Little bit of everything. Archiving creators that sometimes just vanish or get enough false DMCA claims to have their channels go offline. Downloading audio/video for sampling, cutting, & remixing (ie. Vaporwave Music/Video production). Sometimes you just need to snag a bit of video/audio to make a meme for your friends. For example we saw a funny old PSA from the 1980's someone uploaded and downloaded it to recut the video into a meme.
Offline use is a big part of it. When on road trips I like to catch up and listen along to DnD streams from Twitch/Youtube and the easiest way is to just rip the VODs from one or the other so when I'm on a road in the middle of no where I don't have to depend on rural cell networks.
Sometimes just for fun, I had yt-dlp running on a G4 Mac Mini so that I could rip content & convert it to something playable on old ass computers when I tried living on a G4 mini for a few months last year as an experiment. I've got friends in more unfortunate circumstances surviving off of computers from the 2000's that greatly appreciate anything people come up with to keep their machines useable in a modern world.
If you watch anything from a decade or so ago, you'd be forgiven for thinking that video content just didn't look very good back then, but no, it's largely down to YouTube compressing them to death since the original upload.
You can sort your video by name, by date, by other criteria, all on the fly, build into your file manager. You can rename them, surprisingly useful sometimes. You can put them into folders, you can tag them, all according to your own weird criteria. You can do operation on multiple videos, at the same time. Power users can automate those things.
Youtube's subscription website has exact two options for videos from your subscriptions: You can display them in a list and you can display them in a grid.
There's no way to pay for Youtube Premium anonymously - and I'm sure as hell not comfortable with providing Google (an American company, mind you) with any more information than they already have on me.
I also use yt-dlp to download meme videos to share from other social media. That way, people don't have to create accounts everywhere to look at a silly 20 second clip.
I also use it to archive videos of personal significance.
Finally, I sometimes use resource-constrained computers (say, in my shop). The native video players are much more responsive than the official website.
https://github.com/nozzlegear/dotfiles/blob/master/fish-func...
> Such clients use a lot of bandwidth
How many AI companies are there really? Realistically, we're talking about a handful of additional downloads per video here at most.
> don't generate ad revenue
That's the real problem: Youtube is in the business of selling ads or Youtube Premium to humans. Anything that lets humans bypass both is going to be at odds with their goals.
But impressions by LLMs aren't (yet?) useful to advertisers, so it wouldn't make any difference either.
The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube isn't new, so what's changed? The obvious answer would be AI.
> The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube isn't new, so what's changed?
Time has passed and DRM is more ubiquitous on the web these days, and I suspect that the number of people using ad blockers might also be rising, the more ads Youtube is getting.
I don’t doubt that AI might have some effect on it, but I’d be surprised if that was the primary motivation.
Watch them on whatever device I choose when I choose, regardless of network connectivity/lack
There are cases where people who got suspended because they used their account with yt-dlp.
However, I'd guess quite a few folks use yt-dlp for archiving (or watching on an airplane) because YT Premium is not a "we promise this video will still be available next month"
I suppose someone more sycophantic to the wishes of trillion-dollar corporations could argue that I'm not entitled to do this for free, and that YouTube offers an offline download option as part of its $13.99/mo Premium offering. To them, I'd say "you're right, also go pound sand lol."