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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.
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?
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.
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.
That actually makes more sense to me compared to most premium features. Higher quality directly costs more money to stream.
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.
I haven’t noticed any issues on Firefox, can also use an add-on to force specific quality.
Just started getting this ad on the mobile site:
The implementation seems to be too clever for ublock-origin to block it, as the ids seem to be dynamic.
Desktop site doesn’t get it but it doesn’t have the double tap to fast forward feature 😔 Seems to happen specifically on this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ANR_owxnll0
Yeah I sometimes switch to Firefox instead of the youtube app, but its a little bit annoying switching in and out of fullscreen and I’ve found the tap to fast forward doesn’t work consistently. I wasn’t able to find an addon for Firefox Android to force the quality selection last time I looked but maybe I need to check again.
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.
Is this a vibes-based position, or did you actually check the bitrate of the segments?
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.
13 per month. That’s over 100 per year. Did not expect it to be that expensive.
It is because it includes YouTube Music. A really crappy Spotify clone that nobody asked for.
Which replaced Google Play Music, which was actually good.
Yeah that I think is the most upsetting part to me. Replace a perfectly fine product with a half baked one.
That’s been Google’s thing for decades now
The package for couples is 25. I save a dollar.
That’s almost one cent per video. Outrageous!
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…
yt-dlp and VLC still work. I’m good.
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?
i beleive you can open a yt vid straight into vlc, not sure on the specifics of how its done tho sorry
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.
Premium user since Red launched.
Mobile defaults to 320p no matter what I do. I have to manually select 1080p each and every video
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.
Yow answer after this message from our sponsor!
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.
i have 8gbps… youtube buffers nonstop for me. my connection isnt flaky, as I can maintain multi gigabit connections to upload and download sources without issue. youtube sucks
Check your browser
If it doesn’t work on Firefox, then it’s using non-standard web calls. Which Google is notorious for. That doesn’t make youtube suck any less.
Yup, i have the same issue on ff. It just stops and buffers. Goes through fine on the same pc when i test on chrome (used for work). Plays fine on embed, it’s just their website.
I just close the window. Don’t need youtube.
That’s what I do more and more. I’ve had my own invidious setup, I’ve done grayjay. If I continue to have problems, I’ll simply not use Youtube at all…
I paid for youtube red until it wasn’t reasonable anymore. I tolerated the ads until it wasn’t reasonable anymore. I can only do so many mitigations to youtube’s bullshit before I just stop…
Right now I have YT-dlp setup to import some channels into my plex setup. That may be all my house has here soon.
Is that why I am getting about one ad for every 90 seconds of video ?
Creators have a say in how many ads they want to roll. Maybe try another channel.
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.
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?
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.
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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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.
You need to install the sponsor block extension
Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
Sponsor block is great for that.
Majority of what I watch is on my TV. Phone is fine as is computer because of extensions and/or revanced
I can do all of them already without premium.
Pray tell how you have enhanced bitrate without premium.
Can’t yt-dlp download high bitrate videos? I think I saw this option in the list of formats.
I don’t think so - but I’d love to be proven wrong on this. I’m not sure what the other guy is on about.
Enhanced bitrate? Do you get smoother bits there? If it means “more cache”, that’s a setting in mpv.conf.
Better even, i have AI-upscaling.
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.
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.
