The unfortunate answer is that it’s coming, and in the form of the Web Environment Integrity API, aka device attestation. If/when they manage to deploy this to enough devices, they will be able to restrict viewing to only allow ”blessed” clients. It needs hardware-level support, and that has been rolling out for maybe 10+ years now in the form of TPM modules and such.

The future they’re aiming for is that unless you’re using an approved (unmodified) browser on an approved (unmodified) device, you get nothing. It would basically turn large swaths of the internet into a walled garden overnight.

impossible without also blocking end users or requiring premium. even if they required a login, the video can be scraped.

They have been working towards requiring chrome, but that won’t work unless they close source it and lock down developer tools and apis, which would be a death sentence for chrome.

Fully agreed.

While I applaud the effort of making YouTube less hostile and invasive, the only real solution is to stop using it.

But then I know people want to have their cake and eat it too - let Google pay for all the hosting and bandwidth but want to use alternative clients

When WEI rolls out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity reply

It would mean blocking the billions of embedded YouTube videos scattered across the world in websites and emails and apps. It would be a catastrophic own-goal. That said, there are still many ways for them to enshittify their service. I worry that in the next few years they’re going to start splicing ads mid-stream. That’s much harder to block.