YouTube dominates TV streaming in US, per Nielsen's latest report | Hacker News Reader

YouTube dominates TV streaming in US, per Nielsen's latest report

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155 pointsStarrySkies11185 comments

It's replaced what was traditional TV in our home.

We watch movies, and youtube as if it were tv.

Old TV is now either 24 hour garbage news, reality shows, or similar nonesense.

Same in our house. Most youtube channels we watch have weekly releases which we watch similar to traditional TV episode releases.

If you don't mind sharing, what YT channels do you typically watch?

Laura Kampf and Jet Lag are the popular ones in my house...

Oh, I’m sorry I asked.

What did they say?

Yea i too think that we should be able to click "[flagged]" to see original post

If you click the timestamp you can read it. Maybe there's a Karma limit, though.

I can just read them with options set in user settings.

Laura Kampf and Jet Lag. not sure why they were flagged. The former is a DIY channel, not sure what the latter is.

Jet Lag is a travel game show: https://www.youtube.com/@jetlagthegame

Why?

I enjoy:

- BeardMeatsFood (https://www.youtube.com/beardmeatsfood)

- Johnny Harris (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmGSJVG3mCRXVOP4yZrU1Dw

- RealLifeLore (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5tjEmvPItGyLhmjdwP7Ww)

There are two modes of watching TV in my opinion: intentional and casual

Intentional: look for a certain show/movie, e.g. the weekly episode of House MD, Lost, Friends, HBO, ... -> This is the streaming war between Netflix, HBO, Disney, ...

Casual: You turn on the tv with the aim to just browse around and relax, and get something accidentally interesting/amusing -> Youtube is king and more or less the only option here (and a bit of Nebula)

The two together is the traditional TV

omg nebula is incredible. i just subbed like 2 months ago and i feel like ive been guzzling from a firehouse.

I’ve always been a bit unsure of what to make of nebula.

A lot of content is low effort edu-taintainment that seems to be little more than Wikipedia in video form.

More original and higher integrity creators like Veritasium, CGP Grey, Engineering explained don’t seem to be involved (actually I think CGP was but left without an explaination).

Maybe this is just a fundamental problem of bundling. It makes more sense for lower value content but less sense for higher value content.

The original founder's list was Dave Wiskus (current CEO), CGP Grey, and a guy behind Kurzgesagt, but yes, the latter two distanced themselves pretty quickly.

I don't think there's a single even semi-popular edu-tainment channel that wasn't at least approached by Nebula, but of course not every creator is interested. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's a tradeoff between Patreon/Nebula. You can have both, but you can only prioritize one of them, making the proposal far less interesting to those that already have a sizeable Patreon income.

Youtube itself is getting so good at monetization, with more people getting Premium, that it's no longer worth it to pursue other channels at all.

Sure, as long as you don't swear, play even a a couple seconds of copyrighted music, never say any of the "touchy" subjects that would earn you an info box below the video (could be anything from flat earth to covid), and a dozen of other arbitrary, constantly changing rules, YouTube is great on its own. Certainly better than any other popular platform.

However a lot of channels available on Nebula also use it as a place where they don't have to deal with those sometimes nonsensical rules, as a place to publish more "uncensored" versions of their videos. Sometimes they're as simple as not bleeping out the word fuck, sometimes they contain an extra section that would get their entire video demonetized on YouTube (example: showing a piece of art with nudity in it, or pretty much any blood), and sometimes they use it to cover topics that they know YouTube would instantly demonetize (example: pretty much any discussion around armed conflicts).

What I like about Nebula is that when I am using it I feel like they aren't trying to coerse me into anything. They don't push me to watch the next video, they don't push me to comment, like or subscribe, they don't push new channels or features on me. I just subscribe to the RSS feed of channels that I like, watch the video and leave.

I think there enough decent quality channels (many that I was following on YouTube before anyways) that it is definitely worth my subscription.

nebula really is the best of youtube! I've subscribed for a while but recently went for their lifetime subscription (I know it's not a "deal" I just want to support those creators')

a friend is actually a creator there! speaks very well about them

I watch things on Youtube intentionally. Right now I'm watching That UK Sound[1]. There are many more things worth watching intentionally on Youtube then there are on Netflix, HBO and Disney together. There's nothing like 3Blue1Brown on these.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlCEg4hCa1LHLLYk4KQQI...

The funny thing is, a casual viewer might be more interested in the ads/promoted products because they’re bored and looking for something to do.

On a certain movie/show, you can’t be bothered to divert your attention: you’re committed to the show.

Same here. We have the benefit of a nice projector, so we have biweekly movie nights with friends; when it's just us we'll fire up YouTube and watch whatever tickles out fancy.

Last night it was Vewn animated shorts and music videos by group_inou, here's a favorite: https://youtu.be/JP2728BtJ34?si=UGkXJWJFGdy8muyu

> Old TV is now either 24 hour garbage news, reality shows, or similar nonesense

Take a look at YouTube's trending page. There's clearly a reason for that content on TV.

The horrors you’ll see when you visit youtube in incognito

With YouTube not only is it easy to not look for other stuff to watch, it’s easy to skip other activities. It’s low hanging fruit for just about any interest. I’m trying to use it less.

The amount of human knowledge available today on youtube I think nothing will ever come close as apart from formal knowledge we have millions of small hacks improvements that would probably not been written down but have been recorded. If you are dedicated enough today you can go from being a novice to being quite proficient in 100s of different things. And every day the knowledge keeps increasing as well as improving.

The same is true for disinformation.

If you down the rabbit hole you start losing your mind.

I think there is much more information on the internet in written format though. Which I personally find a lot more accessible as well.

I always find video really slow and not very information dense, I don't have the patience for it. I get frustrated with the slow delivery whereas I can consume written text at my own speed. Skipping video works of course but I constantly have to "resync" my mind after a skip which happens automatically with written content. Written text can also be overly verbose and woolly but somehow I can scan through it even faster and summarise it without even thinking. It's really weird.

But it's great video exists for those who love it of course. And I think most people find video more easily accessible. I'm more of an outlier.

Fwiw I already stopped watching live TV many years ago :) All the ads, the endless game shows and talkshows with the celebs loving the sound of their own voices, no thanks.

> I always find video really slow and not very information dense

That always depends on the actual "information". Some stuff is "better" in written form, other things need audio and for other video is neccesary. Trivial thing is needing audio to e.g. hear music (yes, even if I can read musical notation) or pronunciation, intonation and accentuation of words or videos of physical "movement" in sports, crafts and art (dancing, theater,...).

But no, I wouldn't watch somebody programming for hours instead of reading about that either.

I agree but there is one thing I do love about programming videos. It shows you every step of the way. In written information very often some "obvious" steps are left out or forgotten which will cost you a few hours to get right.

Even with programming, videos are better to learn how to use GUIs like VS Code and Chrome Dev Tools.

For some things video is superior though. Like, replacing brake calipers. It is really hard to see what to do on a drawing.

Agreed.. for mechanical and some electrical things, watching video of far more useful. For others, reading is better.

Unlike some, I do appreciate programming videos. It's often helpful to understand concepts with the examples even if you don't recall the precise code or libraries. I'm those cases, it would be nice if more videos had accompanying articles.

I've thought about making some beginner to expert JS/TS content a few times. But no idea if the effort would really be worth it in terms of reach/audience. I've been working on Web based apps since the mid-late 90s. Which is also IMO a hindrance as it's often harder to think in terms of how best to learn things vs the changes over time in practice.

Ironically I also spent about a decade writing in eLearning systems and content. Which taught me it's simply amazing how much you can learn and forget. A couple years ago, realized mid conversation that I couldn't completely explain jet engines anymore. I've learned and forgotten so much domain knowledge that it's hard to express.

There's plenty of more recent stuff floating around.

On TFA subject, I've always enjoyed learning about history/warfare and related tech as well as food and nutrition. Most of my television time is in YouTube. I've recently dropped all other streaming services to cut back on the expense... I use YouTube(+music) way too much to deal with the annoying ads.

Most things that aren’t academic can’t really be learned by reading about it. You have to see someone do it to get all the thousands of different bits of information you cannot possibly write down. Videos are extremely information dense depending on what you’re trying to learn.

Finding the right videos is only the limiting factor. So many times I get frustrated and give up not finding what I'm looking for.

The problem is that Youtube severely nerfed their search (ironic given that Google still pretends it's a search company).

Now if you search for something will give you 5 relevant videos, 10 "for you videos" and then an endless list of something it hopes you will engage with, whether relevant or not

I just opened the YouTube app and the first recommended video is "youtube's search function is atrocious now". Their search function may be bad, but the addiction feed is spot on!

Here's the video for anyone curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3dSkkEr-wk

tl;dw:

First, he searches the exact name of the video on YouTube: it shows a fan-made animated skit of it, the wrong videos but from the right channel, and several re-uploads with only a few hundred views.

Second, he adds the channel name before the name of the video in the search bar. Same results.

Third, he tries searching for a famous line from the video: still no luck.

Finally, he sorts by view count and it shows up, but still not as the first result.

Is this some obscure video from some obscure channel? Nope, the video has 15 million views from a channel with 3.91 million subscribers that uploads videos regularly. He has a verified account which was created in 2006.

I just tried doing the same search as he did in an incognito window, and it also didn't show up for me until I sorted by view count.

I ran it on archive.today, and while it has slightly different results than what I got, nowhere in the search results does it ever show the original video with 15 million views. https://archive.ph/ksZhq

Not for me... I'll go in a tangent for a couple videos,. Then have to sell out something else from my follows... Sometimes to discover I'm no longer following the channel. I can't stand it more often than not.

I use google search then select videos try it you will probably get better results instead of youtube search. I wonder if they google search scans the subtitles as well from youtube so has better results.

I know it's silly but I sometimes feel anxiety at the prospect of that enormous bank of knowledge getting lost in some way or another (e.g. Google deciding it wants to do something else or some disaster).

It is truly invaluable to _humanity_

youtube is doing it's best to now hobble search functionality on youtube, which is already a disaster from a discoverablity perspective. not to mention the huge amount of content that gets deleted due to claims of all kinda of nonsense and other bogus reports and faulty automated detection.

I've tried to find speeches by someone I know the name of, and know basically half the title of the video, and know the context of the video that's for sure in the description or in the comments, and because I got a word or two wrong in the title, I get tons of other videos by the same guy, that have zero of the keywords that I included.

Eventually I find it and I shake my head wondering how YouTube/Google could get this bad.

YouTube gets more minutes watched and ads shown if you discover other videos via search.

It’s not like Google search, where being the best at search is a meaningful competitive advantage and necessary for survival. If YouTube found a credible competitor, I strongly suspect they’d improve their search (from the users’ perspective).

It's often all but impossible to find videos from a few years ago. Wanting to show your now adult children a viral video from a decade and a half ago, nowhere to be found.

Sometimes it feels like you're gaslighting yourself down a memory hole.

If you really like a video on YouTube and think you might want to see it again in the future one day, you must download it and save it. This really goes for just about anything on the internet. You can't trust that anything will still be there after a few years.

Of course I know that now....I didn't in 2008. ;-)

YouTube search is so frustrating to use. You search for a specific title, but instead you're usually shown vaguely related popular videos first, and then the actual video you want below those.

But what bothers me the most is that YouTube's data can't be fully indexed by search engines. Recently, I was trying to find the video of a comment I had a picture of, but it was impossible to find because comments aren't indexed at all. While Reddit's search also sucks for example, at least search engines can index Reddit's data and make it possible to search it.

Is there something new they are doing to hobble it (your use of the word "now" suggests so)?

The last things I can think of they did to ruin it is surfacing Shorts and "you may also like" results, but the results themselves were completely broken for many years now (my favourite is when doing a search within a channel, looking for e.g. "Let's play Factorio Episode 98" which will return episodes 97,98 and 101, but not 98 no matter how far you scroll down in the results. If you want to find episode 98, naturally you should search for episode 99 and then it will appear).

The medium-term threat is the gradual replacement of that knowledge in search results with AI para-knowledge that looks plausible but is not actually true or useful.

It seems misleading to say that YouTube "dominates" TV streaming when according to the Nielsen report with a less clickbaity title, Netflix is only 0.7% behind. https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2024/colder-weather-and-nfl...

Remember when everyone laughed at google for buying them for a billion

Who knew something as basic as streaming videos would basically be a monopoly. It makes sense in hindsight with all the expensive storage required. It’s still mind boggling that you could literally upload video to them 24/7 and they will host it for free.

I’m on the verge of getting Youtube Premium

I didn't really like their “annoyance” style of advertising that, but competitors got worse

There are no DJ mixes on Soundcloud or Spotify any longer, and other platforms are a combination of unused or no mobile app

so I’ll go ahead and get rid of the ads now for just that, but along with everything else on youtube

> no DJ mixes on Soundcloud

I'd say there's two types of them: independent mixes (someone just recorded a DJ set for the fun of it), and podcast-like radio shows, usually backed by a label. The first group is getting kinda smaller, but the second group is definitely more on Soundcloud than anywhere else -- it's just completely undiscoverable. Sometimes it goes to the artist profile, sometimes it has its own "radio show" profile, and Soundcloud does fuck all in terms of displaying such "podcasts" separately.

For me the most interesting of the platforms in this niche is Mixcloud, whose whole concept is streaming DJ mixes, legally, with some of the money somehow going back to the artists whose records you play. But to negotiatate that sort of legality they had to introduce some rather unexpected restrictions, like how many songs you can play by one artist, how many from a certain album, how many consective songs by artist/album... So it's fine in most cases, but doing something like "best of Daft Punk" mix would go against the rules.

And with YouTube it's pretty much a dice roll. A common tactic is to upload an unlisted blank video with the snippets of the music you want to record yourself playling and see how lucky you get with the copyright algorithm. Sometimes a certain song you want to play is just a no-go, so you have to swap it for a different one before recording yourself, otherwise all your effort goes straight to trash, never to be seen by anyone. And you get up to three strikes in a 90 day period, so you can't be too regular with your uploads.

You also get Youtube Music with premium. That's pretty nice. It's not as good at playlists as Spotify, etc, but it's got most music you wanna listen to.

For now that is.

I sort of hope someone more motivated than myself makes a timer for how long before the crappification* of YouTube begins now that it appears MBAs will be taking over. The new CEO probably has some gumption, but it seems inevitable.

* of course this is subjective, but generally I can find lots of great YouTube content. I can buy premium to avoid the ads and become the client, not the product.

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64675997.amp

Circa 2009, with the introduction of ContentID.

Fwiw I think the commonly used term is "enshittification".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

The crappification of YouTube has already begon with Shorts and the inability to disable this completely useless content.

If you click the X on the Shorts section it says "We will hide Shorts for 30 days"

How about you hide them forever? Some MBA must have decided that it would not be good for their KPI if people could just ignore the clickbait.

Idk if I am in different AB group but I no longer have the X there........

On mobile that's the biggest reason I use ReVanced. Sure, blocking ads is nice and all, but I'm paying for premium anyway. I just don't want to see shorts

1: https://github.com/ReVanced

fwiw I turned off history and all the recommendations settings, and now they hide the shorts and frontpage recs

Eh, I like some of the shorts. I just scroll by them when I'm not.

I'm thinking about much deeper enshitification like nickel-and-diming content creators until they all leave. Getting rid of premium or adding ads to it, etc. Adding even more ads for regular users.

The fact that search is broken (you often only get a few relevant videos and then some recommendations that have nothing to do with your search) and YouTube shorts are shoved in your face constantly are not enough for you to attest enshittification at this point in time? How bad do you expect it to become in the near future?

It’s the only streaming service I pay for that brings me joy.

Those who use youtube as TV, what do you watch? Is there a way of consuming YouTube that is more like consuming Netflix, where the 1% (or 0.001%) that is "professional" content is curated somehow? I mean I have no interest in scrolling videos of people eating detergent, I just want to watch shows/films/content that I heard people recommend to me (not algorithms - people). How do you even start doing that on youtube?

I have used youtube since it launched, but I still haven't found more than one or two "channels" that I enjoy (is that what it's called? Interesting people who make interesting videos?) but I haven't bothered logging in or subscribing to one. Should I have? Does it help consuming in any way?

If you want any recommandation subscription is needed. I use multiple profile to separate things like more learning focused vs gaming or whatever.

Never watch a silly random video in one of those profile.

This sounds like an exhausting amount of work for a paid product

I think this is a somewhat "over engineered" approach. I have a range of interests and don't feel any need to have multiple profiles. YouTube is quite good at understanding what I want.

One way this manifests for example is that I use YouTube at work to listen to concerts in the background while I work, but at home I will almost never listen to music or concerts on YouTube as I'm mostly using it like a TV. Despite the same YouTube profile, my work machine gets mostly concerts in the home feed, and my home machine gets mostly other stuff. There's just enough crossover that I can get into either style of watching on either machine though, and in the rare cases where I have done, YouTube seems to react quickly.

Containers on Firefox make it quite trivial I can have all those side by side.

You don't really need an account. The recommendation algorithm works well with just a cookie.

> I just want to watch shows/films/content that I heard people recommend to me (not algorithms - people). How do you even start doing that on youtube?

I don’t understand your question. You talk with people you care about, they tell you what they recommend and then you use the search bar to locate the content and watch it.

This is so obviously the answer to your question that I am worried I am misunderstanding you in some way.

I think their point is that discovery for authentic content is really awful which is true. The homepage never shows me subscriptions, there's a gigantic amount of shorts. The subscription page itself has no way to group or find anything and it also shoves shorts in your face.

The Youtube UI is actually so bad and Tiktok-ified that I just use Feedly to follow individual channels and avoid the website. Even creators talk about this quite often. "ProZD" most recently encouraged people to support him on Patreon because his long form content essentially is algorithm-punished. Apparently only 10% of his views ever come from the subscription page.

I think it's quite telling that the people who make the kind of content that I think the OP is after so heavily encourage people to support them outside of the actual platform.

Not only that: also long-form curated content at all. If I watch TV (Here "TV" means I'm in a couch, there is a big screen I'm often surrounded by other people) then I don't want 3 minute bits of content or extremely niche personal content. I want the general sports/news/entertainment stuff that a group of people can enjoy. Everyone already sits with their phones and watches video content. But that's not TV. That's my personal video content consumption. What I'm talking about is something for passive consumption on a big screen. That's TV. Linear broadcast TV does this well. Netflix does it too. But I struggle to use YouTube for this.

If someone mentions a TV show and I search for it, there will be 100 reviews of the show, 1000 short clips of the show. Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube. Whether or not the actual content is ON youtube (which is the question my search is trying to answer) you'll get thousands of search results. In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero.

Another example: a huge use of TV is news. Every big news outlet has a presence on YouTube. But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.

On the page for a channel, click the Videos 'tab' to see list of the channels videos ordered by most recent.

Doesn’t look like the big broadcasters/news sites want me to use YouTube “as TV” judging by what I see. It’s just clips not programs. BBC for example has some news stories but no news broadcasts.

The curation is what I want. A big important story should take more time of the broadcast. I don’t want to choose what story I’m interested in I want someone to do it for me. That’s the difference between a news program and a set of N 3 minute news stories.

It’s like the difference between an rss feed and a newspaper. A big point of the newspaper is they decide what space to give everything and what to put on the front page. You can’t meaningfully understand the world by reading an rss even with the same articles, because a key insight is knowing what the big story is in the sense of what other people have seen.

Old media corporations have never used Youtube well. But people aren't "replacing TV with youtube" by watching that old media content on Youtube; rather they're not watching that old sort of content at all and now watch the new style of media, mostly done by individual "creators" or a few new-media saavy corps. The remaining audience for old media corps, NBC/etc, are nursing home residents or soon to be.

Yeah even I (an old fart who prefers linear broadcast to anything where I need to click) is consuming a lot of online video content. I like YouTube for learning how to play a song on guitar, tech content, learning how to repair a gadget and so on. But I do this on my phone, perhaps on the bus. Hell, I often do it while watching TV. I'm not surprised YouTube is huge, but this article says that YouTube is big on television screens. And that surprises me.

My big TV I use mostly for watching something together with others - at least with others in the same room - and that's hard with YouTube. Too much to choose from/too niche, and 5 minute intervals between having to choose something. But this article suggests it's something people actually do these days (or perhaps it's "watching together with others" that's also dying in this process? The stats don't say).

But that isn't the intended use case for YT? How are you expecting to watch a professionally produced TV show on YT for free? YT offers a catalogue of tv shows and films that you can purchase and watch on the site but I'm confused why you think you'd be able to search for a tv show and be presented with every episode nicely catalogued in order? YT has always been focused on user generated content - however in recent years you will have noticed this shift toward more professional style videos from larger channels who can afford to employ a proper team

There is tons of professionally produced content on YouTube. And that’s all I want curated, professional content. But it’s hard to find.

YouTube has about as much commercials as the broadcast TV I watch (a lot of which is free and all of which is professionally produced) so I can’t see how YouTube could never have pro content. Their paid subscription also costs quite a bit so just having e.g recent news broadcasts there - which are already produced anyway - doesn’t seem impossible either. I don’t want to watch GoT I want to see a 2004 sitcom or yesterdays BBC news at 6…

BBC news has a page with recent clips - but that’s not a news broadcast. It’s not “TV” just like an rss feed with news studies isn’t a newspaper. TV news requires curation, not merely moving pictures with news.

> Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube.

I did. I thought of "Breaking Bad". Searched for it. There are indeed many reviews and shorts, and on the side of the search result in a separate box I see the official show with a big "buy" button. Apparently I can buy the first season for £10.49.

> In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero.

Not for me. It is all organised neatly into seasons. I can buy individual episodes or whole seasons.

> But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.

Not in my experience? I typed "CNN" into the search bar and it displayed a big box on top of the organic results saying "Latest from CNN" with the latest video uploads of theirs in order.

When I click on the CNN channel it indeed shows various programmes CNN has. If I want to see their latest videos I need to click on the tab "Videos". It can be ordered "latest", "most popular" and "oldest" where "latest" is the default for me.

When I look at CNN’s or BBC’s latest it’s not tv-broadcasts it’s just uncutated clips. To use that for TV replacement seems painful. (If by TV we mean watching something on a big screen without having to interact with it for a long while). The only way to watch clips that way would be to queue up a playlist of say ten 3 minute news bites but that still doesn’t tell me anything about their relative importance.

So what I’m looking for is the 30 minute broadcast where these clips are used, where a less important story (objectively! I don’t want personal content that defeats the point!) gets perhaps broadcast cut down to 10 seconds while the big headline clip gets the full 3 minutes. YouTube is the opposite of that. It’s trying to let me pick what I personally find interesting. But at least for news this is a completely useless idea most of the time. Perhaps some outlet publishes their “news at 6” type programs too?

> So what I’m looking for is the 30 minute broadcast where these clips are used, where a less important story (objectively! I don’t want personal content that defeats the point!) gets perhaps broadcast cut down to 10 seconds while the big headline clip gets the full 3 minutes.

Maybe the solution simply is that what you want is not youtube? Horses for courses. If broadcast TV fits exactly what you desire then that is what you should watch. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Youtube is a mirror, it shows you more of what you watch (at least most of the time.) If you can't resist the temptation of clicking on clickbait/trash, it will show more of that to you.

How to use youtube:

1. Log out, clear your cookies or clear your watch history.

2. Turn off autoplay.

3. Search for a few high quality videos/channels you have seen before, to seed the recommendation algorithm. I use the "Applied Science" channel for this but you use what suits you.

4. Never click on clickbaity trash.

I just fail to find much of the content interesting. TV for me is 99% news, sports, or traditional entertainment (Internationally known example: "Jeopardy", just for the sake of discussion). I find YouTube just isn't geared for this. I mean I have lots of narrow interests, but I don't want to watch a 1 hour video of someone discussing the latest stuff in my area of interest no matter how good it is. Because the people in my family who is also in the room would protest. And there is no one I can discuss this with when I have seen it because it's such a slim topic.

I mean if you sit down at lunch today and want to grab a 30min news summary for national news, from a reasonably trustworthy news source how would you even do that on YouTube?

Sounds like you just want an endless feed of traditional TV. I suggest you talk to younger people because this is not how they generally consume content anymore, and that is the target audience for YouTube and why the traditional content on YouTube is corralled into a small walled section sandwiched between vast swaths of algorithmic suggested content.

Note, this is all from a US perspective.

FWIW, YouTube TV, the paid subscription package, has what you're looking for. If you wanted to watch an episode of some cable or local news broadcast, you can do that. Pick your flavor: Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Fox Business, HLN, PBS News, local affiliates, etc. It is practically just cable TV on the internet. Want to watch Game Show Network and watch endless shows like Jeopardy and Deal or No Deal or whatever, it is there. Lots of sports-centric TV channels as well, but not all regional sports networks are available (at least last time I checked).

Some news channels do offer more traditional news segments on regular YT. NBC News and ABC News offer a 24/7 live stream and often makes entire episodes available.

https://www.youtube.com/@NBCNews

https://www.youtube.com/@ABCNews

PBS NewsHour offers full episodes on traditional YT as well and are usually live during notable events and during their broadcast times.

https://www.youtube.com/@PBSNewsHour

Hollywood streaming services are in trouble as the world gets hooked/accustom to free, user generated(those documentaries on every little random thing users create are great.. low budget TLC/Discovery like shows) and short form content.

In 2023 I canceled all hollywood streaming services and watch 2 to 6 hours of youtube (in the background while working) a day. As well through a Mac Mini connected to a LCD TV use wireless mouse as remote (provides everything the Internet offers on a big screen).

Hollywood if they were smart would start putting all their shows on youtube and split them up .. if it's 20 minutes show .. split it into two. I bet they will!

Netflix doesn't appeal to people that haven't grown up with TV. Youtube is just a website for videos. You surf Youtube like you surf the web. On netflix, you can't even have multiple tabs open.

Lot of consolidation likely this year among all the streamers. Too many streamers. Too much content. Too few eyeballs.

No way. There are too many lazy customers with auto renewing subscriptions.

There are already talks of Peacock and Paramount+ merging into one service.

Paramount was never going to be able to compete with the relatively deeper pockets of Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Disney/Comcast or even Warner Bros Discovery.

It is not the lazy customers that drive the merge, it is the shareholders and wall street.

Not just in the USA. YouTube is my only vvideo source. And to add insult to injury, local legislation has it that I have to pay 60E/month for the local, basically state-controlled TV/radio/news station, although I dont consume its content. YouTube, which is what I use daily, only costs about 1/6th of that. Oh, and there is only one democratic party against this practice. The far-right. All the others seem to love this practice. Thank you democracy, you're useless.

What country is that? That's a lot. At least in the UK if you don't watch regular TV you don't have to pay the licence fee (£159/year).

We used to have an the ability to opt-out from TV and only pay for radio, which is what I did for many years. However, since January this year, the system has been reformed and the ability to opt-out from TV was removed. So now I pay 35/mo more for a service I dont use. Besides, I am blind. So billing me for TV is a joke by itself.

>The far-right. All the others seem to love this practice. Thank you democracy, you're useless.

If you poll the voters, and the non-far-right voters generally approve of this, then democracy is working as intended. Just because you don't like the results doesn't mean the majority of your countrymen don't.

Its not that simple. Since the only party opposing this practice is far-right and mostly non-votable, nobody in their right mind has the option to vote for a party which does not support this practice. That is when democracy fails. When all the parties team up to support something they want done, and the people basically have no option to vote against.

Surely the option, if you live somewhere with a reasonably plural system, is to run for office and see if anyone else cares about this issue sufficiently?

Stunning that they don't invest more in their TV apps, especially the Apple TV app. Their single-row horizontal scroll UI is so frustrating.

Not sure on that... Amazon prime is pretty atrocious. Similar for Netflix anymore. And the CBS/Paramount TV app won't work right at all with my pihole blocking their tracking service. WTH.

It wouldn't take much for Rumble to do better, but it seems like the TV app experience is such a minimal priority for them.

Max was decent and so was Discovery... Since the merger both are worse and they aren't even merged. Just worse than before.

The YouTube app is one of the best steaming apps available on Apple TV...because it's not constantly signing you out.

I used to scoff at the idea of paying for YouTube, but I'd absolutely consider it if they had a cheaper plan that excluded YouTube Music.

I won’t pay for YouTube as long as they keep trying to make Shorts happen. It’s everything I dislike about the Internet in one feature.

Edit: Why would this get downvoted? Do people really find value in shorts?

> Do people really find value in shorts?

Yes. Obviously. This is an absurd question.

I think it probably isn’t depending on what you think value means. At a surface level people watch them ergo it has value. But peer deeper and it seems fair to think about whether that’s a good or bad thing and so on.

Depending what value means... I think that shorts do not bring any value, just mindless filler. In my books that has no value. Some might disagree.

I’ve learnt about a lot of things through shorts. It’s not just crap

Mind naming some positive examples? All I get is right-wing political propaganda and "Whatever"-podcast antimodernwomen crap. I would pay to get rid of this blatant negativity.

https://youtube.com/shorts/5QUqxmqBOQI?si=Fep5LxAr6Boe6pBn

https://youtube.com/shorts/RxZ77kjmnU8?si=uCNLl3nZCIbLHjk6

https://youtube.com/shorts/0ja1E-OwrVI?si=WNsEVV_yyS-F3khY

https://youtube.com/shorts/FAZpx1EucQw?si=FKQiESLTuhfANGL1

https://youtube.com/shorts/3iotlZfJjH0?si=x3ND5rVR54LbieN9

Those where in the first 10 shorts I got

This is pretty far shy but it’s just fun

https://youtube.com/shorts/j7SByXWWVzU?si=7Et5jRKpEbV93Sia

Had a couple of clips from start trek which came up too.

Obviously people find value in mindless filler - look at junk food, or reality tv

Some people find value in watching other people watch tv, or watch other people play games.

People find value in TikTok, obviously, and Google wants part of that pie and is willing to degrade all of our YouTube experience in order to chase it.

But very unclear if anyone finds value in Shorts.

My shorts feed is far higher quality than my tiktok feed right now. I definitely find value in it

TikTok has a clunky Web UI (there was an experiment they accidentally rolled out for a day in 2022 to make it much better, but it was rolled back and never seen again). YT Shorts work fairly well. It also supposedly pays out to creators better than TikTok.

Although I have to use `document.querySelectorAll('video').forEach(e => e.playbackRate = 2);` in my console for either service since they don't have native playback speed control on the web.

There are extensions that can do that if you get tired of it (Stop The Madness has an option to restore native video controls which includes playback speed control)

I'm not one of them, and clearly you're not one of them, but: Yes, some people do find value in things like YouTube Shorts.

And these people are real people.

(But complaining about downvotes is a sure-fire way to get downvotes -- even as far back as Slashdot, where such a complaint could only be levied pre-emptively or as a reply to oneself.)

I find shorts quite helpful if you’re intentionally looking for a quick explainer.

There are unfortunately lot of how to videos on YouTube that are 10 seconds of content in 13 minutes of filler.

The trick is just to never scroll through shorts, but instead navigate back to search afterwards.

Perhaps I use YouTube differently:

If I am using YouTube for learning, then: My bullshit meter trips very quickly when I detect needless filler, and then I go find another video to watch (or, ideally, a writeup instead of a video -- away from YouTube). Shorts never enter the equation.

And if I am using YouTube for entertainment, then: I want more entertainment than a YouTube Short typically provides.

It's tough for everyone when they find out they aint the main character.

Mostly use it on Android TV... Almost never see shorts as a suggestion. They're there, but I don't really use them or notice much.

It just caused me to stop paying for Spotify. Spotify is clearly better, but Youtube music is really 'good enough'

Same.

Isn’t this behaviour exactly what got Microsoft in anti-trust hot water?

The government doesn't care about anti-trust much anymore. It's been two decades since it lifted a finger.

Single instance of bundling two crossover apps (read as Youtube and Yt music) is different from Microsoft bundling every kind of apps on its platform, with frugal dev support.

Nobody is stopping Spotify to bundle with another video app or create one themselves.

Same here... I did keep Spotify for a while for Joe Rogan, but their Android TV app is crappy and video support sucks badly. YouTube Music is good enough, but the previous incarnation was slightly better IMO.

I mean it's a pretty reasonable price if you do the family plan with a few people.

I recently started paying for YouTube, it sucks way less without all the ads, and I generally feel I get my money's worth. I know I could technically use AdBlock or something, but it feels really nasty to do so. YouTube Music is okay, but I still use Spotify, as the interface of Spotify is better.

I still do.

I just started using a minimal ad skipper chrome extension called Clear Skies and youtube is back to being usable.

> YouTube has reached a few other milestones in recent months, including the 100 million users who pay for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium.

Purchase price parity based pricing of YouTube premium according to the country is awesome, in comparision to other services like Spotify, X. Thats one main reason for engaged buyout.

Can’t beat the price. Google knows what its target market is willing to pay.

If you can afford to subscribe to a paid video streaming service, YouTube will help you to cancel whatever service you have anyways, when you realize you don't watch it enough to justify the monthly fee.

I can’t stand how they shove YouTube Shorts down our throats and don’t give us a way to disable that.

I am a huge fan of YouTube overall and have been happy to pay to have an ad-free experience

I don't mind the short videos. What I do mind is that they co-opted the word "shorts" which means something else in the context of videos. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024...

Perhaps not: I think your link is talking about "short movies" or "short films". YouTube's Shorts are "short videos". Movies (films) and videos are not the same thing: movies/films are a type of video, but there are many other types of video that are not movies, most notably TV shows, and also "music videos", but really anything that involves a moving picture. A "movie" (or to some, "film") these days is commonly meant to refer to a specific form of art, meaning a visualized stand-alone story that usually takes 1-4 hours to watch, and frequently gets played in a cinema.

Similarly, a "book" is a collection of bound paper pages, but a "novel" is a specific type of book that contains a story, and is usually a certain length (if it's too short, it's called a "short story").

So I think it's ok for YouTube to call their 60-second videos "shorts", as long as they don't call them "short films" or "short movies".

The term "shorts" is also part of that and is what YouTube was trying to co-opt. In the link you can clearly see the word "shorts" being used to refer to these. Here's one from 2010: https://thescorecardreview.com/tsr/review/film-reviews/2010/...

That's just context allowing for abbreviation. "Shorts" has always meant different things in different contexts.

how much extra would you be willing to pay for a shorts-free experience? I'd probably be willing to throw them a dollar or two more for that.

You can get it for free by turning off your watch history.

There are extensions to hide the Shorts. I’ve been using one for a month now and it’s been great.

There's no way to disable them in their mobile apps unfortunately without jumping through a couple hoops with something like a PiHole or using an alternative app on Android.

The alternative apps are great though. No ads, no tracking, included sponsorblock etc. I use libretube. Grayjay is also nice but a bit too commercial for me.

I don't use YouTube very often as I don't like the video format but sometimes I can't avoid it. And this makes it a lot more palatable.

Don't use the mobile app. Use https://m.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions in a browser, with uBlock Origin installed.

If you are on android just use Newpipe.

There's even one featured on the chrome web store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-youtube-shorts...

IMO what Instagram has done is worse. Reels every other post in the feed, reels in stories, reels specific tab.

On top of all that, yesterday I wanted to post a 5 second video post, just a regular video post, of my dog doing something, and no matter what I did it insisted on posting it as a reel, even though at one point I cancelled the new post, went back to the "new post" view, made sure "post" not "reel" was selected, and then it still made the video a reel.

Reels in the feed is what makes me hate modern IG. There’s already a Reels tab I never tap! I’m telling you something, please listen.

To post a video as a non-reel the standard workaround is also putting a picture in the same post. You’ll see some creators with an image that just says “anti-reels slide”.

this is what made me finally quit Instagram. I was only following friends and family. if it had been 3 friends posts for every 1 ad and zero other stuff pushed at me I'd have stayed but the signal to noise ratio got too high and I finally got fed up and deleted my account last month.

I often want to do the same to YouTube as it's recommendations are atrocious and it provides no good ways to turn off the noise. 4 easy things I'd like.

The obvious, let me disable shorts.

Next up, separate music from non-music. 30% to 50% of their recommendations are for music when I'm not looking for music. By separating them they can give me 100% music when I want music and 100% non-music when I don't.

Let me chosoe for it to never recommend videoes I've already watched. 5-10% of their recommendations are wasted on vidoes I've already seen. That should include videos I've manually marked as already watched

Don't recommend mixes. (maybe ok in music mode of they'd separate music from non-music)

It's very subjective, but Reels are actually the only way my close friends interact with Instagram now. As Facebook did, it's gone from a platform for sharing ourselves to a platform for sharing third-party 'content'[1]

[1] stolen pet tiktoks

If you go to the website, you can hide Shorts for 30 days. There is an X on the top right for the Shorts section.

I do that and don’t feel like it’s being forced into my face anymore.

If I can only hide them and not remove them on a permanent basis, that is the very definition of being forced into my face.

"Oh wow, I can not eat the poop whilst I catch my breath. This will be an enjoyable break before I am forced to start eating the poop again"

I agree. But it’s better than nothing. I wish I could also just disable it everywhere.

> hide Shorts for 30 days

Is there a name for this fucked up dark pattern of giving users a "choice" only between accepting and accepting couple days or weeks later?

Not from search results.

Thanks for this tip. I want to be able to do this on the YouTube apps on my kids’ devices

Unfortunately it only removes the recommendation of shorts but not the short tab on the bottom.

Shorts pollute everything because they’re so easy to make it’s basically spam.

Just make a filter to remove the shorts insert.

The killer app for Shorts is the ability to view Tik Tok videos without having to directly engage with Tik Tok.

Tv has become so insufferable boring that my entire household has stopped watching, except for YouTube. Audible has been picking up and people who live in my house are actually reading books again.

With American television at least, I think you need brain damage to tolerate it. This is why most of the people still watching it are people with dementia in nursing homes.

The core audience has finally been explained to me. Lol. Nice.

Because entertainment is a largely a commodity and whoever has the most wins. Not that complicated.

The quality of stuff I get on YouTube is way higher than most of the garbage that Netflix pumps out. YouTube is largely a meritocracy, if a creator doesn't make something that viewers want they just don't get money or views, while Netflix and Amazon Prime, on the other hand, are mostly just corporate crap factories where people keep failing upwards even if nobody is watching the crap they produce.

Why is the article mentioning only Apple Vision Pro in the context of “spatial reality”, ignoring other products?

I enjoy paying and watching Youtube Premium on my TV (through a sideloaded app), but whenever I open the official app on my iPad, I am bombarded with Shorts, every search I make returns clickbait, unrelated content among the real results and that annoys me so much I keep thinking I should stop giving Youtube any money.

Google, the bloody search engine company, keeps making sure that every search I make about video game videos, returns totally unrelated clips about very sexualised Twitch streamers ("how is this allowed on Twitch??" with some very prominent cleavage in the thumbnail), or any other thirst bait that has nothing to do with what I have been looking for. Funnily enough, they don't even let you choose "don't recommend this channel" for these results.

I tried clearing my watch history, disliking the video, reporting them, Google doesn't fucking care. They are force-fed to you, hoping every single time you click on it.

Honestly I just wish that company burns to the ground. Literally making their platform as shitty as possible to increase their bottom line. Yes, clickbait works, it does not mean you need to turn the entire place into clickbait. Jesus that makes my blood boil.

I know I could just read a book instead of watching my favorite content creators on the platforms, not all of which are on Nebula. But it takes some effort to create a product that pushes people away from it. Or that they hate themselves for using it.

I wish that Rubble or others worried nearly as well. Also a TV user (NVidia Shield TV) and it seems every other time I check Rumble I have to sign in again. The recommendations are garbage and half the content feed is just noise.

I'd really like something similar but not so heavy handed as YouTube gets on suggestions and content filtering.

I've also tried a few also ran video services and none haber been even as good as rumble as bad as their TV app is.

Yup, I'm not sure how anyone uses the standard YouTube app. Even with adverts removed you get bombarded by shorts and nonsense clickbait/disinformation.

I use it currently with a patched Revanced apk which is not logged in (in case Google suddenly take to banning accounts) and some UX tweaks like blocking shorts.

For the couple of channels I actually would like to support in some way I stomach using the official app and give them some ad impressions.

How much do you use YouTube? Because as a fairly substantial user, this doesn't match my experience at all. When I wasn't watching Shorts they were present but not in-your-face. Search pretty much always returns exactly what I'm looking for, there's no clickbait except for the low level of clickbait that the channels I like use... I pay not to have ads, but that's about it. Honestly, I really enjoy it. The app could be a little more iOS-ified, but that's a minor gripe.

I wonder if you're just a sufficiently light user that it's not learning your preferences, or, I wonder if much of the personalisation comes from client-side event logging which, by using a third party app, you're skipping, meaning that in many ways your profile is missing data.

My experience is much closer to parent than yours, and I don't use any third party app. Yes, I have paid. And no, I'm not "just a sufficiently light user". That's pretty dismissive actually.

The official app sucks, and the desperate Shorts push is annoying at best.

Shorts are injected into the search, and search is otherwise as bad as discussed. On the bottom menu/bar, the five things are "Home", "Shorts", the plus/capture/upload button (why would I ever want to use this on mobile? oh yeah, I don't and only accidentally press it, but Youtube wants people to upload Shorts), "Subscriptions" and "Profile". This is the same on iPad.

At least with YT Music, seems they realised that the UX of the main app was so bad, they just needed a separate one. But with Shorts, the desperation for those sweet Zoomer ad views was too high, so into the main app it goes.

> And no, I'm not "just a sufficiently light user". That's pretty dismissive actually.

Apologies, certainly not intentional. I've just observed users in the past who just don't use the product much and as a result have recommendations that are much closer to what I see when I open YouTube in an incognito tab with no history.

This is all fair criticism. I do (now) use Shorts, although I resisted for a long time. I actually get very different videos on Shorts to my regular watching, and it found what I wanted pretty quickly.

I get that the weight of the app judging by the nav bar is partially shorts and uploading, but home/subs/profile would I think be valuable to you? They certainly are to me (for playlists/downloads access in profile for example). And then many other users do use Shorts and uploading, so this doesn't feel too out of balance. Instagram having a "shop" tab, or WhatsApp having an "updates" tab are similarly of little use to me, but I understand why the products have them and don't begrudge there being users who use the product in different ways.

It's just annoying, and by no means unique to YT. Companies forcing changes upon users, it's going to be adversarial - especially for people who do use it a lot.

People do watch shorts, of course. I can see it can be a good fit on phones, even if it isn't for me. I can also see not wanting to shaft creators who put effort into shorts.

Where it falls down is the heavy-handed, passive-aggressive thing of "ok, we'll hide shorts for 30" (in this view only though). My UI criticism is more that for "normal" videos, you'd use home and subscriptions the most, right? So sandwiching stuff between that just feels like they're trying to make you mis-tap on purpose. Maybe Google engineers don't use bumpy public transport? (Or other one-handed scenarios.)

Possibly, this is all a projection of the main worry - especially for paying users: If they are willing to degrade the long-form video experience, or at least show little consideration, what does the future of that look like?

Besides the regular gaming content on twitch there is a bunch of weird stuff. I noticed there is this ASMR type content where people lick plastic ears in front of a microphone. The amount of views they get, concurrent streams was mind boggling for me.

But regarding 'sexy' content they recently made some policy updates, they initially hammered down on such content, but I think it hurted their income stream.

https://safety.twitch.tv/s/article/Updating-our-Approach-to-...

Twitch has become a soft-core porn website. But it's easy to avoid. Youtube blatantly promoting clickbait videos, injecting them into search results, with no way to tune the recommendations is worse.

Mainstream media is dying fast and YouTube is replacing it #ftw

You can watch what you want, when you want, search and recommendations are powerful.

Individual content creators are on fire, unfiltered and quality content. Can't remember when we watched MSM in the last 10 years, like other said it's garbage and just propaganda.

Search are rapidly trash, while recommendation required some effort on my part to cultivate or otherwise trash might sneak in.

It's certainly the golden age of youtube, with high quality creators, I learned a lot of interesting stuff that I probably otherwise wouldn't, though it's hard to know because I would have read about these things in magazines.

But there are some issues in the space.

For example, my attempt to report low quality autogenerated nonsense from a bot has so far been unsuccessful because of a combination of being too small to notice and successful evasion tactics.

Creators need sponsors, some of which are questionable, to pay the bills and youtube continues to be an unstable income stream.

Moderation is absolutely necessary to maintain information quality, but youtube moderation is not very transparent and they are unaccountable if creators are wrongfully banned. It's also why my attempt to report a bot go nowhere.

Agreed, it's easy to report copyright (even if it is fake to take someone channel down) and its taken down immediately and they don't have a way to even appeal and get back.

While it's tough to report genuine cases like you mentioned.

> Mainstream media is dying fast and YouTube is replacing it #ftw Traditional linear media is surely being push out, but YouTube is also being "replaced" by short form media.

> You can watch what you want, when you want, search and recommendations are powerful. On demand part is surely powerful, but are you sure on the recommendation? Did you remember a few years ago people are talking about horrible youtube recommendation?

> Individual content creators are on fire, unfiltered and quality content. Can't remember when we watched MSM in the last 10 years, like other said it's garbage and just propaganda. I don't know how what channel or geo region you are in. There are quality content, but at the same time there are thousands, if not million of rubbish on YouTube, propaganda[0][1], spammy content farm[1].

[0]: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-ai-propaganda-1... [1]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Guerrilla-influencers-are-pu... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

True, however the point is you are in control and have a choice of what to watch and what not!

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