YouTube provides their content for free. They just don't want to provide that content without strings attached, they want to force their users to watch advertising.
The only way to provide content for free, yet force users to watch advertising, is to lock down users' computers and remove their freedom to control their own computing. That's what most HN users are against, as it goes against the philosophy of free software [0].
If YouTube doesn't want to provide free content, they have all the liberty in the world to remove free content from their site and provide it only for YouTube Premium users. But they don't want to do that, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
But YouTube provides very little content of their own. They are primarily a hosting platform used by third-party content providers.
If YouTube doesn't want to make content accessible for free anymore, it would undermine the use case of the vast majority of people who use it to distribute their own content.
I don't know what their finances and operations look like internally, but I suspect that the revenue they are bringing is enough for them to operate very much in the black, despite some proportion of their audience blocking ads, just as traditional broadcast TV networks have been profitable for decades without having nay mechanism to ensure that viewers are watching commercials.
Perhaps YouTube should just accept that ad blocking is part of the market landscape they operate it, and plan their monetization around reasonable estimates of the actual reach of their ads with blocking taken into account. Potentially undermining their core business model just to increase ad viewership by a few percentage points doesn't seem like a sound strategy.
> If YouTube doesn't want to provide free content, they have all the liberty in the world to remove free content from their site and provide it only for YouTube Premium users. But they don't want to do that, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
If you believe in the philosophy of free software to the letter YouTube can't do as you suggest. If they were to offer a paid only service to Premium members that respects their freedoms, that content should also be freely distributable to others. That undermines their entire business model.
I don't think that this is a real problem. There's nothing stopping you from downloading a video and emailing it to a few friends, but there's no viable alternative to YouTube as a video distribution platform. If you wanted to take a lot of videos from YouTube premium and share them all with the world without having to worry about bandwidth costs, what are your options?
Torrenting is the only real solution that comes to my mind, but that only works for the most in demand media. If you want the long tail, then as I see it, YouTube's (or similarly Facebook's) infrastructure offers the only viable solution, and there's no alternative to paying them for maintaining this infrastructure, either via ads, or via a subscription.
> If you wanted to take a lot of videos from YouTube premium and share them all with the world without having to worry about bandwidth costs, what are your options?
I also want to be able to feed, shelter, and educate the whole world without having to worry about costs, but I have no options.
I don't agree that this is true, you don't have to have free content to have FOSS devices, but sometimes your business model doesn't work. I'm not obligated to buy your stuff.
When you say 'free content' do you mean free as in beer or free as in freedom?
I agree that 'free as in beer' is not required for a 'foss device', but I don't see how you can have content which is not 'free as in freedom' on a foss device. Without DRM and licensing restrictions, how can YouTube prevent premium users sharing that content with non-paying individuals?
To be clear I am not saying it is right or wrong, just a statement of facts. All I am suggesting is that both business models (ad supported free (beer) content or paid subscriptions) do not respect free software principles. Either way, you are restricting what a user can do with that content.
I don't understand that analogy. I've never been to a supermarket without some degree of security, and laws form a deterrent. Sure, we could say that violates my freedom to take what I want (and it does) but trading some liberties are what allows us to have a civilised society where we don't all steal from each other.
> The propaganda is so pervasive that we believe that people must be made physically unable to steal, otherwise they definitely will.
Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals? Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time.
Again, and I want to stress this, I'm not saying it's 'right' or defending YouTube's business practices. I just don't see how either business model can be reconcilled with the Free Software principles.
> I've never been to a supermarket without some degree of security
And I've never seen a video streaming site that just gave you links to download the videos. They all have some degree of security, but no supermarket ever tied my hands behind my back on entry.
> Are you suggesting that if tomorrow YouTube removed all their DRM and turned into a paid for only service, that content would not be freely distributed to non-paying individuals?
No, I'm suggesting that not everyone would steal it, in te same way that not everyone shoplifts now. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the convenience of Netflix over torrents is so great for the average person, that they'd keep paying even if there was no DRM on Netflix, because
> Hell, content with DRM is getting torrented all the time.
> And I've never seen a video streaming site that just gave you links to download the videos. They all have some degree of security, but no supermarket ever tied my hands behind my back on entry.
What security measures can YouTube employ which are compatible with FOSS? How can they prevent users copying the content if the content is DRM free and has an open license?
> no supermarket ever tied my hands behind my back on entry.
Again, I don't follow this analogy. The overwhelming majority of people are quite happy consuming content with DRM and heavily restricted license agreements, it adds no friction to their experience.
DRM and license restrictions only matter when you want to break their terms, which is analogous to the point in a shop when someone tries to steal something. It's only at that point does the DRM feel restrictive, in the same way that you would expect your hands to be tied behind your back in a shop if you steal something.
> No, I'm suggesting that not everyone would steal it, in te same way that not everyone shoplifts now. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the convenience of Netflix over torrents is so great for the average person, that they'd keep paying even if there was no DRM on Netflix, because
I did not suggest everyone would 'steal it' (whatever stealing means with open licensing) but enough would for it to significantly materially impact their business. As it stands, licensing and DRM protections mean that none of the big players will touch hosting another's content, YouTube's legal team would be would be all over them like a ton of bricks. If they removed the restrictions though, why not give it a go? Twitch could host say the top 10% of gaming content off YouTube and earn ad revenue off it, or include it as part of Twitch Prime ad free.
It's really interesting you bring up netflix because it probably demonstrates this problem more clearly. If netflix removed their license restrictions, that means a big player could host their content and pretty much only pay the bandwidth costs. I appreciate that's no small feet, but it's certainly easier than making the content in the first place and paying the bandwidth fees. YouTube is certainly at the scale that they could trivially host all of Netflix's content and their business would be gone overnight.
The only reason people keep paying for netflix is because piracy has friction. That friction only exists because of the restrictive licensing and DRM.
> I've never been to a supermarket without some degree of security, and laws form a deterrent.
For what it's worth, I have been to some unattended small shops (particularly in smaller places around Europe) that are fully trust-based, with just self-service credit card checkout or a money box that you should put the right amount in, and it seems to work. I don't know if it would work for a large supermarket, but I think we are getting there, with the proliferation of self-service, and camera-based technological solutions like Amazon's.
Really this makes perfect sense in locations where most people are honest and the dishonest minority are just pilfering the occasional chocolate bar and not unloading the entire store into a waiting van.
As long as increased levels of theft doesn't exceed the salary they would otherwise have to pay, it's a good deal for the store owners.
Interestingly, one of my coworkers from India expressed disbelief in the trust that cafeterias had in their customers wherein one gets their food from a fridge or hot service and then, with the food in hand, voluntarily walks over to the cashier to pay for it instead of just walking out not paying. He said that system wouldn't work in India (whichever locale he is from) because nobody would voluntarily pay.
I agree with the other child comment to you that such systems only work in a highly trustworthy society.
> If they were to offer a paid only service to Premium members that respects their freedoms, that content should also be freely distributable to others
Old school TV, and cable companies, lost this argument looong ago. Commercial skipping by a variety of products was challenged in court ; they lost.
They also lost before commerical skipping existed, in the 80s, when they tried, and again failed to get VHS recording of live TV banned, because you could fast forward through the commercials.
Before that, there were attempts to make it illegal to record songs off of the radio, going back to the 70s!
So many attempts were made at this, that many countries have legislation which makes recording off of TV, for personal use, specifically legal.
Democracy has spoken.
In other words, youtube's model of injecting commecial content into freely viewable media, and hoping people won't modify it to their tastes, is a proven failed business model.
Any executive which thinks this is the path, and they one can legally enforce it, is literally delusional and unfit to ply their trade.
All their hand-wavy attempts to get around this, via encryption, via copyright have also failed repeatedly.
This business model is still alive, but control of endpoint is dead, dead, dead.
I think you're wrong. I'm a big advocate of open computing, but I think that endpoint autonomy is in as much danger as it ever was, if not more. You're describing that legal challenges to market-based or grassroots ad skipping etc. have failed, but consider that the legal route is out of fashion. What companies do now is sell a locked device. See windows on ARM, safetynet, [whatever apple is doing]. I love this click-to-root hack, but it's really a "play 2009 games, win 2009 prizes" situation. Good luck trying this on a game console or an Amazon echo.
Don't know about Echo, but I just jailbroke and wiped an Amazon Fire Stick and installed TWRP and LineageOS on it. The exploit to unlock the bootloader has been patched in the latest firmware, but I don't see the arms race ending any time soon.
That's awesome. I have some old kindle fires with lineage. I mentioned the echo because they have been iterating the hardware to make it harder and harder to gain access. For example, I have one[0] where they removed the USB port.
Universal Studios sued Sony over BetaMax not because it was worried about skipping commercials, it wanted to be able to sell movies instead of people being able to record it.
The first lawsuit about programmatically being able to skip commercials which is more akin to the crowdsourced YouTube skipping creator embedded sponsorship was in 2001 when 28 studios sued ReplayTV out of existence.
> Old school TV, and cable companies, lost this argument looong ago. Commercial skipping by a variety of products was challenged in court ; they lost.
In spirit, you're right. But legally, the DMCA was specifically intended to give the media companies what they had always wanted but been denied by the courts.
I don't understand your point. A lot of people are OK with watching YouTube with ads, and the rest can pay for YouTube Premium. Why would they remove free content?
The parent comment was talking about YouTube Premium as a better solution to the ad problem, implying that jailbreaking your system for the purpose of disabling ads is somehow bad. I explained how jailbreaking is actually just taking control of your computing, since YouTube already provides the content for free, and wants to monetize it by taking the control away from the users.
YouTube could monetize their content with YouTube Premium without taking the control away from the users, by means of not letting anyone view the content without paying. But they do not want to do that, as providing content for free is what made YouTube popular in the first place. So they lock down the users' machines.
They're the ones sending us videos free of charge. They're doing it assuming we're gonna look at all this noise. Unfortunately for them, their assumptions aren't gonna hold. We're just gonna delete the parts we don't want. Just like we can rip out the ad pages on a magazine and throw them away.
Where's the YouTube plan where Google doesn't track me, where I get zero ads, where YouTube itself blocks hardcoded sponsor segments in videos, where YouTube allows me to download videos DRM-free? Because we already have all that without paying them a cent. You want us to pay them to have less freedom and power than we already have? Nope.
I mean, this hauteur is nice and all, but typically people pay for things that they want to see continue existing. When you aren't paying in money, the only recourse is to pay with your attention. Refusing to do either is just social abrogation.
I pay for YouTube Premium because I won't sit through ads but I want creators to get paid (and apparently at a better rate than without it). I also use SponsorBlock, by the time I've watched a channel's back catalog I've often already signed up for their Patreon. I can't practically do so for every channel, so making sure they get their impression money is minimally just.
> typically people pay for things that they want to see continue existing
That makes things even easier. I don't really want surveillance capitalism corporations like Google to keep existing. Therefore I won't pay them for anything, not even with my attention. "Minimally just" has nothing to do with it. Any data they have on me, they took despite my best efforts to deny them. If creators can't make it work without exposing me to this evil, that's OK too. It was never meant to be.
> signed up for their Patreon
Yeah, I think this is the way to go for creators. They get paid before they create for the act of creating. This is the only thing that makes sense in the 21st century. Outdated stuff like ads and copyright needs to go, if they refuse we'll force them out with amazing world changing technology like uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block, Ad Nauseam and the almighty ability to copy that every computer inherently possesses.
>> it can be configured to skip things that are not simply sponsor spots, stuff like filler, intro and and cards, begging for subscriptions, and so forth
> Amazing! I didn't know that. Now I'm starting to wonder why I ever tolerated this noise in the first place...
No. This is just adversarial interoperability. Ignoring their silly "our way or the highway, take it or leave it" deals is what user freedom is all about.
The article defines the term but it does a poor job justifying it in the context of this discussion. Sure, it can be a tool to weaken large companies which is a good thing I guess, but it doesn't address the fundamental idea that we have always traded value for value. If we don't like the trade, we don't make it.
There is no "trade" here. I make an HTTP request, their servers send a reply with free data. If they don't want to serve me, all they need to do is return 402 Payment Required.
It's not like I'm hacking into their servers and exfiltrating data against their will.
This is pretty silly. You aren't Fighting The Man by not receiving ads paying for the stuff you consume. Google is The Man and they'll be fine. But they don't pay creators for videos viewed via adblock, and I sure hope you're putting money in the till for them.
I agree with this article but I think it's actually a lot simpler than that.
Our attention belongs to us. Our minds are sacred. Not a single corporation on this earth should have an assumed right to "compete" for our attention or otherwise exploit it for personal gain. Our attention is not theirs. They have no right to sell it off to the highest bidder. There really does not need to be any justification beyond this.
Economic harm? It doesn't matter how much money they lose. When some advertising corporation calls ad blockers "robbery" I can only laugh. I call their advertising robbery. They rob us of our attention. They mind rape us, inserting their little brands into our awareness without our consent. I think they belong in jail for this stuff. Blockers are just legitimate self defense, we're just protecting ourselves against these malicious corporations trying to manipulate us with their advertising for profit.
And yet broadcast TV has existed for decades, supported entirely by ads, with no tracking or spyware involved, and with nothing restricting our ability to fast-forward through commercials.
I wish Google offered the option to do something like this:
1. pay 2 cents (or whatever the value is to Google for a single ad view) for each ad skipped
2. if your total cost exceeds the monthly cost, just pay the monthly cost
That may not make sense from Google's perspective, but on the consumer side, I'm a lot more likely to sign up for that scheme than paying a monthly fee for youtube.
I pay for hulu without ads because we watch enough hulu for that to make sense. But I watch probably a handful of videos on youtube a month. I can't really justify paying for youtube premium in that case.
People say "just let me pay" but when the option is there no-one really does. They just want free things.