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YouTube ponders subscriptions

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youtube-logoEveryone uses YouTube!  How else are you going to get your daily dose of dramatic chipmunks?  But analysts reckon that the site will lose as much as £288m this year alone, due to its free nature.  

The site’s already had a go at solving this problem with deals such as the recent one with Channel 4, where the two companies share the revenue from adverts on the webpage, but now the suits are sneaking glances at the possibility of a subscription service for recent TV and movies.

Google executive David Eun said that, “We’re making some interesting bets on long-form content; not all content is accessible to us with the advertising model.”  Major American TV and film studios have been very reluctant to broker deals like C4’s with YouTube: “I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content,” to quote News Corporation’s president Chase Carey.

As such, the concept of a subscription service that could get recent telly and movies on YouTube is one that is gaining interest, especially as the currently US-only-but-sure-to-go-global-sooner-or-later Hulu is getting ever more popular in the States.  The company is also apparently looking at a pay-per-view model, a la the iTunes store.

There’s some sort of very laboured pun about Keyboard Cat to be made here, but we just can’t find the words.