YouTube announced their subscription version of the service called YouTube Red yesterday. Basically users pay $10 a month and they get access to ad-free videos, offline playback, and access to more original content. Sounds good, right? However it seems that not everyone is too thrilled about it.
According to a report from Reuters, Disney’s ESPN has announced that they will no longer be making their content available on YouTube following the announcement of YouTube Red. In a statement made by an ESPN spokesperson, “ESPN is not currently part of the Red service. Content previously available on the free YouTube service will be available across ESPN digital properties.”
While there haven’t been any details regarding why specifically ESPN will be pulling out, it seems that it might have something to do with rights and legal issues. We can only imagine that ESPN probably doesn’t appreciate YouTube cashing in on content that they have created and hosted on the platform.
Granted there were ads before that split the money between ESPN and YouTube, ultimately it was still free then. With YouTube Red, viewers would essentially be subscribing to see ESPN clips which we can only imagine is a conflict of interest. Either way we’re not sure if ESPN will come to YouTube Red at a later date, but in the meantime Disney themselves will be part of it.
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