YouTube is about to charge, just like Apple and Amazon

According to The Information, YouTube is considering offering customers the ability to subscribe to streaming services from Showtime, HBO, Netflix, and CBS All Access, managed by YouTube. Those are paid services that users currently have to subscribe to and look through set-top-box.

Meanwhile, the normal YouTube version is still free to watch videos with ads as before to get revenue from advertising.

Before YouTube, Amazon, Apple and some other companies did the same thing. Apple users can sign up to watch paid programs on the Apple TV app. Subscribers to Amazon Prime Video can also subscribe through the Amazon Channel.

A portion of the user's program subscription revenue will be shared with Amazon and Apple. According to figures from BMO Capital Markets, Amazon revenue in 2019 from products on its channel is $ 2.6 billion. In 2020, this figure could reach 3.6 billion USD.

Amazon and Apple can control a portion of the growth in this area by offering some upgraded versions of traditional TV packages to their customers and making them pay a premium to watch those favorite shows.

According to Google's CEO Sundar Pichai, this is a good business that Google is researching and planning to apply to YouTube.

Currently in the US, nearly 20% of people watch TV programs through streaming services, nearly 93% of them are willing to pay to watch the better programs.

YouTube currently has 2 billion monthly users, so if Google focuses on investing in this field, they will become a serious competitor of Amazon, Apple.

The biggest difficulty for Google and YouTube is the cost of licensing and there is no guarantee of the minimum number of users because customers can easily access the available channels of Amazon and Apple. However, YouTube can use its revenue to make up for losses, YouTube's revenue reached $ 15 billion in 2019.