Will You Pay to Download YouTube Videos?
Sometime between yesterday and today Google announced paid downloads of YouTube videos. Yes, YouTube’s partners can now offer their videos for paid downloads.
The help section of YouTube speaks about this feature, thus -
Learn More: Video downloads
You have the option of downloading and storing your favorite Partner videos and watching these videos even without an internet connection. To download Partner video:
- Find the video you’d like to download.
- Below the video’s play bar in the lower left hand corner, you’ll see a ‘Download‘ button.
- Click the ‘Download‘ button to indicate that you’d like to download the video.
Purchasing a video download
Some videos require purchasing before you can download them to your computer. Once you’ve opted to download the video you will be directed to Google Checkout to finalize your purchase:
As mentioned in the help page and it’s announcement, Google is offering this service as a test to a few of its partners. So not all partner videos would have this feature enabled. However, the team asks potential partners who are interested in participating, to touch base here. Downloads will only be available as MP4 files and reports regarding this feature suggests that most paid downloads currently hover around $1 (sounds like iTune yes).
YouTube has been the problem child for Google for monetary reasons, that despite having as huge a user base as it has, it still hasn’t become the cash cow it was meant to be. This paid download feature certainly seems a new way to add monetization options to the video sharing site and look beyond advertising.
However, as most reader’s of WATBlog would know better than me, a variety of download tools and hacks are available for YouTube videos already. How will Google tackle such a menace? Will you pay for a video you can get for free? Will you pay to download a YouTube video even if there is no other way to have it on your computer?
While you decide, don’t forget to watch our WATShows .. for free of course.
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there are plugins in firefox which can do this for free. why should anyone pay? maybe they should give HD uploads as a premium feature. that would work better.
what?
i already have most of youtube videos on my pc…..
all u need is firefox to download then why pay?
Well there are already free ways to download these videos ( websites and plugins)
Maybe something can be done on the HD end , like vimeo has it
http://vimeo.com/hd
No way…
I am not gonna pay for the stuff I get for free!
Just forget it!
my opinion is youtube guys r not that stupid that they would let u play whole video and rip it off from temporary cache of ur browser….if they really want to sell videos they can make previews of 30 seconds or so available free of cost and then viewer could decide if he want the whole video……….and who know they might just backstep cos this won’t go well with the principle of free sharing on youtube….and might invite more porn due to pay purposes…….and even trouble for their adsense for video…….so i would not be surprise if they backstep their decision of charging for downloads instead they might go for subscribing fees for channels as a whole………..
I use YouTubeKeep.com to download YouTube videos at the moment. Anything that on YouTube, it can download. So I don’t see why anyone would pay to download YouTube video.
But maybe people will. People actually seem to use iTunes. I don’t know why…
Google’s logic ‘watching these videos even without an internet connection’ go out of the windows straight forwards keeping in consideration that internet is ubiquitous these days and its spread will only increase every coming day. So when internet bandwidth is increasing everyday (plus getting cheaper) data available free online is nearly equal to data present on hard disk. No one gonna shell out money just because data is present on HD.
If Youtube really needs to implement this then they need not play cards on ‘paid download’ but they need to restrict free online viewing as well. Even iTunes would never have been a success if it would have given free music online and paid only for download.
Youtube might prefer to restrict free views to only small previews/trailers and people who are interested in total video content may need to shell out money. But this approach might jeopardise their ad revenue model. Let keep our fingers crossed to see how it unfolds.
Y will I do that? M I out of my senses? Specially In India where Watching Streaming Video with the kind of speed we get is never cool and never appreciated….
I will rather to stick my super tweaked torrent downloaders
No need to pay.
Why not download a Free YouTube Downloader.
http://www.flash-on-tv.com/free-youtube-downloader.html#124
I use http://www.youtubevdl.110mb.com to download all types of videos in various formats with live preview option.