Google, YouTube’s parent company, is going to launch a YouTube subscription service for those users who are tired of advertisements they have to see before viewing the video. According to YouTube’s head of content and business operations, the streaming service is currently “fine-tuning the experience”. YouTube also said that a subscription offering was very important to the service, because too many viewers are being annoyed by having to sit through adverts.

Indeed, the online video service has been exploring its paid, advert-free version for a while now: for example, a pilot program was introduced back in 2013. It allowed individual content providers to charge viewers a subscription fee for obtaining access to a particular video channel.

Google also launched its YouTube Music Key service a few months ago. It still works in an invite-only beta form and allows viewers to watch music videos without ads. However, the users are shown advertisements on other types of videos.

This novelty would allow the most popular streaming service to compete with such companies as Netflix. YouTube admits that this move would represent a significant change for the service, whose free ad-supported videos are viewed by over a billion users per month.

Within the 2013 pilot project, 29 channels went live. The list of YouTube partners in the project included Sesame Street, UFC, National Geographic, PGA and Magnolia Pictures. They charged a fee starting from $0.99 per month for paid channels that would sit alongside their free videos on the service. However, some of partners had to admit that their paid channels had got off to a slow start. National Geographic was one of the companies who had to admit that they failed to set the world on fire with the new strategy.

YouTube’s head of content and business operations also pointed out that YouTube’s growth had accelerated despite competition from other services. This is why Google is eager to encourage its best content creators via such schemes as Google Preferred. The latter was launched in 2014 and packages together the most popular YouTube channels and sells advertisements across them up front – just like the traditional TV commercials are sold.

We already have it. uBlock for blocking advertisements on video pages and Streamus for Youtube music.