YouTube plans to launch video-on-demand subscription service

16 Mar 2015

In a bid to battle mounting competition from players like Facebook, Hulu and Netflix, Google-owned YouTube is understood to be exploring a video-on-demand service modelled on YouTube Music Key.

Such a service could include videos from YouTube stars and would offer ad-free streaming of popular video content.

According to Hollywood news bible Variety representatives from YouTube reached out last year to YouTube partners about potential licensing deals.

YouTube is looking to build on its YouTube Originals initiative through which it pays its biggest starts to produce family and comedy programming.

This content is slated to debut by the end of 2015.

Launched last year Music Key – YouTube’s rival platform to Spotify, Beats, Pandora, Deezer and Rdio – provides unlimited ad-free access to music videos and some 30m songs on Google Play Music for US$7.99 a month.

YouTube image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com