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Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

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Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual problem is that running a platform isn't that expensive -- there are a hundred tiny Linux distributions that do it on essentially volunteer work -- but once you control a platform with a large number of users you can use it to shake down anyone who wants to reach them. And then people object to the shakedown and do whatever they can to try and stop it.

Think about what you're saying dude: Hundreds of tiny distributions rely on unpaid volunteers to run a platform. A platform with questionable quality and no real support. Yeah, it isn't expensive under those criteria.

> A platform with questionable quality and no real support.

The quality of tiny platforms is often higher than the larger ones because their maintainers will actually accept patches and one of the people having the problem will know how to code, whereas consumers reporting bugs to large vendors is more like adults writing letters to Santa Clause.

Anybody can get support for anything by paying someone to support it. For nearly everyone outside of large corporations, the cost of this exceeds the benefit, because 99% of your problems will be solved by whatever comes up when you type the problem into a search engine and the last 1% won't be worth the cost of eliminating.

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#62
post #54
post #40

This whole situation really feels like Google has their head stuck up their ass. People are just as likely to leave Roku, as they are to leave YouTube TV. Their subscriber numbers can't be strong enough to justify such idiotic behavior. To me, this sounds like a middle manager gone rogue, and no one higher up has stepped in yet and said "Ok, you shot your shot, but Roku called your bluff, you've taken this way too fa…

"middle managers" are not negotiating these partnership deals. I don't really buy the compression algorithm thing either - surely they make more off of ads than the savings that would be generated from better compression. pretty sure this is just hardball over revenue sharing, data sharing, and technical requirements...

Sure they are. In mega-corporations like Alphabet, even the head of YouTube is a middle-manager.

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#63
The service in question is YouTubeTV, which is basically a replacement for traditional cable. Local channels, things like TNT, CNN, etc.

I had the service for a while, solely for local news. They bumped the price up a few times, and it was just too expensive at $65/month.

I ended up buying a Tablo device instead. A bit of fiddling with different antennas, but it works great. There is the up-front cost of ~$250 or so for the device, decent antenna, and hard drive. Then $5/month after that, or $10/month if you want the commercial skip. I'm happy with it. You can access it from a Roku app, so the end experience for local news is pretty much the same as it was with YouTubeTV.

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#64

It is so dumb and twisted that there even needs to be a deal. Any web browser can hit youtube, you can probably get to youtube via a web browser anyway on a roku, if not they could in principle do that. Also dumb and twisted that as a paying youtube subscriber, I could buy a computer (a roku) and not be allowed to access youtube on it. Do better, tech.

You can still use YouTube TV (The old leanback interface) if you set your user agent correctly to spoof Tizen Smart TVs. Works almost well enough with keyboard/controller navigation but some keys are mapped incorrectly.

    /usr/bin/chromium --start-fullscreen --user-agent="smarttv;applewebkit;tizen"  "https://youtube.com/tv"

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#65
This is no different than when a cable company (usually temporarily) drops a major media provider due to failed contract negotiations.

The only difference here is that the specifics of the contract is being waved about in public to get ahead of customer fallout to losing access to the YouTube channel.

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual problem is that running a platform isn't that expensive -- there are a hundred tiny Linux distributions that do it on essentially volunteer work -- but once you control a platform with a large number of users you can use it to shake down anyone who wants to reach them. And then people object to the shakedown and do whatever they can to try and stop it.

But that is different. You cannot compare free and voluntary with commercial services. If you had to pay for those volunteers to maintain at a market rate, all that free stuff would be prohibitively expensive on a per user basis. I agree that Roku, time and time again, has been too aggressive in their tactics to extract maximum profit from their users via the apps they consume (HBO disappeared for a while last year,…

> If you had to pay for those volunteers to maintain at a market rate, all that free stuff would be prohibitively expensive on a per user basis.

These "platforms" start out with an existing open source operating system (BSD or Linux) that already works and has done so for decades. Then they add some features to it that represent a relatively modest one-time modification to the work that has already been done, after which further necessary changes amount to primarily security updates.

Corporations often spend massive resources doing further rearranging on an ongoing basis, but nobody really needs or wants that. If you gave people the choice between the current version of a given platform or the version from 2009 but with security updates, most people would shrug and have no strong preference, if not prefer the older one.

But also, YouTube is a platform and it goes both ways. Why should anybody need a special deal to display a website on their device?

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#68
post #20

It is so dumb and twisted that there even needs to be a deal. Any web browser can hit youtube, you can probably get to youtube via a web browser anyway on a roku, if not they could in principle do that. Also dumb and twisted that as a paying youtube subscriber, I could buy a computer (a roku) and not be allowed to access youtube on it. Do better, tech.

The issue is that companies like Roku are increasingly making their money by having companies like YouTube TV pay them to carry their apps. Likewise, there are lots of things about these systems that can fall under negotiations. For example, what analytics does Roku get access to for actions taken within apps? Does Roku get insight into what YouTube videos you're watching? From Roku's blog post, it seems that Google…

Is it all Rokus or all new Rokus?

If Google wants to move to AV1 it makes sense to sign forward thinking contracts even if they have existing hardware that doesn't support it.

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#69

It is so dumb and twisted that there even needs to be a deal. Any web browser can hit youtube, you can probably get to youtube via a web browser anyway on a roku, if not they could in principle do that. Also dumb and twisted that as a paying youtube subscriber, I could buy a computer (a roku) and not be allowed to access youtube on it. Do better, tech.

i wonder if apple will strike a deal with hbo or some dumb shit. hbo available on macs only. love our corporate controlled media

Re: Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube

#70
post #34

It is so dumb and twisted that there even needs to be a deal. Any web browser can hit youtube, you can probably get to youtube via a web browser anyway on a roku, if not they could in principle do that. Also dumb and twisted that as a paying youtube subscriber, I could buy a computer (a roku) and not be allowed to access youtube on it. Do better, tech.

As a note. The article is about "YouTube TV" not "YouTube". I missed it the first time.

This is not totally clear. While the only references I can find to this quote are in articles about the situation, I honestly can not tell whether the YouTube app is nonetheless included in terms of availability. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if it was, this kind of thing happens all the time in these disputes. "Agree to our terms or we remove all our channels".

>"We are, however, giving Roku the ability to continue distributing both YouTube and YouTube TV apps to all existing users to make sure they are not impacted."

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