, breaks Youtube.
What tends to happen is that the ISP notices a lot of traffic coming from YouTube. So they call up Google and get some caching servers installed inside their network just to handle YouTube video. All YouTube traffic is intercepted and redirected to these caches and for about five minutes all is well. Then YouTube traffic doubles in a year but the ISP makes no effort to upgrade its caches and everything grinds to a halt.
Re:Ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Youtube streaming sucks. (Score:2, Interesting)
Mind elaborating on this and how it relates to youtube vids?