Hacker News Reader

Comment by helsinki | Hacker News Reader

There is little reason to not pay for YouTube Premium, in my opinion. Worth every penny.

YouTube TV, on the other hand, well, I need to cancel that.

It's the most expensive streaming service subscription I have (family) but it gets 100x more use than all the others combined. I'd love to know how the fee I pay gets distributed to channels I watch though, assuming it even does.

I forgot the source but in 2020 it was ~30% to YouTube and ~70% to creators (in watchtime proportion, if you have watched someone outside of YT partner program it will go to YouTube), but it was three years ago so I'm not sure if something have changed here.

I've asked a few streamers for their perspective, and the response is vague but more per view than ad impressions

I'm assuming this is mostly just because the ad revenue on youtube is pretty low

Agreed. The ability to just have all ads be non-existent on every platform is super nice.

Yes, on desktop I can use an ad blocker but that doesn't solve the app or smart tv usage.

For a smart TV, if it's an Android TV (or "Google TV"), you can install SmartTubeNext.

For android app there is newpipe

Or youtube ReVanced, also incorporates SponsorBlock

Libretube is becoming a good alternative

YouTube TV was asking an extra 20$ per month for UHD streaming, all you got was some sparse 4K sports programming. Not to mention they couldn’t get the color space correct, looked like r709 content played through r2020 container. Any orange or brown was shifted red. I believe they lowered the cost to 10$ per month for uhd add on.

What content on YT do you find to be valuable? Personally I find video to be a poor method of finding and sharing information, and anything that's not information is just a thinly veiled ad. Most "reviews" aren't, and most talking heads just spout shite.

I watch PBS Newshour, Frontline documentaries, other documentaries, catch up on the weather and local news, and informative content on trains, urban design/planning, and transportation.

Yeah, reading this stuff would probably be better, and I do also read a lot. But sometimes I just want to sit back and relax while someone presents their information to me.

See, this sounds interesting to me, but the discoverability for me is still dire years down the line, even using the same YT account. Never been impressed with the recommendation algorithm, despite thumbing videos accordingly, doing the whole "not interested" thing and ticking which box as to why.

It would be worth it if it allowed to properly use youtube-dl for archiving purposes.

ytp-dl seems to work fine, and is faster than youtube-dl.

You mean yt-dlp?

That seems like an arbitrary requirement - no other media streaming platform allows for this. In fact, YouTube is the only one that’s even possible to reasonably use/download for free.

It's not arbitrary, it's fundamental. And I don't pay for any streaming media platform currently so that point says nothing. I did pay for Apple TV and Netflix before, torrenting shows satisfied my archiving requirements in those cases.

It's belittling of the user to refer to their use-case requirements and cost analysis as "arbitrary"

No, it’s not. Expecting to download content freely from a subscription-based platform, where the creator/producer has ownership, is an unreasonable requirement.

Go buy a DVD, or convince YouTubers to release MP4s for money.

The whole point of those platforms is to reproduce content for my personal consumption. After it is reproduced, no matter how, streamed or downloaded etc, original creator still has the exactly same degree of ownership as before, so their interests are unaffected.

If I don't pay, YT profits from me watching ads so to provide any reproduction capabilities that mean I watch ads less would take bread away from their tables so that's okay. If I do pay, YT profits from that, so I expect it to provide appropriate reproduction capabilities at least by not throttling youtube-dl.

If your expectations were widely accepted as true, then all streaming platforms would provide seamless DRM-free downloads.

Why would they cater to the needs of captive user base? It's not like there is some alternative and I can stop using YT. I just don't buy YT premium, that's all. In fact I know no one who does, so I guess I'm not alone in this.

That's the perspective of YouTube maybe, but that isn't the perspective of this individual user. That doesn't affect their personal requirements when choosing software. It's a free market.

Does YouTube premium also block sponsor segments?

No, it doesn't block those.

Nope. There are tools to do that, such as SponsorBlock. I tried it but it calls home pretty often and sometimes does weird things to the videos's timing. I found it to be an annoyance. I think I did away with it, when it advertise something or tried to upsell something (forgotten). If it just ask me to buy it and keep quite and calls only Youtube/Google, it might have been OK.

It also is not available for all videos. Nonetheless, I've a feeling I should not rob off the creators, a lot of whom I follow are awesome, of their sponsor earnings.

SponsorBlock segments are crowd-submitted, so it needs to check the server for the latest segments. That said, the entire ~4.2GiB database can downloaded, and you can even set the extension to use a custom API server instance if you'd like.

> I should not rob off the creators, a lot of whom I follow are awesome, of their sponsor earnings.

I have never—literally not once—bought anything because of an overt online advertisement or sponsorship. Not because of any conviction, not because I dislike ads, not even because I didn’t have the money, but because none of the things being advertised got me interested even the few times I followed up on the ad. Even if we go full Laplace’s rule probability nerd on this, there sure is a lot of zeroes after the decimal point in that conversion rate.

Are the publishers (and consequently creators) being robbed of their ad money now that I’ve installed an adblocker, or were the advertisers being scammed by selling them worthless impressions in the decade before I did? I don’t think either is quite true, but one is probably about as true as the other.

> I've a feeling I should not rob off the creators

If you don't buy what they advertise the only person being robbed is you. They already got paid before even uploading the video

Personally, I just skip them TiVo-style 90% of the time. As long as there’s nothing unskippable, it doesn’t really bother me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com