A short Rant on YouTube’s New Subscription Model and Mobile Strategies

So a few months back YouTube rolled out a slick new redesign with a big new emphasis on subscription content. This makes sense to me. However, it surprises me that YouTube’s monstrous parent company Google, which has also redesigned over 60 services lately as part of an admirably thorough integration of its “look and feel,” not to mention a more dubious integration of its privacy policies, have overlooked what seem to me as two absolute “gimmes” in terms of encouraging subscriptions, both of which involve their mobile app.

1. Why is the absolutely no integration between your YouTube subscriptions from the iPad app and the YouTube website? I’ve tried many of the new iPad video apps that lately seem to crop up increasingly fast and furious in the Apple App Store, such as Denso, ShowYou, etc., but always seem to come back to YouTube, which remains the best at letting you subscribe to content that interests you… I don’t need a million irrelevant “suggestions,” just the stuff I want to see when I want it, and an easy way to find out when it’s new. However, when I flip open my MacBook, my iPad subscriptions are nowhere to be seen. Isn’t seamless integration between your devices the wave of the future? And isn’t Google, the creator of Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail and even a laptop that runs nothing but Google Chrome, supposed to be on the forefront of this revolution?

2. This is a smaller gripe, but also speaks to a general neglect of the YouTube iPad app… Why can’t you rearrange your subscriptions within the app!? Flipboard, the New York Times for iPad and many other major news apps let you personalize the order of your categories. Yet YouTube locks your channels into the order you found them. Too bad if you subscribed to LOLCatzTV before you discovered you could stream the CBSThisMorning through your mobile device. Cause unless you want to delete and resubscribe to every channel you love, those crazy kitties will take precedence over the Israeli-Palestine conflict every time you pass the launch screen!

Anyway, this concludes this rant. YouTube, I love ya, but get your mobile act together… Or else one of those million new video apps are gonna overtake you, and the next time your little icon starts to wobble that little “X” in the upper left hand corner will start to look might tempting.