YouTube official says company is preparing to launch subscription service

Google Inc is set to launch a subscription model for YouTube in a few months, CNBC quoted Robert Kyncl, the online video service's head of content and business operations as saying at the Code/Media conference.

The company was "fine-tuning the experience", Kyncl said at the conference in California.

YouTube has been exploring a paid, ad-free version of its service for some time. The company launched a pilot program in May 2013 that allowed individual content creators to charge consumers a subscription fee to access a particular "channel" of videos.

The plan would represent a significant change for the world's No. 1 online video, whose free videos, often accompanied by short commercials, attract more than 1 billion users a month.

(Reporting by Abhirup Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)