Building on the Milk Music service it introduced in March, Samsung launches another streaming pipeline for its mobile devices, this time for video. Announced Wednesday, Milk Video puts a free YouTube alternative (with a limited video selection) exclusively on Galaxy smartphones.
Consider it the visual counterpart to Milk Music’s streaming radio. Samsung partnered with companies like Red Bull, Funny or Die, and VICE to provide exclusive programming.
See also: Samsung’s ‘Milk’ Is … Yet Another Online Radio Service
Milk Video is simply Samsung’s latest lukewarm attempt to break into the already crowded media landscape. Its previous try, Milk Music, still can’t come close to music-streaming giants Pandora and Spotify. Milk Video begins life with no shortage of competitors either, from YouTube, DailyMotion and others, up to premium services like Netflix and Hulu.
It’s clearly important to Samsung to have exclusive media services for its users—the better to keep them on Galaxy devices, or so it hopes—but its streaming offerings to date haven’t exactly set the world on fire.
Another concern with Milk Video: If it’s following in Milk Music’s footsteps, will it also start charging people for extras? The latter was completely free when it debuted too—in fact, Samsung made a big deal about reducing “pain points” for end users. Then just three months later, the company decided pain points weren’t so bad. It began charging for extra features, asking users to cough up $3.99 per month for offline listening, unlimited song skipping and a sleep timer.
Well, if you’re a U.S. users with a Samsung Galaxy phone released in 2012 or later, enjoy the free videos while you can.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock, modified by ReadWrite; vertical phone image courtesy of Samsung
