Ben Relles explains YouTube Red, a subscription service offering ad-free viewing and offline playback, plus exclusive access to YouTube Originals. The first four Originals launched in February 2016: Scare PewDiePie, Laser Team, A Trip to Unicorn Island, and Dance Camp. Relles sees the first year as experimental and wants to build ensemble series bringing multiple creators together.
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So YouTube Red is a subscription service from YouTube, and you get some benefits like a music service and the ability to watch YouTube uninterrupted with no advertising, the ability to watch videos offline, and the ability to watch videos in background mode. Aside from all of those features you get with a YouTube Red subscription, you also get exclusive access to YouTube Originals. And that's really where my focus is— figuring out what YouTube Originals will be most exciting to a YouTube audience. We launched our first 4 YouTube Originals in February 2016. Scare PewDiePie starring PewDiePie was a series. We launched a movie called Laser Team, which was produced by Rooster Teeth. We did a movie documentary called A Trip to Unicorn Island with one of our most popular creators, Lilly Singh. And then we also released a movie from Awesomeness called Dance Camp. And all of those 4 projects were grounded in YouTube channels and creators that already had really loyal, massive fan bases. So one thing that is unique about YouTube Red Originals is that the originals themselves live on the actual channels of the YouTube creators. So a lot of the marketing comes from those channels themselves. If you're watching the PewDiePie channel, you actually get a sneak peek of every episode for free on that channel. And then if you're a YouTube Red subscriber, you can watch the full episode on that channel. In addition to that, we're still doing a lot of the marketing which you would see in a traditional media campaigns. So we're doing outdoor, and we have marketing before movies and on TV and a lot of those traditional elements. But I think what makes YouTube Red Originals unique in some ways is that we have an ability to have the creators themselves dictate how they convey the series or the movie to their audiences. Right now for YouTube Red, because it's year one, we're looking for a lot. I think in a lot of ways we view this year as a great experiment for us to understand what works and why when it comes to YouTube Red Originals. So we have a lot of— early insights that are really important for us about how we can work with the YouTube creators that have really strong fan bases already on the platform. But in terms of the specific types of content, right now we're open to unscripted, scripted, comedy, movies, documentaries. We're very open to figure out what works on YouTube Red and why. So specifically, as part of the YouTube Originals team, we're looking for things that would resonate with a YouTube audience but feel different from what you might expect from YouTube regularly. One thing I think producers can bring to YouTube that they wouldn't necessarily bring to all platforms is the ability to have YouTube stars and influencers a part of the series that they pitch. So for us, a lot of times we're looking for great ideas from producers where we have the ability to go to some of our talent that have really loyal fan bases and put ideas in front of them that they can be a part of. I think one thing that could work really well on YouTube Red would be ensemble formats, where we have the ability, whether it's scripted or unscripted, to create a format where a lot of the YouTube creators that people are most familiar with can come together into one series, and we can create something really great combining a lot of those personalities in ways that maybe you wouldn't expect them to be combined usually.
