Not enough people buying Premium, eh?
Not enough people buying Premium, eh?
251 comments
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Don't assume Google et al. will ever consider enough people buy their subscription. There's never enough money for these people.
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A company isn’t successful in hyper capitalism unless they are accelerating the growth of their profits every year. They have to sell more products to existing users, acquire new paid users, charge more for their existing products, or they’re considered unsuccessful. The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth of the human race where success can only be achieved if every human alive is paying for every product offering possible, buying every upsell and microtransaction, freely giving their data to be sold so that more useless products can be created at minimum cost and sold at maximum price. But also hyper capitalism lobbies for less benefits, lower pay, etc. It inevitably collapses into neo-feudalism or just slavery
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The model literally assumes a constant infinite exponential growth
Cancer. Capitalism models cancer.
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Google asking me for €13 a month? Their empire is built upon selling user data. Fuckers should be paying us.
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And if you're a content creator, you can opt in to allow your content to be used by AI... Without compensation. 🤡
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At least that's opt-in, unlike them using your Wi-Fi SSID to fine tune their location settings. Not only was that opt-out but you had to change your router settings (either change your SSID, which isn't hard but shouldn't be required, or hide your network, which alienated guests when mobile data wasn't so ever present). I don't even know if there's still a (simple) way out.
But yes. The option you describe is clearly ridiculous.
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I was happy to pay for youtube as a service until they broke the shit out of their algorithms and started shoving ads to my face in premium. Did a chargeback and got my money back. Fuck these monkeys.
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Search is also completely broken on YouTube. It's become useless.
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Search for a video using the exact title? Sorry, no match. Here is 5 videos that are loosley related to a word in your search, before the completely unrelated algorithm feed begins.
Use the exact video title in quotation marks? Best i can do is two videos of the five i already showed you.....
I'm frankly offended by he shittiness of youtube search.
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I get hit by dumb influencers before actually seeing what I was looking for.
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That's a nice way to lose access to all Google products, including your email account.
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So far so good. The fuckers at youtube support acknowledged serving ads to me even with my premium membership, so they can suck a big fat dick.
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Assuming they use Gmail in the first place
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I got the 2 month free trial recently and have yet to see an ad with it. Don't plan on continuing the service if I do see one.
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Watch out for the “video suggestions” in your home feed with the title “introducing ….” These are product placements they make even with the premium subscription. I HATE ads so I pulled the plug.
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I don't care that enhanced Bitrate is premium only. I do care that you still need to click "advanced resolution settings" to access this even for premium users on mobile.
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And even if you select high resolution preferred in settings, they will absolutely serve that shit at a low resolution forcing you to manually select the resolution every damn time.
Yes YouTube my connection is absolutely fast enough to watch at the max resolution you can serve, don't pretend it's my connection to cover for your intentional bumping down in resolution.
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People can’t afford yet another monthly bill.
It’s like walking in Trador Joes for snacks. Oh, hey, this is only $3! And look, this is only $5! Get to checkout: $130 please.
Seriously, that’s how this nickel and dime subscription crap works.
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More like $126, if you know what I mean
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This has been a thing for a while now, hasn't it? I remember trying to watch the Noseferatu trailer a few months ago and seeing how shit it looked. Tried to up the quality only to see that it was paywalled
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trailer
I mean, that's an advertisement. I feel like if you're going to watch an ad, that the company trying to sell the product should find a way to have the ad in full quality themselves.
It looks like the official website does use YouTube, though.
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I’ve just seen it for the first time now. Might be because I’m situated in Europe? Or because I mostly don’t give a damn about the pixel count.
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Possibly, I don't think its on every video
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They finally shut off my premium account in Argentina for $3 and now I’ve been blasted with ads so much it’s unbearable. Like 3 ads every 3 mins pretty much.
Maybe I can try again in another country but I’m pretty sure they’re wise to it and demand a card used be of the same country too.
It’s fine on my phone but on the tvs where I mostly consume it’s hell on earth!
God damn YouTube. Why do we like it so much.
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You could try SmartTube
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I am seriously thinking of cobbling together a cheap pc just to plug into my TV to watch things like YouTube without the ads.
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Like 3 ads every 3 mins pretty much.
It's crazy on both ends of the pipeline. Like, if I'm an advertiser, I want my content to be relatively exclusive. I don't want to be the twelfth ad you see in an hour. If I'm a consumer, I want a continuous uninterrupted stream of media. I don't want a service that repeatedly cuts out, spams me with some volume-adjusted bullshit, and then cuts back in again seemingly at random.
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Yeah I honestly don’t mind a short ad in between videos like the old days. But this shit right now is horrible, forcing people on to premium. YouTube don’t care about the creators they just want subs.
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You can usually pay a radom guy in any latin American country who makes a business sharing family accounts for netflix etc. or just get ublock origin.
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Try Invidious
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I’ve heard there’s too many issues and they have to keep one step ahead of YouTube all the time and it’s getting difficult. Plus, can’t use that on TV
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Any good instances? All I've tried are dead
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It's the world's medium length video platform. If there's an indie creator that's good he's there. Of course we like the whole world's content that's fed to us by an incredibly sophisticated algorithm.
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uBlock Origin 🥳
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I see this recommendation all the time. It frustrates me. I'm in favor of blocking ads and modding clients and whatever it takes to optimize one's experience, but the majority - by far - of my YouTube experience takes place on my TV. I can't do much to control it (pihole and other DNS solutions don't work on YouTube since their ads are hosted in the same servers as their videos).
I could perform various modifications to the operating system of my TV, and trust me it's tempting for a lot of reasons, but it was a very expensive (by my standards) TV so I want to at least wait until the warranty expires until I start experimenting.
I could also use something hooked up to my TV and mod that, which is my favorite idea, but my wife likes the interface as it is. It's an LGTV with the ... Sigh ... "Magic" remote, which I absolutely hate, but I don't want to take it away from her. It seems like that interface, especially the "magic" cursor, would be hard to replicate. I'd prefer not to go through the tedium of having two different systems.
Especially because we also have a console hooked up and no solution I've found so far has provided a simple way of switching between HDMI sources without running a disgusting number of cables. I did recently order a new receiver, so hopefully that helps with the multiple origins issue.
Obviously this is very much a a first world problem, and I apologize for my privilege, I just wanted to point out that uBO (or other software based solutions) aren't always the solution.
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Thanks for bringing this up, because it frustrates me as well. Most of the time I'm watching on a TV, and there's no way to block YT ads on a TV. The people I share my house with aren't technical and will watch YouTube even with ads. So to keep them out of my house I pay for YT premium.
Suggesting that people just do something technical and janky to block ads isn't a solution for me, not because I can't do it, but because there's no way my family will do it.
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I totally get that, I have a few suggestions since I've been in the same situation for years and have recently improved it.
Our Yamaha stereo takes many HDMI inputs, and has a single TV output, so the TV never needs to change inputs. It's quite easy and quick on the Yamaha.
I bought a Raspberry Pi 500 for ~$100 US and am loving it. I think it could use a speed upgrade (I hear the SD card will do it). Of course it's mouse and keyboard, but we only use it for Netflix, YouTube, etc, so it was easy to make shortcuts and get a small/nice living room keyboard/mouse combo.
It's led to zero ads, and the household discussion was like "would you trade some ease of use to not see this stupid ad?" And we both agreed that it's worth it. So far it's been really nice.
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Yes, certainly, fuck their ads; but that wont restore the degraded resolution now will it.
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That actually makes more sense to me compared to most premium features. Higher quality directly costs more money to stream.
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Even with premium they will send lower quality if they think they can get away with it, I have to change the quality on every video that plays on my tablet now: it completely ignores the preferred quality in the settings.
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As with most things in the modern world that have gone to shit. It is not the monetization scheme in of itself that is the issue. It is the never ending desire for more profit this quarter than last forever.
If it was acceptable to stop trying to make even more once the cost to operate is covered and some healthy profit is made predictably then a lot less people would have issues. And enshitification would slow down.
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YouTube already randomly drops me to 360p on my big-ass broadband sometimes because it just feels like it. What are the guarantees YouTube Premium won't do that? ANSWER ME YOUTUBE, THIS IS CRUCIAL PRE-PURCHASE INFORMATION.
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On mobile, many videos will start at 720 and I have to specifically select a higher resolution but it will stay there. It will have me wait for buffering if my internet isn't capable but it won't drop the resolution.
On pc it remembers the resolution you set last.
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Premium user since Red launched.
Mobile defaults to 320p no matter what I do. I have to manually select 1080p each and every video
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If your internet is flaky, there’s nothing YouTube can do about it. The alternative would be waiting for the video to buffer at 1080p.
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Yow answer after this message from our sponsor!
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The worst part is that this doesn't seem to be some sort of better quality. All of the other qualities seem to have tanked in the past year, so at best this just restores the previous 1080p bitrate.
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Is this a vibes-based position, or did you actually check the bitrate of the segments?
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100% vibes based. I've been noticing very atrocious artifacts. It could also be things like different encoding settings that are producing a worse result. Or I could be making up the whole thing up and confirmed it in my mind for 1080p when the launched the higher bitrate and then was primed to see the higher resolutions drop in quality after.
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Notice how they don't post the bitrate, because even the higher one will be extremely low. Every streaming service has been dropping their bitrates over the years, Netflix and HBO are the worst offenders as I've noticed. It probably saves them a ton of money, and 90% of their customers won't notice because they're on their phone while watching in the background.
To make it weirder, I'm confident they boost the bitrates on their new releases to get the approval of the enthusiastic viewers, then drop it after the reviews are in.
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So the reason no one posts the bitrates is because it's not exactly interesting information for the the general population.
I'm highly skeptical of the claim that streaming services would have intentionally dropped their bitrates at the expense of perceived quality. There's definitely research going on to deliver the same amount of perceived quality at lower average bitrates through variable bitrate encodings and so on, but this is sophisticated research where perceived quality is carefully controlled for.
It probably saves them a ton of money, and 90% of their customers won't notice because they're on their phone while watching in the background.
So this is fundamentally not how video streaming works, and I think this is important for the average person to learn - if you stream a video in the background or with your screen turned off, video data will stop loading. There's literally no point in continuing to fetch the video track if it's not being rendered. It would be like downloading the audio track for French when the user is watching with the English track turned on, i.e. nonsensical.
This subsequently removes this as a possible reason for any video streamer intentionally reducing their bitrate, as the savings would not be materialized for background playback.
To make it weirder, I'm confident they boost the bitrates on their new releases to get the approval of the enthusiastic viewers, then drop it after the reviews are in.
Depending on the usage patterns for the platform in question, this probably doesn't make sense either.
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They're especially greedy when you consider they are not only the most profitable of all their competitors (Netflix/Disney Plus/Hulu/etc), but that they're unique in that they're the only one who doesn't fund creating any content at all.
At least the other companies put tons of money producing content alongside their other stuff. YouTube just lets others do that for them and then takes all the profit.
So how does YouTube really justify their costs for premium with zero production costs and the largest profit margin?
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Most other companies can be selective in what they host / stream. YouTube will host/stream anything users upload and that's actually quite insane. Current statistics say that YouTubers upload 30.000 hours of video.. per hour.
Aside from the streaming/processing, only the disk space that would need is already frightening. Most of those videos will never be seen, and no ads will be played on them. The setup needed for this is massively more impressive to me than services like Netflix.
Do you perhaps have a source for those profit margins? I really wonder if they're already running break even.
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From a technical perspective, I wonder what they do with those seldom viewed videos. Do they get stored somewhere in slower, deep storage, only to be eventually transferred out and cached when they're actively receiving views? I imagine you wouldn't want to waste faster, more expensive storage on something that'll likely rarely to be retrieved.
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Don't worry about YouTube - according to alphabets filings they account for ~10% of Googles ad revenue. Google is posting record profits every quarter, so they should manage.
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13 per month. That's over 100 per year. Did not expect it to be that expensive.
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It is because it includes YouTube Music. A really crappy Spotify clone that nobody asked for.
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I use both and find yt music is far better for discovering new music and artists and I love that it can play music from YouTube video as well. Everything else about it is worse though.
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I unironically use ytmusic more than spotify because finding niche artists is a lot more easier, which is basically the entirety of edm and its many subgenres.
I use revanced though because I dont like google that much
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For some magical reason, YouTube music has less AI music than Spotify.
The playlists are significantly worse, but I haven't really heard any AI Christmas music that has infested Spotify.
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The package for couples is 25. I save a dollar.
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That's almost one cent per video. Outrageous!
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If you watch 43 videos per day on every day, yes...
Some of us go to work or school or whatever and can't therefore do that every single day, especially not when the videos are longer...
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„I don’t want to watch ads and I want everything to be free.”
My brother in christ, this is not how services work.
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It wouldn't be so bad if the ads were reasonably placed.
Don't target people who come in from another domain or on the first viewed video. Pre- roll ads after that. Most importantly, ad breaks at creator-defined times only. Sick of ads coming in at arbitrary times in the middle of a sentence. That's the worst part of it, IMO.
Oh and a time limit on ads. That has to happen too.
Also could somebody tell all the streaming companies that they know what language I watch all my videos in and to stop giving me Spanish language ads? Like, I got no problem with other languages, I just really feel like you're wasting your advertisers money showing them to people who don't know a quesadilla from a carton of pickles.
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Free-at-point-of-service is a common feature of amenities provided by countries with socialist economies.
But they only work when the economy is actively managed. If you're just pumping cash into a big banking machine and telling people to grab for it, you're not incentivizing any particular economic activity. You're just encouraging entrepreneurs to get particularly good at snatching money out of the air and elbowing one another in the face.
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I was fine with it back when it was just one ad that you could skip.
I was fine with it back when it was just two ads that you could skip.
I was fine with it back when it was just two ads, and you could skip one, and the other was 5 seconds long. 10 was a stretch, but I'm patient.
Without an adblocker, now it's playing an unskippable, 10+ seconds long ad at the start AND at the end. Some ads are as long as 20 seconds. If the video is long enough, it dares to abruptly play an ad right in the middle. You can't skip that one, either. We're back to television content-to-ad ratios - the exact thing I was happy to dump once there was enough content on YouTube. I was patient. That wasn't enough for them. They can suck a beehive.
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I can be patient if the content is >10min long.
If I need to watch an ad for every 2-5min video of streamer clips I'd go balistic as that are even more ads than the broadcast tv nonsense.
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According to Google, YouTube had made US$15.1 billion in ad revenue in 2019, […] nearly 10% of the total Alphabet revenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Finances quoting https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=05bd9fe
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But have you considered how clever you look if you simp for the bourgeoisie?
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It would be fine if there were so many ads
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I don't mind paying. Except if it's evilcorp. Which it is.
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Lol, yep that's how it works in tha GAFAM ecosystem because YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. So I'm not giving a dime to google but I'm hapoy to support creators directly.
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The 1080p non-premium looks like shit, not better than 720p. I think they reduced the Bitrate a lot and premium restors the original Bitrate.
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Bitrates have always been garbage to be fair
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I was paying for it until it got to like $16.99 on iOS. As much of an annoyance to use a work around like AD Guard. I can now afford it but refuse to give those greedy mofos a dime.
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That is because you are paying for the premium of signing up through ios; apple takes a cut so to make money they raise the rates. It's extremely common signing up to any service through ios, that you will be charged higher than if you went to the website on your browser and sign up for it there. First link has link to Hank Green who does a great break down and investigation but provided many more examples.
https://www.devicemag.com/youtube-premium-cost-iphone/
https://lifehacker.com/dont-sign-up-for-subscriptions-in-the-app-1850298355
https://umatechnology.org/psa-subscriptions-cost-more-when-bought-on-an-iphone/
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wow, premium in the usa is expensive. it's a little under $3 per month here in india for the family plan and even that's after a recent 16% hike. the individual plan is even cheaper.
i guess these rates are in store for us as well in the future?
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Depends on economies, they can't really charge like double minimum wage, so countries like India have "cheaper" subscriptions. So for a minimum wage worker, it's about the same in terms of expense (ignoring other bill differences).
So it's probably going to stay about the same for you.
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yt-dlp and VLC still work. I'm good.
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Do you use VLC to play the downloaded YT videos from yt-dl or is there some method to stream directly from a given YT url with VLC?
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i beleive you can open a yt vid straight into vlc, not sure on the specifics of how its done tho sorry
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Is that why I am getting about one ad for every 90 seconds of video ?
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Is that how bad it is? Fuck...
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Just recently it has gotten worse. The good thing is that I don't watch TV at all any longer because I used youtube. Now I'm watching less youtube AND no TV so win win for my free time.
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Oh yes, it's gotten that bad. Like, I have a streaming stick and I can't root it yet. I tried watching a single video on vanilla, no ad-block or anything. One video had like 4 - 5 ads within the 5 minutes of length. That is fucking inexcusable.
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Creators have a say in how many ads they want to roll. Maybe try another channel.
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I never noticed a quality difference on my phone due to the small screen, even 1080p to 720p wasn't bad on my 4k TV. Also, when did they change the free trial from three months to one?
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when did they change the free trial from three months to one?
When they decided FUCK YOU!!! PAY US MONEY FASTER!!!
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I don't notice it on a 75" TV.
But when 99% of the content on YouTube is struggling to just get focusing right, pursuing higher quality bitrates is a useless priority. It's all trash amateur TV. Resolution is not a factor here.
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Browbeating people into buying services continues to be unpopular, film at 11.
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I pay for premium but would love to use peertube instead since it's decentralized. It would be great to have all the people I sub to upload there as well then I'd bail.
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More than you think, actually. My wife recently signed up. I'm like, Babe! I already have uBlock Origin to block ads on desktop! On mobile, Firefox also blocks ads and allows listening to videos with the screen off. 😫
But, we still get ads on our smart LG TV. So. That's apparently enough to throw the money away.
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Look into getting SmartTube for the TV. Works pretty great for me
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We csncelled all streaming and use plex but we watch too much YouTube and am tired of having to keep up with versions of pirate apps every time they break. I already deal with having to keep patching the newest youtube apk with vanced on my phone. Not gonna bother for all the other devices.
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we still get ads on our smart LG TV
That's when I hit the mute button, hold the remote with my finger on the OK button ready to skip, and use the remote to block my view of anything but the bottom right corner of the screen. Then when I see the skip button appear, I can click it.
Recently I have discovered that I can just use the "why this ad?" menu and select "return to video". That way you can skip any ad before the timer runs out.
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Exact same story. It's frustrating.
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I can do all of them already without premium.
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YouTube premium is one of the subscriptions I most often feel thankful for having. I watch enough YouTube videos that avoiding all those ads is really worthwhile, I hope that my view is worth more to the channels I watch, and YouTube music let me cancel Spotify.
I understand being pissed at YouTube and Google, but at the end of the day, of all the things I have to rage at, YouTube isn't worth it. I like it, there are creators that use it that I like, and I understand that it costs real money to run the platform.
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You used to be able to play videos in the background but they removed that feature specifically to lock it behind a paywall. YouTube will never see a dime from me because of this.
Charging for new features? Sure I guess. Removing features to charge for them later? Get fucked.
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You’ll have ads and be paying soon enough
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I paid for premium recently which helps a bit except now the problem is a lot of the content I watch ppl are doing sponsored segments which I get but at the same time fuck off.
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You need to install the sponsor block extension
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Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
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Last I heard it also pays the creators more per view than standard Adsense, and a portion of each individual subscription is always divided among creators you watch. This info could be out of date.
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Sponsor block is great for that.
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Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
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Actually you paying for premium hurts the rest of us. You’re rewarding them for the shit show that is modern-day-YT
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"Enhanced" bitrate? I've heard of high bitrates, and I've heard of low bit rates, but I ain't never heard of no enhanced bitrates. Does Google know something we don't, or do they think we're suckers? (Rhetorical question, don't answer.)
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Bitrate and resolution do their own thing.
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You can have high bitrates, but non enhanced bitrates are just worthless no matter what
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I think, there is usually 1080p with 30fps and with 60fps. So, they are probably selling you 30 more frames per second... for $13...
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That's not what Bitrate means. They use a lossy compression to send you the video. When targeting lower bandwidth/bitrate you see more artifacting.
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I just lost my premium subscription after about 2 years of paying $3/month in Argentina. Here it's $24/month (family plan). YouTube is unbearable with all the ads. Sometimes a 10-minute video has 3 as breaks. I'm only using it for precise purposes now, not scrolling and exploring, and finding alternatives as much as possible.
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OK, am I the only person that has a working ad blocker and doesn't get YT ads? Literally never seen one.
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Because of Google going out of their way to cripple YouTube in the name of advertisers, even going as far as to cripple Firefox's performance just for using it because their videos would sometimes stop resuming, you'd need to refresh .etc
They aren't seeing shit from me. I will use UBlock Origin as I please.
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I'd try it if they finally offered us a one year subscription period here in europe. they don't. their loss 🤷♂️
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My girlfriend said the same thing about Korea. Google keeps getting in their own way of selling a good service
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Friendly reminder: If you know how to use Docker, you can self host Invidious on your PC and have an experience better tgan YouTube for free.
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I've done this for about 6 months, I've had a very mixed experience with Invidious, mostly with YouTube constantly making changes without notice or the video stream not really supporting resuming if the connection breaks briefly.
This isn't a comment on the Herculean effort the contributors are taking on, but new users should be aware that they need a very reliable connection, update the container regularly, and exercise patience in the current state of Invidious.
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YouTube has litterally attacked it by blacklisting all know cloud IPs world wide when tmaccessing YouTube.
Self-hosting is the only reliable way. Sometimes, YouTube breaks something, but after a few hours, Invidious pushes a fix...
But if you target the latest tag of all relevant images, itms just:
docker compose pull; docker compose down; docker compose up
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Invidious alone has been working quite badly this year (stopped working for months until inv-sig-helper was invented, etc), but combined with FreeTube it almost always works; can recommend.
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Cancelled YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, and Netflix this month. Prime is up next. Will keep Spotify unless they decide to jack rates up again soon.
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Spotify is an evil company. They've started adding fake songs in to pay themselves instead of paying royalties to real artists.
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Yeah, I agree about them being evil. Unfortunately, I got outvoted on which services to keep.
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Oh they will jack rates again, don't put it pass them. Their recent rate hiking was like 6 months ago.
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Two rate hikes in the past year, or close to it. It's the one streaming service my family all want. Will keep it for now.
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Yeah... I pay for premium and I'm not proud of it...
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Maybe it's more expensive in Europe, my premium is 7.99 usd
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I can't believe people still even use YouTube when shit like this is happening. Paywalling resolution? Get fukt.
Edit: To be clear, people who keep using services like this as they enshitify are literally the problem.
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Resolution is the same it has always been, they are just offering a higher bitrate stream with premium (except I think they offer 8K streams on premium? But like come on... who the fuck needs that).
Doesnt matter if the video is uploaded in 4K, you can watch that stream at 1080p with the same/better effect.
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Paywalling a better resolution than the ones ALREADY present on the platform, may be the best way to approach the issue of it being fucking expensive to serve it.
Youtube has gone to shit and the enhanced 1080p bitrate is not one of the reasons
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251 comments