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YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

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Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#121

Post by LeoWattenberg »

ffsm8 wrote: post #83
rockskon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company wants to offer its service as a loss-leader to outlast its competitors who offered their services at a cost its users were willing to pay, then that company has no room to complain if people don't want to pay the last-game-in-town's jacked-up rates! There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.

[flagged]

Dailymotion, Google Video, sevenload, german TV stations RTL and Pro7 even launched Clipfish and MyVideo respectively to compete with youtube. Youtube happens to be the only one that survived on Googles ad model, the others very quickly realized that paid premium content is much easier to handle (copyright, CSAM) and monetize.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#122

Post by learingsci »

keepamovin wrote: post #81
learingsci wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called “opportunity cost.” If you marry somebody and they suddenly become a totally different person and try to extort you a common reaction is to feel deceived and unhappy. They have cheated you in a sense of the opportunity cost of being able to marry someone else. That people might not understand that tells you something about them.

Yeah, that marriage situation can be totally tough. If you're going through that, I feel for you. I can relate, but then who of us has ever really picked the "right" person to marry the first time around? Sure, some get lucky. But often our wapred childhoood expecdtatiosn contaminate the idea of a perfect match with something that feels familiar but is actually wrong for us, or worse, just abusive. Anyway, in this ca…

I’ve read about this concept the Indians have called “izzat” which probably explains why they have arranged marriages. You can imagine the deceitful games that might be played on unsuspecting brides and bridegrooms if one doesn’t find deceitful games out of bounds morally; arranged marriages address that.

Arranged marriages are unpopular because we value choice. For the same reason we, westerners, abhor monopolies that transform society, wreck age old institutions, remove choice and limit access to what once was free.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#123

Post by zigzag312 »

jy14898 wrote: post #43
kurito wrote: post #23

What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place. At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.

While I'm not pro YouTube, I think it's fine for companies to decide how to monetise their product, including things which were originally free. If you don't like free services, stop using them

> including things which were originally free

Oh, I despise this tactic so much. It means the company has known from the start that they can't offer it for free in the long term, but decided to subsidize it in order to gain a dominant position and get rid of competition. This breaks the conditions needed for a free market dynamics to work. In other words, they win market share for reasons other than efficiency, quality, or innovation. That's why some forms of government subsidies are prohibited under certain agreements, for example. Some multinational corporations have annual revenues larger than the GDP of many countries and can easily subsidize negative pricing for years to undercut competitors, consolidate market share, and ultimately gain monopoly power.

Also, the company has hinted false promises to the customer, as it signals that they have developed a business model where they can offer something for free. For example a two-sided marketplace where one side gets something for free to attract users and the other side pays (as it profits form these users). Users can't know something isn't sustainable unless the company explicitly states it in some way (e.g. this is a limited time offer).

So from the user's perspective, this is a bait-and-switch tactic, where the company has used a free offer in order to manipulate the market.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#124

Post by speedgoose »

blell wrote: post #97
speedgoose wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may have been extremely competent at this, but if they decided to spend years of their relatively short ephemeral life on such a useless project, perhaps they weren’t the best at the time. Perhaps they needed money and were focusing on family life, I don’t know. Who I am to judge? I’m judging though.

Why is that useless as opposed to what most of us do for work? I think you guys have a weird sense of how useful the average job is, or how much the average job contributes to society at large. At least this made a lot of money I guess.

I think most jobs contribute positively to the society. Not much, for sure, but they contribute.

Is the cleaner regularly removing poop stains from the personal toilet of a big and rich Google shareholder more useful than the qualified Google engineer working hard so a big number is very slightly bigger on one the shareholder’s list of numbers? I think the cleaner has more impact.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#125

Post by anonymous908213 »

keepamovin wrote: post #117
anonymous908213 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive Disney, Netflix, and HBO all fund the creation of and own the content they provide to users. Youtube does not. Youtube inserts itself as a middle-man taxing regular people sharing videos with other regular people. There is obviously a non-zero cost to infrastructure but their attempts to extract revenue go far, far beyond that, hence people feeling…

OK, again a good point. There is YouTube Originals ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqVDpXKLmKeBU_yyt_QkItQ ) not sure the model vs the others (also want to ad I enjoy the classic films that YT provides for free [tho I think I need to be on a US VPN to get that if traveling], plus of which you need to buy/rent), but I'm also not sure any of us has the inside track on YT's costs/revenue, so I guess we're all specula…

Youtube's direct expenses are not published by Google, but there are a couple of ways we could measure it. One is the fact that Google is among the richest companies in the world, if not the richest at any given time. This definitionally indicates that the margins on their main revenue-generating services, among which Youtube is one, are extremely high, with revenue far, far, above expenses.

Another way we could measure it is by the value of an ad-view relative to the price of the subscription they offer. Ad views are auctioned and go for different prices based on category, demographics of viewers, etc., and aggregate statistics are not provided, but an ad-view typically tends to be in the range of US$0.01 per ad view. A subscription fee of US$9* to avoid ads, then, would require viewing 900 ads to justify the cost. I suspect in reality most people don't see more than 100 ads in a month, so Youtube is likely generating an 8x profit margin over costs of not showing ads to Premium users, give or take depending on how you work out the napkin math. If people had an option to buy an ad-free subscription with none of the other premium features for $1/mo, I suspect the uptake would be significantly higher and feel fair to the general population.

*After looking it up, Youtube Premium apparently actually costs US$14.

Anecdotally, I used to spend, I believe, ¥480 per month for a Niconico subscription (Niconico is the Japanese domestic equivalent to Youtube). I was content paying this subscription fee for years, until they increased the price up by 50% to ¥720, and about two years ago the price further increased to ¥990. I cancelled my subscription and stopped using the website. I am not opposed to paying subscription fees to platforms, but when it feels extortionate, I won't. The same is likely true for many or most people.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#126

Post by slig »

laserlight wrote: post #18
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #9

Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades and attempt to paywall it as ‘Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members.’ Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information. Fuck you google.

It upsets me to see YouTube Premium apologists despite all the hostile moves by YouTube. YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. They won't forget sugarcoating ads as being “unobtrusive” or “environment-supporting” or whatever. But guess what? If you don't want to see them, you can upgrade to YouTube Premium Plus and continue bein…

>When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them.

We'll see. Until then, it's cheap and works fine.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#127

Post by stavros »

keepamovin wrote: post #120
stavros wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally, the ads are too high a cost for me to pay. When my ad-free way of watching breaks and I get an ad, I simply close the tab. I find ads really annoying these days, and I pay to avoid them where I find the price fair, otherwise I don't use the thing.

I don't like the ads, which is why I switched to Premium. I like it. I also listen to white noise variants at night, so I can't tolerate ads there obviously. I know a little of your situation I think from reading your previous posts here, so I'm sure you are able to "afford" the premium fee. What makes you not pay it? Small strange nuance for me is when I switch to my corp account, and see an ad, sometimes I really e…

I watch maybe an hour of YouTube a month, so it's not worth it for me.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#128

Post by Buttons840 »

kurito wrote: post #23

What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place. At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.

It's a testament to the health of our free markets and competition that the winning move here is to spend a lot of time and money making your product worse for the average person.

Re: YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers

#129

Post by supernes »

It's only a matter of time before the entire YouTube catalog transitions to DRM-encrypted video that you can only watch on Google-sanctioned devices. They're probably doing the math on how to make the platform at least as profitable with a drastically lower DAU count, since alienating users now seems to be their top priority.
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