cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40372957
fyi:
- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp lets you download videos (from youtube and also hundreds of other sites)
- for desktop, https://mpv.io/ is free and lets you watch youtube (or any other video) at even more and faster speeds than youtube premium does, among many other features
- for android, https://newpipe.net/ lets you play youtube in the background (and download videos, and block ads, …)
- https://ublockorigin.com/ blocks ads everywhere (and yes it does still work on youtube, at least in firefox anyway)
Typical. Take it away, then charge to bring it back.
For anyone wondering, only 4x speed is behind premium:
On mobile I can increment it by 0.05 up to 4x
Do people even use that?
Who’s got enough hours in the day to only watch reaction videos of teenagers eating foreign chocolate bars at only double speed?
I’m aware that this is a joke, but it’s also my point. Those types of videos are usually sped up already. How on earth can someone digest anything from a video in 4x speed?
I know right. I always alter the speed. I watch nearly everything at 1.25 speed because it shortens my viewing time without missing any content and I almost never even notice the difference. With really slow talkers I can get to to 1.75 speed. I almost never go to 2x. I can’t imagine 4x. There is one guy I have to actually show down to 0.75 speed to digest.
You have to work up to higher speeds and use headphones. Start at 1.5x and increase by .25 until you get to 3x, thats usually my max but if the video doesn’t have sound then 4x seems reasonable like for Odd Tinkering and Primitive Technology
Honestly, no idea. I think they’re just clutching at straws for things to “offer”, because the the next step is obviously going to be “take away the other options from free users”
Consuuuuuume
I am not against paying for services to unlock extra features, but I utterly despise the way YouTube premium is entirely composed of features we had but they took away.
Years ago I understand why streaming services want to implement paid subscription. But now, I heard that even on premium you will still get ads! It is just milking more money at this stage!
How would you suggest they get people to pay?
People pay for features they want. YouTube did a bait and switch and launched their service with all the features that were expected, such as running in the background, no ads, fast forwarding and everything else.
Now when the service is a monopoly, they are removing features instead of adding things that are worth extra money.
Its a bait and switch.
The cost of running YouTube is constantly growing. New features cost extra to develop and maintain. Monetizing existing features lessens the burden and allows the platform to keep providing their core service for free.
Youtube is owned by Google, market cap of 3.7 trillion dollars, third richest company in the America.
3.7 trillion is 62 million times the average American salary.
Lets pray together they will be able to manage their bills this month.
Why are you comparing the market cap of a company that runs multiple services for billions of users to the average American salary. That really shows where your brain is at and why you keep landing on the conclusion that this is unfair.
Maybe the example was a poor one, but the idea was to show that these companies have so much money, that im not going to feel sympathy for them needing even more.
Ok let’s take a look at the numbers. They might be unreasonable I dont know.
I couldn’t find YouTube’s profit or net income. So I’m going off the 2024 net income for alphabet which was 100b
YouTube is considered to be about 30% of alphabets valuation.
Let’s assume YouTube’s net income 2024 was 30b
Now they have 2.54 billion users. Divide that up and its about $12 profit per user and that is in their best year due to the election driving massive 30% increases in traffic and ad revenue.
I think $12 profit per user per year is reasonable margins.
Come up with new features that people would be willing to pay for.
How is that any different from shifting existing features to premium? If you aren’t paying you’re lucky to get anything.
I dont pay and I ad block everything. I’m surprised I can use the site at all. These features are nice to haves and not core to using YouTube.
Lucky to get anything? YouTube couldnt even have grown at all if it was a paid product from the start. People made it into the success it is, by using it, because it was free.
Now when its a monopoly, they do a bait and switch.
So because they started off offering something for free they owe us? Its still free, there has been no bait and switch.
Yeah. They owe us, they owe their content creators, they owe the tax payers who built and power the platform upon which their platform sits. They sure ain’t paying their fair share.
Some artists making content are practically their own little PBS stations or something, I’m with ya!
Would it be more palatable if they told us using adblock w/o premium was “robbing creators of one-hundredth of a cent each time” or something? If I’m not mistaken there is a connection between content creator payouts and that.
I dont pay and I ad block everything. I’m surprised I can use the site at all.
3 billion active viewers is what makes up the majority of Alphabet’s stock value. The revenue from ads, donation extortion, and premium are peanuts. That’s why youtube will never go full paywall or hard ban ad blocker users.
As far as i know, there is a difference in psychology between taking away features and adding the new features already behind a paywall
With you on this. Freeloaders have so many options to use the same service
I pay for premium to get rid of ads. Not convinced that adblockers will be a permanent and privacy friendly option but havent really explored it. But anything faster than maybe 2.35x is unintelligible, and not worth usint due to sound “tearing” issues (youtube lets you adjust it in 0.05x increments)
How does playing videos faster than x1 affect creators i actually want to watch? The Spiffing Brit did a thing a while ago about doubling their view time (and thus engagement) by having people watch the videos at 1/2 speed. If that was true it makes sense that watching it at 2x would only count as a half watch even if you watched all of it.
It’s why there’s like a second or two of a delay before the video plays when I watch on a browser with uBO. The connection isn’t slow, they’re just purposely slowing it down.
When they say ‘faster playback speeds’ they don’t mean faster connection speeds, they mean watching videos at 1.5x normal speed (or faster).
Up to 4x
Sometimes they even show an “Experiencing interruptions?” popup just to be extra dickheads. I am patient, I can wait.
its not an issue after it loads, and sometimes the “delay” doesnt activate on other videos.
In case anyone’s wondering, scytale’s ad blocker.
Play video in background
Was such a shamelessly sleazy was to try and twist arms into using their service. Nevermind that it just spawned a thousand different 3rd party tools for getting around this annoying limiter. It just felt like a huge red flag, indicating they were going to use their native app to be fucking annoying to their clients going forward.
The lite version does not include this. It also still shows ads on music and shorts.
I don’t understand. I play videos in the background all the time.
Not on free YouTube you don’t.
Maybe an issue with your browser then? Which one do you use?
The background play is removed on cell phones. It used to be possible, but they removed it, only so they could charge money for enabling it again. I doubt they removed it from desktop.
Try using desktop mode on your phone’s browser. I’ve had good results.
They are throttling top VPN ips, too. Can’t watch videos without them constantly buffering
Last night for the first time a video wouldn’t play for me at all, with a new error: VPN detected. Other videos were fine.
My boss uses a VPN and some other clandestine methods to subscribe via India, so he pays the equivalent of about £3 per month for premium.
I gave it a try, but could never quite manage. You need to fully turn off location services, use an Indian registered Gmail and pay via a credit card of some kind. I think you also need a registered address, but he just used one for a random hotel in Bangladesh.
VPN to Albania. No ads on free YouTube.
… Or you could just use an ad blocker
Can you do that on a firestick?
Maybe a jailbroken one. But I have no idea, I’ve never used one.
You don’t really jailbreak them as such to get functionality. You just enable dev options and APKs from unknown sources. You can SSH onto them if you really want to go command line and dig around in the OS, but it’s not necessary.
Admittedly, the creators get extra revenue from you using premium, so that approach is very valid in my eyes.
Also, ublock now blocks a list that includes the tracker for youtube views, if I remember right, so peopld using ublock don’t even count towards the creator’s views now :-/ this may be outdated now
Donate to your favourite creators either way! And use patreon not the youtube BS because youtube takes a massive cut!!!
Yeah, I donate to my favorite creators. I’d much rather do that than give YouTube a penny.
if I remember right, so peopld using ublock don’t even count towards the creator’s views now :-/ this may be outdated now
This was a temporary problem that was discovered by a bunch of creators and eventually fixed by uBlock Origin.
I’m fine paying for YT Premium, because I watch YouTube all the time, but I don’t even understand why people try to use YouTube’s monetization. It’s pennies compared to getting subscriptions from Patreon.
I turn off ads for all of my videos, because I’d rather just have the freedom to not worry about de-monetization. If I ever end up needing the money, I’ll use Patreon to fund the channel.
I’m glad that’s fixed.
And I think your approach is good. Look at Gamer’s Nexus’ channel. They got more funding from their supporters to fund their documentaries around the US, Germany and China in a few weeks than they would have got from youtube in months.
Viewer support is the way forward for creators imho.
Ib4 youtube bans external funding while using their platform.
I don’t see how YouTube could ban Patreon at this point. It’s too big to fail. Many of the top YouTubers have a Patreon account that earns them tens to hundreds of thousands per month. Cutting off people’s main source of revenue would just cause them to quit YouTube for another platform.
Doesn’t work on TVs tho
SmartTube
I use TizenTube on my Nvidia Shield.
You can plug a computer with an HDMI cable into your TV
What do you use for OS or software and remote? And dont say browser and wireless keyboard
Any major OS should be fine, although of course a good Linux distro is best. As long as it supports multi-monitor setups, you’re fine. Not sure what your issue with browsers is, given that the ad blocker is the whole point of the operation. As for a remote, there are probably many potential solutions. A Bluetooth game controller or probably any number of apps would work as a remote.
I was just hoping for a software which would give the TV experience and is optimized for using a remote
Because where would we be if we couldn‘t CONSUME ENDLESS SLOP AT FOUR TIMES SPEED?! Seriously who needs this? This is sickening.
If you’re watching lectures from someone who talks really slow.
Slop comment aside, a lot of people with ADHD listen to videos at 1.5x or more speed because that’s how their brain works.
I watch a bunch of channels that are mostly talking and are 20+ minutes. I always put it on 1.5x speed and its barely noticeable and you get used to it. It saves me time without any loss of what was being shown so I consider it a win.
1 question, this feature already exists for non paying costumers, does this mean its going to be a pay for option only soon? That will piss me off…
I was thinking they’d cap the free speed up at either 1.5 or 2, but I don’t know
i usually just skips the part if they drone on and on.
I think it trains your brain to be even more impatient and when you talk to people in real life, you will think everyone is slow and annoying.
Reading a book is probably hard for your brain too.
That makes faster playback a disability affordance, for legal reasons
1.5x is totally legitimate but Youtube advertises 4x speed. They put 4x speed behind a paywall. That‘s ridiculous.
Tutorials where they are going through stuff you 90% understand already and you just need to find that juicy remaining 10%.
Try watching videos by “explaining computers”. Actually pretty good content (mostly on single board computers like raspberry pi), but he talks glacially. Normally I watch at 1.5x, this channel is one of just a few where I need to up it to 2x.
I usually just skip to the part where he reveals the price of the amazingly cheap sbc, then click off when it’s definitely not cheap.
Nah I actually do care about the technical details, and that’s the reason I watch the video. I can look up the price in like 3s myself and didn’t need a video for that part.
When you think about it, it’s not really that different from learning to read faster, which is a valued skill.
(There’s an argument to be made that for many things you’d be better off reading rather than watching YouTube vids at 4x but let’s not focus on that.)
Have you seen people who complain about written jnfo his video info? Its because they can read thr info faster than listening to it be said. But if you speed it up to 2x or 3x then it becomes the same as reading in terms of time. You get used to it over time. I can’t listen to anything at 1x speed anymore.
I’ve thought about dipping my toes into this but I don’t want to start getting antsy when people talk IRL
Do NOT do it. I dont think the time saved is worth it. It hasnt changed irl stuff for me but any media feels painfully slow. I had to listen to a 1hr video conference with a group on 1x speed and I felt like I was being tortured. I had to refocused myself every sentence because i couldn’t hold attention on sentences that were being said so slowly.
If you want to consume info fast then reading is way better.
This is me but backwards sort of. Media has always been painfully slow for me and it wasn’t until I found the playback speed settings that I could tolerate watching most things. ADHD is wild.
TizenTube Cobalt or Smart Tube on AndroidTV
even better adblock. unless they aggressively go after anti-adblock, like preventing the page from loading there arnt getting new subscribers.
Got a 3 month free trial of it, honestly love the things I used to have. But it still stutters like shit and is a garbage feed of shit I don’t watch. I will not be paying when it’s used up.
How’s your Internet connection? I never get stuttering issues
More internet than I need, snd thankfully not spectrum. Not an internet issue.
YouTube is the only subscription I maintain month to month. Its worth the 13 bucks for no ads, and a music service (to me)
Respectfully, ew.
Same, the algorithm seems to do recommendations a little better too but that might be my imagination. I dont pay for streaming services and my neighbors let me piggyback off their wifi so yt is my only internet expense.
PipePipe still works
