“YouTube Red” offers premium YouTube for $9.99 a month, $12.99 for iOS users

NEW YORK CITY—Today YouTube announced "YouTube Red," a $9.99-per-month subscription service for YouTube that will launch on October 28. The service lets you watch videos ad-free among other premium features, and it will eventually fund the production of premium, members-only video content.

At an announcement event, YouTube also launched "YouTube Music," another specialized "vertical" app interface along the lines of YouTube Gaming and YouTube Kids.

YouTube Red—Ad-free video, offline play, and premium content

Google describes YouTube Red as "the ultimate YouTube experience." The $9.99 subscription will cover all of YouTube products, meaning YouTube, YouTube Gaming, YouTube Kids, and the newly announced YouTube Music. The new service will let you watch YouTube videos without ads, save videos to watch offline on a mobile device, and play videos in the background on a mobile device.

Update: YouTube Red does not work on YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is not a signed-in experience (we'd imagine this is a factor of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), so ads will still be shown.

There is a big catch about that $9.99 price: $9.99 will cover Android, desktop, and the mobile Web, but if you purchase a subscription via Apple's in-app purchasing on iOS, the price goes up to $12.99/month. Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenue on its platform, and Google is passing that cost directly onto the consumer. (Most likely, customers will be able to bypass the higher price by paying $9.99 directly to Google and using the service across all platforms, including iOS, simply by signing into the app.)

YouTube won't talk about revenue sharing with content creators, but the company says it will pass on the "majority" of the revenue. In lieu of ad revenue, subscription revenue will be split up among creators by view time from Red subscribers. The subscription service changes things for YouTube creators, and anyone that doesn't agree to the new subscription terms will have their content set to "private" on YouTube.

YouTube Red will also be the start of an original content push called "YouTube Red Original Series." This YouTube-produced content will feature "new, original shows and movies from some of YouTube’s biggest creators." Netflix has done amazingly well with its original content push, spawning award-winning shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, and it seems like Google is trying to replicate some of that success.

One show is called "Scare PewDiePie," starring the namesake YouTube personality and created by the creator and executive producers of The Walking Dead. The show entices users to "experience thrills, chills, and laughter as PewDiePie encounters terrifying situations inspired by his favorite video games." Other shows follow a similar format, taking the YouTube Generation and throwing a big budget behind them. The shows will launch "early next year."

The challenge for Google will be getting YouTube users to fork over cash for a service that has traditionally been free. Will the combination of original content, ad-free videos, and offline viewing be enough?

YouTube Red is launching in the US on October 28, and the feature will expand to other countries "over the course of the next year." Google already offers a $9.99 subscription service for Google Play Music, but YouTube Red's fee will also include access to Play Music All Access and vice versa. It seems like some kind of universal "Google subscription service" branding is in order.

YouTube Music

YouTube Music is the latest specialized YouTube portal, following the launch of YouTube Kids and YouTube Gaming. Music videos have always been extremely popular on the service, with music videos like Psy's "Gangnam Style" among the site's most popular videos overall.

YouTube Gaming and Kids were radical departures from the YouTube interface, but YouTube Music doesn't stray far from the YouTube app. The three-tab design looks a lot like the traditional YouTube app, only showing music exclusively. The main addition seems to be a switch at the top of the "now playing" screen that changes from video to music-only mode. Search will also bring up an artist page, which presumably would be populated with videos from the artist (YouTube didn't show the feature). There also won't be a desktop website in the near future.

Google didn't show off much of the service today, but YouTube Music will launch "soon" in the US, with a plan to expand to more territories in 2016. The new mobile app will take full advantage of the YouTube Red features like offline playback and background music. YouTube was previously experimenting with these feature with a "YouTube Music Key" beta, but that eventually morphed into YouTube Red and YouTube Music.