YouTube is about to pull its apps from Roku
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
> The fight between the two companies centers on a 2019 agreement to allow YouTube TV on Roku. Roku said Google demanded special access to search data from Roku customers as a condition of allowing YouTube TV on Roku devices. Roku also said Google asked for prioritized search results for YouTube videos in Roku's search feature.
> Roku said it agreed to those terms, but also asked that Google not ask for any additional data. Google would not commit to that, according to Roku, and now both sides are at an impasse. Unless both companies come to an agreement before Dec. 9, YouTube's apps will disappear from Roku's app store.
It'd be nice if they thought of the users they'd be affecting, but I guess in a way they are, in that they're upset they can't mine those users.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945280
also see[]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945250
Regardless of this deal, Roku is almost certainly dead in the water. They have limited international penetration and their platform, if you can call it one, is extremely limited compared to Apple, Google, and even Amazon’s offerings and app stores.
I don’t see a path forward at this point for the company. They will continue to have a stream of ad revenue for awhile, but will slowly get squeezed out.
Most cheap smart tvs come with roku OS. I wouldn't call that limited penetration.
Roku help page for Apple TV channel: https://support.roku.com/article/360036652634
> If you subscribe to any Apple TV Channels, payment will be charged to your Apple ID account at purchase.
Apple TV channel listing on Roku: https://channelstore.roku.com/details/a20e3c294993147c6cda43...
"brand-specific buttons on its remote controls... $1 per customer for each button ... Roku doesn’t pay anything to the channels it distributes, yet it still takes a share of their ad revenue. ... Roku executives will threaten to cancel a channel if its owner doesn’t give Roku a larger cut of ad sales" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-11/streaming...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 (2 years ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 (1 month ago)
It's mostly that I despised the way that, fundamentally, plex was in control of what user saw when they first logged in. They kept adding bs and less technical users kept feeling like the rug was pulled out from under them when a bunch of stuff would change.
Jellyfin doesn't give me the control I'd like to have, but it does give me what I consider essential. This may improve when the team transitions to a from-scratch web client[1] rather than the forked-from-emby client.
Gone back and forth between it and just running a simple desktop with VLC connected to a TV, for many years.
Happy Jellyfin user for... oh, two or three years now. I use it with the Roku app, and sometimes in a browser.
It's got some rough edges, but nothing like Kodi.
One thing I really like is that I can just run it directly on my file server. An absolute breeze to get it running in Docker. I'm a very lazy sysadmin when I'm on my own time, so I've even been relying on Docker to handle restarts and such—didn't touch Systemd at all. This isn't exactly best practice but I get it "for free" and it's yet to fail. If it does, well, it's not like it's a big deal. Kodi samba shares to play remote media have always sucked to set up, but this instead provides an API for clients to browse and then stream one video remotely—the clients don't need any form of actual access to the files (I think there are ways to set Kodi up like that, too, so you've got it two places and one's just playing media from the other, but the last thing I wanted was even more complexity in my Kodi set-up and config process)
Being able to hop on a browser anywhere and edit config and media metadata is so very much nicer than trying to do it on a TV. The in-browser UI's also pretty damn good for watching stuff.
I haven't tried it, but I understand there's a plugin for Kodi that lets you play your Jellyfin library through it. If I ever set up Kodi again, for some reason, that's exactly what I'll do. No "native" file access in Kodi, just a thin frontend for Jellyfin.
Somewhere on my long list of shit I'll never actually get around to doing is writing a Jellyfin browser & player "core" for Retroarch. Now that would be perfect.
[EDIT] Oh, I like its account management way better than Kodi's, too. Very easy to configure (through the browser, like nearly everything else). My kids have access to one set of content, my wife and I each have an account with access to everything, so our "watched" statuses don't interfere for stuff we watch on our own time. It's great.
Plex is just creepy, doing things like requiring you to sign up and log in through their web portal instead of using the local plex server. Even before the [onslaught of money put into it recently](https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/14/plex-raises-50m-growth-rou...) Plex did weird things requiring you to ping their servers. I imagine this is going to increase tenfold over the next few years. Gotta hit those KPI's after all.
Overall, Jellyfin does not have the shine that Plex has. As a user of Jellyfin since day 1, it is getting better and better every day. At this point, the only platform that doesnt have a Jellyfin app that I really wish it did was PlayStation.
EDIT: So there is a companion Jellyfin app for Roku
I felt that keeping it in Jellyfin and grabbing metadata using https://github.com/ankenyr/jellyfin-youtube-metadata-plugin was nicer. Plus way more client support than just a web browser.
Roku tells customers it is unable to strike a deal with YouTube -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28943886
It basically cured my kid’s addiction to YT’s junk/addictive content for young kids.
I’m sure this so benefit at least some people in a similar fashion.
(1) These are alternative YouTube clients that block youtube ads, and STN even has sponsorblock.
0: https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms#:~:text=circum... "Permissions and Restrictions" (2)
You might mean content distribution but that's really never been a commodity either. Even though it sorta kinda feels like you can buy "cable" from lots of companies that's only because each company independently negotiated contracts for all their channels. Physical distribution -- B&N/Blockbuster/Record Stores (and OG DVD Netflix) is the closest thing you could call commodity content distribution.
But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early on with DRM and locked-down clients which put platform owners in a similar spot to cable companies and so here we are.
> But we kinda ruined open internet distribution early early on with DRM and locked-down clients
DRM is nothing more than an enforcement mechanism for existing copyright though. So that's a bit like saying "copyright is a great thing as long as it only exists on paper".
Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8
(It's a few years old at this point, but not a lot has changed, and possibly has gotten worse)
Edit: And also this trick is known by a lot of kids according to a friend I have that works at a public school
My kids never cried for Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+, but when I banned YouTube they CRIED.
I had the same problem with my elder kid, YouTube is to kids what Facebook is to the aging population and Tiktok is to teens, an uncurated poison. But kids lack the ability to filter their own content, and YouTube makes no effort to curate. He complains he can't watch it anymore but when I stream kid-appropriate content from the other streaming platforms he'll watch it without further complaint
Sure, Roku is "smaller" than Google, but I disagree with the characterization of Roku as some poor upstart that's getting ground underfoot by Big Tech.
Doing a thing, getting called out, and then lying - only to get bitten by a leaked paper trail is such a Microsoft thing to do.
Disclaimer: Haven't tried this yet.