Unrelated, but am I the only one who can't believe how bad both the app and the website are from an experience perspective:
Website:
1. If my google home is playing music in my kitchen, I can't watch videos. It just cuts them off and gives me a licensing error. Instead it should just downgrade me to ad-driven youtube.
2. Most videos have huge 'annotations' that I can click off, but automatically get clicked back on for the next videos. Its usually people begging for you to subscribe to their channel. Its almost never to annotate anything and even if it was, the UX is terrible. It should be something I call up, not something that blocks the video content.
3. In-video ads. On top of the ad to watch the video I now need to be pestered with this little pop-up adds their ruin immersion. Oh I have youtube red, but I get these anyway sometimes. I imagine this is just a bug but even then they're a terrible experience for non-youtube red subscribers.
4. Audio quality is often terrible. Not sure if its the video itself but even the official music video channels usually have audio that sounds, at best, like 56k MP3 streams circa 2002.
App on Android
1. Holy hell is is slow to startup. Worse, if you accidentally hit a youtube link and try to press back, you need to press the back arrow about 3 times before it responds. Its probably my slowest app. Meanwhile an mp4 served from imgur is near instant. Heck, even a big ugly gif starts up much faster. There should be no scenario where a 100mb gif starts up faster than a 3mb youtube video.
2. Autoplay of next video means that if I'm reading the comments and if the video ends then it wipes the comments I'm reading and replaces it with the description of the new video.
3. Quality seems variable even though I'm pegged to the same 50mbps wifi connection at home with full bars.
Not to mention, the comments ranking system encourages 'hilarious' jokey comments over the more serious content. Youtube comments are usually terrible but for less popular videos they can be insightful, the problem is that the top 5 or so comments are either jokes or fairly obvious trolling attempts.
I wish someone wold disrupt this space but I imagine the deep pockets you would need to host all these videos on top of the legalities of it all means that only the top 5 tech companies would be able to compete and they're just not interested. I imagine the margins are fairly low here.