Hacker News Reader

Comment by herpderperator | Hacker News Reader

I have been paying for YouTube Red since 2015. I really like the YouTube Music app and how I can save songs for offline use, and how it's kept up-to-date with songs I like on YouTube (as well as recommended suggestions) whenever my phone goes on WiFi, so my playlist never gets old. You also get other perks like keeping a YouTube video playing in the background on your phone.

I prefer using YouTube for music as opposed to other services because I listen to a lot of underground/developing artists who aren't as easily signed up to go on the larger platforms like Spotify. For that reason I also like Soundcloud, but I feel I find more relevance on YouTube.

Since I pay for YouTube Red, I don't get ads. I think the cost justifies it. So, if you have so much of a problem with ads, you should really consider just paying for it. It's a great service. Shouldn't you be paying for services you appreciate?

View on HN

Unfortunately this is only in the US as many other google programs. I have google music and if I were living in the US I'd have Red included. But it isn't, Red isn't even available.

So I make my own red, i.e. see videos with ad-block or youtube-dl.

Google really needs to make their stuff global, right now it's extremely US centric.

"extremely US centric" All content services are like this. Even Netflix hides some content from non-Americans.

The common excuse is licensing and copyright. Yet none of these services are actively trying to fix it. They just do not care about non-Americans.

Many other American companies make excuses too. Apparently non-American money is no good. Heck, Microsoft have differing support services. They even actively try and hide the contact information. When you find you figure out quickly they ignore your contact requests. Unless you mention bomb, gun or addresses of their employees families. Oh the creepy things you have to do to get them to do their job. It is vile nasty work indeed.

> The common excuse is licensing and copyright. Yet none of these services are actively trying to fix it. They just do not care about non-Americans.

What do you think initiatives like Netflix Originals are for?

Content owners are trying very hard to squeeze as much as they can without losing all their agreements.

Netflix is ubiquitous so clearly they can be charged more and more until they drop the agreement and a show falls off.

Do you really think Netflix wants anything less than to offer every TV show and movie ever created? That'd be a huge advantage for them.

But every step they take toward that makes it harder to negotiate for more. So they've started making their own content that costs upfront but with no recurring fees.

FYI YT Red is about to launch in 100 countries in the upcoming months. AFAIK the launched has been delayed a few years because right owners used the occasion to renegociate the contract they had with Google Play Music.

I agree. For $15/month family plan, my wife and I enjoy the music and we get no ads on YouTube. For $180/year it is a great entertainment value. That is two months of cable TV, which provides much less value.

Annoyingly, the family plan is unavailable to G Suite users.

Do you run G-Suite for your family? That would be the only reason I can think of to not be using a personal account for this purpose.

For a while you could get a free google apps account for up to 10 users. A free google account + your own domain name which costs you less than 8 bucks a year.

If they were smarter maybe they would just offer this as a paid feature on top of gmail. Its not like it costs them more money to deliver email to a different domain.

I _think_ (not entirely certain as the docs are pretty bad) that the very-recently-accounced Google Cloud Identity free tier does almost that for free; but it's just the identity service, and doesn't include any apps like GMail. Not sure if it has mail routing settings, or if that's just standard DNS.

Because of these issues I abandoned moving my family to G-Suite I had setup and instead use it for forwarding to our free Gmail. Not sure if we're missing out on anything much we would've had from the free tier of G-Suite.

I agree, I wish I could get YouTube Red, I have been trying for a few years now, but is still only available in very few countries. I love playing all kinds of music videos on my AV system. I’m happy to pay for ad free high quality video and audio and suround sound. In the UK Sky’s music channels are awful (i dropped Sky last year mainly because of this) terrible poor quality sound, no HD video and long adverts literally every 10 minutes, adverts are particularly annoying on a music channel. Apple Music has a pathetic choice for selectable Video and no Video channel. I don’t understand why the market is not serving my needs, I’m sure there are plenty of others who want the same as me.

I have to say that since I've been paying for music, I've always had the one complaint: Why does the industry insist that each music portal have a fragmented, incomplete catalogue.

In a world where everyone pays for music, I suppose this makes sense, since to have access to the complete catalog one would need to subscribe to each and every service out there. The one exception was grooveshark, which had everything.

I think google may have succeeded where grooveshark failed, in strong-arming the industry to provide access to their complete catalogue. Originally I subscribed to youtube-red because I couldn't stand adverts popping up during video lectures. I suppose they succeeded in frustrating me.

But $10/month is the correct price point for an unrestricted music catalogue, and now ad-free streaming of other media is just a bonus.

The music industry isn’t a monolith, there is an array of companies and rights holders that control over a century’s worth of recorded music. The only single party that could step in and simplify the legal morass is the government.

Yes, the music industry is extraordinarily complex. There are many layers of legal complexity that apply differently (consent decrees) across the industry. There are archaic rules about the source of the music.

And generally, the fact that distribution of original music is effectively a two-sided market business model (media) means music isn't worth as much until it is popular, so one method has been to give it away for free to get to that point (think demo CDs).

Spotify deserves a lot of credit for handling the mainstream content to an international user base. The business rules of serving which version of a song (two users who play the same song can be served different content because of licensing rules), accounting for the royalties to different publishers, etc... are hard enough to figure out.

This doesn't prevent the industry from getting together to make their product more accessible. It didn't stop them from banding together to make it less accessible (RIAA/MPAA).

The government has also already shown they can force licensing as they did for radio.

My one complaint: I have to use the various companies’ shitty players to access the music. Spotify’s discovery is just about making me not hate their “value-add” too much, but the consumer is going to win big when startups can one-stop license all the music for $10/m and start doing interesting things with it

I pay for red, but the real annoying thing is you can only have 1 youtube video playing at once.

So if i'm listing to music on my tv and open a link to youtube on my desktop, it stops the music on my tv.

At one point they had it so if you were listening to a song on Google Music on one device and then opened a YouTube video on another, it would stop the song on Google Music.

There's a huge difference between a product that's being funded by ads, and you can pay to switch the funding source, and a product that they're actively making the ad-funded experience worse specifically to push you to subscribe. One is just trying to keep a business afloat, the other is a company intentionally trying to irritate you.

I actually don't want to pay for services from google though, nice if vimeo had something similar.

That would be rewarding bad behavior. If Google wants money they can ask. If Google wants to play games to pressure me into giving them money, they can go perform anatomically improbable acts on themselves.

> Since I pay for YouTube Red, I don't get ads. I think the cost justifies it. Since I have started using ad blockers I don't get ads neither.

> Shouldn't you be paying for services you appreciate? Sure, but if 'lacks advertisement' is the selling point then it sounds like a bad joke that I don't get.

Could you share how you are successfully blocking ads on YouTube (without sitting through a blank screen while the ad plays in the background)?

afaik, uBlock Origin no longer is capable of it.

Does anyone know of a way to combine youtube-dl + Plex or something like that to simulate YouTube's subscription list? That is my primary means of media consumption rather than TV, and I would gladly pay for TY Red, but they don't offer it in my country.

Possibly a bug on your end. Win 10 w/ firefox, uBlock filters all youtube ads, and it's pretty much a stock install of uBlock.

You're right, so much for following guides on the internet to optimize things.

You are using Adblockers to circumvent the primary means of making money on YouTube while enjoying the services for free. Sooner or later, they will block you from using the application.

"Lacks Advertisement" is not the main point. It's one of the points. Ability to play music in the background is one big advantage.

I am waiting for YouTube Red to come to my country. It's one more subscription to add to my already big list of subscriptions. But for now, I can see the value in it.

> [...] "Lacks Advertisement" is not the main point. It's one of the points. Ability to play music in the background is one big advantage.

This is precisely why I don't use YT app on Android. Firefox allowed this by default, now you just need an addon to re-enable the "big feature".

> You are using Adblockers to circumvent the primary means of making money [...]

I'm using adblockers to control the way I interact with the content, on my device.

I should perhaps clarify, I don't use YT Android app, only Firefox.

I get YT Red for free with Play Music. Two things an adblocker can't help with are mobile and Chromecast, so I'm sticking with it for that.

uBlock works just fine on Firefox for Android...

It certainly doesn't for me....could you possibly share your uBlock config on pastebin?

Sorry, I use the default.

Does it work for the YouTube app?

No, for the site.

I have Play Music, and Red comes with it. I like the current YouTube Red experience. It actually encourages me to watch more videos.

or, or, hear me out...

I could use adblock, a free and crowd-sourced adblocker, to... block the ads.

YouTube already makes copious amounts of money outside of advertising and Red exclusivity. don't force that kind of an annoyance on people if you expect them to A) use your service or B) not subvert the crap you put in front of them.

there is no argument for ads anymore.

Youtube could make their ads unblockable by putting them in the content's video stream or just serving them from the same domain. I feel like they don't do that just as a way to be nice to adblockers, but I don't know why.

They've a/b tested inserting ads into the video stream before. If most people acted like I did, then YouTube would have seen them come back once every week or two and leaving as soon as one of those ads came up.

Right now it seems like most content providers are actually experiencing competition as it's extremely easy to jump to the provider with the least onerous ads, while torrents create a floor in terms of how annoying your ads/drm can be before people pirate

I'm pretty sure it would also be more expensive in terms of CPU and potentially disk.

The cost of concatenating two mp4† files is essentially zero. IIRC you can even `cat foo.mp4 bar.mp4 > baz.mp4` and it's supposed to still be valid mp4 (there may be same-codec restrictions, but even resolution can change).

The output of cat isn't valid MP4. The CPU cost of concatenating is small though, it can be done on the fly. Even easier for MP4 streaming (DASH).

The cost is not in the CPU, or the processing or the resources. The cost is in the people who leave.

They are doing it already, if I block googlevideo.com, the videos don't play.

> YouTube already makes copious amounts of money outside of advertising and Red exclusivity.

What? Unless something drastically changed in the last two years Youtube still breaks about even [1]

I'm willing to bet that they are the largest hoster and streamer of video content in the world, and storage, servers and bandwidth ain't exactly free.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-goo...

Wanting to do targeting for the specific user makes that really hard. They would have to do real-time transcoding of the ad into the video. Makes more sense to transcode the video once at upload then dynamically insert just the ad.

Youtube controls the client, so they could switch to a format (a brand-new format if necessary) that makes it computationally cheap to catenate videos.

What other revenue sources does Youtube have other than ads and Red subscription?

I would assume there is a fair amount of data collection that goes on with YouTube as well.

How does this contribute to revenue for youtube though? Certainly they will be using it to drive increase ad revenue, but the data collection of itself does not pay the bills.

uBlock and youtube-dl is the poor mans alternative. But I suppose it will not work so well on a phone.

uBlock works on a phone on Firefox (on Android). There's also NewPipe: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

Newpipe added the ability to subscribe to channels a few months ago. I'm still occasionally finding videos it fails to play but overall a fantastic app.

Unfortunately videos now stop playing when you turn off the screen with Firefox for Android, so you drain battery faster if you just want to listen.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com