Can you remember back to the days when YouTube wasn’t muddled with pre-roll advertisements? Yeah, I know, it’s straining. Well, Google is looking to finally alleviate the pain that comes packaged with having to sit through tediously boring commercials. The new initiative is called YouTube Red, and yes, like all magic it comes with a price. For $9.99/month you can stream YouTube videos completely ad-free. Oh, and thankfully there’s more to it. With a YouTube Red membership, you can also save videos for offline playback and background playback is enabled (the latter meaning playback continues even if you’re bouncing around other apps or if you’re mobile device falls asleep). Another perk? A Google Play Music subscription is part of it, too. Of course, Red benefits do not apply to those YouTube videos that require you to pay to view such as film rentals and the like. The rest, praise be, indeed go ad-free.
In time, YouTube Red will also offer exclusive content such as YouTube Music (a new way to curate and listen to music coming next year) and YouTube Red Original Series produced by some of the sites biggest stars like PewDiePie and Joey Graceffa. Preview ten of the new series coming in 2016 over here.
As of October 28, YouTube Red has gone live and you can live the ad-free experience by signing up today. YouTube’s offering a free one-month trial for you to find out if the $10 barrier to entry is worth it to you. If you happen to be a proud owner of a YouTube channel, do note that if you are ever looking to support your videos with ads, you will be forced to pay up for a Red membership. With that slightly sour but understandable point out of the way, go give YouTube Red a test drive and see if the reality lives up to the hype of living in an ad-free YouTube world.