Acorn TV’s add-on channel is now available via YouTube TV for $6 per month and UMC is $5 monthly, the same pricing as through other platforms. They join a trio of AMC Networks services already available through YouTube TV: AMC Premiere ($5 monthly), Shudder ($6 monthly) and Sundance Now ($7 monthly).

The base YouTube TV package, which costs $49.99 per month, offers more than 70 channels including most local TV stations in all U.S. markets.

Other add-on channels available via YouTube TV — with HBO the notable exception — are Showtime ($7 monthly); Starz ($9 monthly); Epix ($6 monthly); CuriosityStream ($3 monthly); Fox Soccer Plus ($15 monthly); and NBA League Pass ($40 monthly).

Programming current available on Acorn TV’s YouTube TV channel includes: “Manhunt,” a hit ITV drama starring Martin Clunes (“Doc Martin”) as a former police detective who pursues a serial killer; “Line of Duty,” BBC One’s top-rated cop thriller; “Agatha Raisin,” starring Ashley Jensen as an amateur sleuth in adaptations of MC Beaton’s best-selling novels; and long-running series “Doc Martin” starring Clunes as a tactless, self-centered, and uptight doctor in a small village.

UMC’s channel includes: “A House Divided,” an original drama series starring Demetria McKinney, Lawrence Hilton Jacobs, Paula Jai Parker and Brad James; “Beyond the Pole,” UMC’s first original reality series that follows six of exotic dancers from Atlanta on their journeys out of the strip-club world; “Craig Ross Jr.’s Monogamy,” which will return for its second season later this fall; and TV shows including OWN’s “Black Love” and WeTV’s “Growing Up Hip Hop,” and UPN’s “All of Us.”

Last year, AMC Networks acquired majority control of Robert Johnson’s RLJ Entertainment, a content distribution company that operates Acorn TV and UMC.

The strategic evolution has been in the works over the last several months, with YouTube Premium (which was born in 2015 as YouTube Red) holding off on any major scripted buys. As Deadline reported last fall, the company has been looking to embrace unscripted fare anchored to recognizable stars as opposed to incubating scripted originals and trying to compete in a crowded landscape.

The Google-owned video hub will now secure free windows for originals such as Cobra Kai, the Karate Kid continuation which the company has picked up for a third season. The exact windows are expected to vary somewhat with each property.

YouTube said in a press release issued ahead of its Brandcast event at the NewFronts that it would now focused on three types of series: music, learning and personalities. It maintained that scripted would remain an active component of its development and programming plans, joining unscripted, interactive and live entertainment events.

“For today’s viewers, primetime is personal and our content resonates so strongly due to the diversity and richness of our unmatched library and platform capabilities,” Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl said in the official announcement. “While every other media company is building a paywall, we are headed in the opposite direction and now have more opportunities than ever to partner with advertisers and share our critically- acclaimed originals with our global audience.”

At the start of Brandcast, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki emphasized one stat as a motivating factor behind the shift. She said the fastest growth in viewing is in the living room, where about 250 million hours of YouTube fare are watched every day, on average. According to comScore, YouTube has the broadest reach of any ad-supported streaming service (and 2 billion monthly active users across all devices.)

Wojcicki described the company’s programming direction as aiming to “delve into topics that people truly care about. … That’s why people watch YouTube.” Topics such as beauty, cooking, music and science took up the opening minutes of the CEO’s remarks. “And, of course, slime. We’ve had lots of slime.”

It’s a big milestone for the service, which is now available in all 210 US television markets — up from the 195 that YouTube announced back in January. That said, not all YouTube TV markets are equal, with some areas not offering all four of the major local networks (Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS), so you’ll want to check your zip code on the YouTube TV website to see what’s available.

The nationwide rollout also highlights one of the biggest strengths of internet-based TV over traditional cable: widespread access, with YouTube offering the same (barring the aforementioned local channels) service at the same price to everyone in the US, something that essentially doesn’t exist for regular cable TV.

Come 2020, the video giant will retreat from its push into premium scripted series. At the same time, YouTube is planning to make all future originals free for its 2 billion monthly users, supported by ads — and thus virtually abandoning the YouTube Premium paywall, which is priced at $12 per month. YouTube first launched its premium service, initially dubbed YouTube Red, back in Oct. 2015.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that the move marks “a serious budget reduction” for the YouTube Originals team, which will continue to be led by MTV veteran Susanne Daniels. While Cobra Kai, for instance, has been a bonafide hit for the platform, the cost of competing in the increasingly crowded premium content market — led by players like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, who spend billions of dollars on content annually — apparently wasn’t paying off.

What does that mean for YouTube Premium subscribers going forward? In order to justify the subscription price, YouTube is considering making series available for binge-watching (rather than releasing episodes weekly for ad-supported viewers) or offering subscribers extended, special-edition cuts of series and films, according to the Reporter.

Despite the shift, originals that were already in the works — including second seasons of Cobra Kai and Doug Liman’s Impulse, as well as upcoming titles like Wayne and The Edge Of Seventeen — will still arrive behind the paywall. And while YouTube’s chief business officer, Robert Kyncl, acknowledged a pause in buying scripted shows, he told the Reporter that it was “too early” to conclude that there would be a full-fledged pullback. Other upcoming originals include Jordan Peele’s Weird City and Kirsten Dunst’s On Becoming A God In Central Florida.

“If you look at our originals over the last few years, our main goal was to drive subscribers to YouTube Premium,” Kyncl told the Reporter. “But through experimentation, we’ve also learned that we can make a lot of the projects work incredibly well when we make them available free to users.” He said that a number of advertisers had expressed interest, for instance, in sponsoring Liza Koshy‘s Liza On Demand.

In February, reports surfaced that Google planned to keep its YouTube Premium production budget flat for the next two years — a figure that was said to be “a few hundred million dollars.” YouTube Premium is currently available in 25 countries.

After fits and starts of marketing its YouTube Red video service and YouTube Music audio service separately, YouTube rebranded them in May as YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium. In the subsequent three months, the company has launched the services in 17 markets and announced plans to make 20 or so foreign-language shows in France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, India, and Mexico over the next year and a big chunk of the 50 originals that YouTube plans to release in 2019.

At the beginning of August, YouTube announced a slate of three Spanish-language shows for YouTube Premium, including one starring Gael Garcia Bernal, who won a Golden Globe for Amazon’s comedy series Mozart in the Jungle. Now it’s announcing a new Korean original, a documentary film about the K-pop star G-Dragon. The service says it plans to announce more foreign-language originals in the coming months and to launch video and music services in many more countries over the next few years.

You would expect a global company like YouTube to expand its subscription services beyond the United States. But an intensifying land grab for worldwide video subscribers by Netflix, Amazon, HBO—and soon Disney and Apple—has put more intense pressure on YouTube to expand the service to markets where its competitors already have a big head start.

“YouTube is a global product with more than 80% of watch time coming outside the United States, so we’re very motivated to get to a global place as soon as possible,” says Adam Smith, YouTube’s VP for product management. “Each country has different licensing, payment, and partnerships, so we’re moving as quickly as we can to get to as many countries as possible.”

Wherever it goes, YouTube wants to occupy as much of your attention as possible. “It’s a war for time, and everyone wants to keep you inside their world longer,” says BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield, who says he thinks YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, the company’s $40-a-month cable competitor, are more about brand loyalty than being in the TV business. “If YouTube Premium has more content you want to watch, you won’t leave the platform to go watch something on Netflix.”

RED OUT, PREMIUM IN

YouTube Premium is the latest go at premium music and original programming for YouTube and Google, which have been pivoting between various approaches and branding philosophies for years. Google launched Google Play Music in 2013 and YouTube Music (originally as Music Key) in 2014 as standalone music services, and launched YouTube Red in 2016 as a bundle that included premium shows from prominent YouTubers like Rooster Teeth and PewDiePie (the latter of whom was later booted off the service), access to the music service, and ad-free YouTube. In 2017, YouTube Red started ordering studio-driven shows like Cobra Kai and sci-fi thriller Impulse.

YouTube Premium launched in May as a two-tiered rebranding:

• YouTube Music Premium ($10 a month). The completely redesigned iOS and Android smartphone apps are free and ad-supported, and the Premium tier allows ad-free videos, downloads, and background play. The service is also available for the first time on desktop and mobile browsers.
• YouTube Premium ($12 a month). Previously branded as YouTube Red, YouTube Premium is more of a feature suite than an app. It includes the YouTube Originals shows and supercharges the YouTube and YouTube Music apps you’re already using by removing ads and adding downloads and background play. The ad-free YouTube viewing experience is pure bliss; hardcore users may find that feature alone worth 12 bucks a month.

MORE TV, MORE GLOBAL

YouTube’s video originals to date have fallen into three buckets. Some are driven by people who have large fan followings on YouTube. Others are Hollywood studio shows that are available only to YouTube Premium subscribers. And the last category is ad-supported celeb-reality shows and documentary series.

YouTube is continuing to ramp up production in all three categories:

• YouTubers. Joey Graceffa’s surreal competition series Escape the Night premiered its third season in June, and the first episode has nearly 7 million views. Liza Koshy’s gig-economy series Liza on Demand, which also premiered in June, has 11 million first-episode views. (YouTube generally makes the first episode of a premium series available without a subscription.)
• Studio shows. YouTube Premium has already renewed Cobra Kai, Impulse, Step Up: High Water and Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television for second seasons, and the shows in development for 2019 include a Jordan Peele sci-fi anthology called Weird City, a George Clooney drama starring Kirsten Dunst called On Becoming a God in Central Florida, and an untitled documentary series about artificial intelligence that will be produced and hosted by Robert Downey Jr.
• Ad-supported. Kevin Hart’s healthy-living reality show What the Fit has clocked more than 100 million episode views since premiering in March, and a second season is already in production. On September 25, YouTube will live-stream Will Smith: The Jump in which the actor will bungee jump out of a helicopter over the Grand Canyon. (For real. He does stuff like that.)

“We’re at a unique point in time where users in the United States and globally are embracing digital subscriptions,” says YouTube’s Smith. “Our aspiration is for YouTube Premium to be a globally available product.”

THE RACE IS ON

Like subscription video, subscription music is a global business dominated by a handful of big players. Spotify (83 million paid subscribers) and Apple Music (50 million) comprise roughly half the global market, according to MIDiA Research’s most recent report, followed by Amazon, Deezer, Pandora, and Napster. Google Play Music and YouTube Music are lumped into the “other” category, a sign in itself that they haven’t yet reached the sort of massive scale that YouTube and Google crave. (Google does not report subscriber totals for either service.)

In a way, YouTube Premium Music’s biggest competitors are ad-supported YouTube and YouTube Music, which already account for nearly half of all music streaming globally. Why buy the digital cow when you get the ad-supported milk for free? A combined 133 million Spotify and Apple Music subscribers do find music worth paying for, and YouTube Premium is certainly a great value if you’re inclined to pay for a music service. But convincing a generation of YouTube users to pay for music that’s always been free—and is free now if you don’t mind the ads—will be tough.

For a music listener, the big sell of YouTube Premium is the bundle aspect of the service. For $12 a month—$2 a month more than Spotify or Apple Music—you’re getting an essentially identical music service plus ad-free YouTube plus a big and growing list of YouTube Originals shows. For someone who’s not interested in a music service, the value proposition is a function of how much you value the ad-free YouTube and YouTube Originals.

YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium’s two price tiers seem intended to stay on price parity with Spotify and Apple Music while charging a premium for full-service subscribers. That’s too complicated: YouTube Premium should ditch the $12 tier, price a single level of service at $10 a month, and market it as a better value than Spotify or Apple Music. Also, with Apple’s future subscription services unannounced and pricing unknown, a YouTube Premium service with a single price point would better position YouTube to react to whatever Apple unveils.

Those pricing and marketing decisions will work themselves out over time as Google, Apple, Amazon, Disney, HBO, Netflix, and others expand their subscription services globally and consumers start to figure out which are essential and which are not. A recent Nielsen research report showed that 37 percent of U.S. households already subscribe to multiple video services, and that number is growing as more households replace traditional cable and satellite service with a buffet of streaming options.

YouTube’s Smith emphasizes that the company isn’t done shaping the YouTube Premium proposition. “We will continue to enhance the feature set and the experience that you get as part of your paid membership,” he says. That gives YouTube the opportunity to treat the service the way Amazon has positioned Amazon Prime: as something that’s worth paying for in part because it gets better over time.