YouTube’s first wave of Red Originals coming 10 February

Thomas McMullan Read more February 4, 2016

A horror comedy series from PewDiePie and a documentary about vlogger Lilly Singh are amongst the first batch of original content from YouTube. Users of YouTube’s subscriptions service, YouTube Red, will be able to exclusively stream the three films and one series on 10 February.

Seeing as YouTube Red is only currently available in the US, potential UK viewers will need to instead purchase or rent the content through either YouTube or Google Play.

The four Red Originals encompass Felix Kjellberg’s Scare PewDiePie, Lilly Singh’s A Trip to Unicorn Island, musical Dance Camp and Rooster Teeth’s superhero comedy Lazer Team.

PewDiePie’s reality series offering will see the YouTube gaming star face “the most insane live horror games ever”. Viewers will see Kjellberg get scared by a series of set pieces, designed in collaboration with the executive production company behind The Walking Dead. It looks to be a riff on the format that originally made Kjellberg a hit – playing scary video games.

There is no official news yet of whether YouTube’s $9.99 per month subscription service will come to the rest of the world, although it seems like an inevitability. A recent deal between YouTube and music licensing organization PRS For Music suggests that a European launch of the service could be coming within the next few months.