325 million people that don't know about Firefox and uBlock Origin?
So yeah, take my $13.99/month
Youtube is just profiting from it, by shoving mostly shitty ads in your face.
Just because it was the first one to gain traction..
• the good stuff is VHS-quality TV content that somebody pirated
• the ads, once nonexistent, are typically disreputable and now incessant
• the few 'creators' worth watching are lost in an ocean of audience-captured, brain-dead garbage "hey guys... [product placement disguised as organic content]... misinformation... remember to like and subscribe... [product placement disguised as organic content]"
• access becomes increasingly arcane due to ad-blocking measures
• one of the lowest quality comments sections - largely inorganic, rogue state-sponsored - on the internet
• increasingly just AI slop
The day I can't scrape videos via yt-dlp is last day I permit youtube domains on my network. Personally, I would prefer to eat a rotten cat carcass than pay a single cent to Youtube.
In a better world, youtube would be some kind of a protocol, not a mediocre company serving as a middleman.
For the TV, I would suggest VacuumTube (a frontend to the Leanback interface) on a free/libre box running Linux.
It works on Android and PC.