YouTube adds purchases using Google Checkout

The new purchase option shows up on the bottom left-hand corner of selected videos.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

On Thursday, YouTube launched a new system for partners in the U.S. to make their videos available for download and purchase. While the download feature showed up as early as mid-January for some videos, little explanation was given by Google on how video creators could offer it on their own content.

With the new system partners who are admitted into the program can choose from one of five different Creative Commons licenses, and can set the pricing of a video to anything they want. Users who want to buy the video go through a special Google Checkout page that uses their existing Google account credentials.

There's already a selection of partners that have made their videos available for purchase. One, HouseholdHacker.com, is pricing its video downloads at 99 cents a pop. These videos are only available in the .MP4 format (which is provided DRM-free), although YouTube could add additional formats to match what Google Video once did with copies encoded and re-sized for portable devices like the iPod and PSP.

One serious concern YouTube, and content partners must have with this new system is that it's still quite easy to copy a video with a number of stream-ripping tools--many of which don't require any software whatsoever. If YouTube expects people to shell out for a digital copy of the clip it's going to have to do something to keep these types of tools from easily getting at the source file.

Update: Regarding third-party stream-ripping tools, Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou tells us that YouTube is hard at work "putting in place engineering solutions that prevent (such tools) from working." Also worth noting is that downloading a YouTube video without using the new download option is a violation of YouTube's terms of service, which says "you shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a 'download' or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission."

[shootthecops]

there will always be circumvention, what consumers need to understand is that you will NEED to support at least your favorite content creators for there to be any budget for new content to be created. youtube is offering what people having been asking for, DRM-free video content, its time for the consumers to step up.

[aka_tripleB]

How do they expect to enforce the ToS when it is possible to watch videos without agreeing to it?

[spectator1]

You Tube is really doing some cool things now. I like this feature on the You Tube site.



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[Julia200]

I guess that it will be a long time before there is a substantial number of videos on YouTube which Google will let us download. According to Google themselves, there is currently only a "handful of partners" in this program. Also I don't imagine this functionality will be added retrospectively to the several billion videos already uploaded on YouTube. It sounds like I'll continue to use my trusted YouTube downloader Quivic for quite some time still...

[allyduan]

i often use a free youtube downloader to download videos in youtube.com
http://www.flash-on-tv.com/free-youtube-downloader.html#124

It is still ok now.
So i dun need to pay 0.99 for that videos.
(Only for personal use)