To me this looks like a desperate move by YT to increase profitability. The problem is that YT has forgotten the elephant in the room.
YT's censorship of certain political content needs to stop, but they instead remove the "Dislike" counts.
YT's search is broken and everyone knows it, but they instead focus on making it even harder to consume quality content at high-resolution (like this link suggests).
They took a great idea and turned it into a giant cesspool with some gold here and there. No wonder people don't want to go Premium.
A counterpoint to this is that as someone notes: Do you really need 4K on a phone?
I've always thought that just as a matter of "manners" one should attempt to use as little of a limited resource as possible - especially when using perhaps internet or worse, cellular data or radio spectrum.
Back when Google did the whole "we will set the default resolution lower" thing at the beginning of the pandemic, were YouTube users en masse pissed off at the lower quality, or did they even notice? I would argue that most people would not be scrutinizing the video, especially if they were not full screened, at which point the resolution may as well be wasted.
I'm not necessarily defending paywalling the feature, but I do think there is validity into pushing users into a lower qulity funnel for reasons beyond simple greed.
On the other hand, I watch most of the videos I watch in windowed theater mode in 1440p on my 4K screen. I find that 1440p is the best quality that does not cause frequent seeking in the video to lag, and I tend to do this a lot to skip for example, sponsor segments and other "fluff” manually. I'm on fiber internet, so it's probably got something to do with either YouTube or my computer's video decode pipeline
I was under the impression that on Android, Chromecasting typically doesn't send the actual video but rather asks the Chromecast to play locally, but I suppose this problem still exists then
I pick 2160p on YouTube even on a 1080p screen to reduce the awful blur in videos with any kind of motion. The downscale looks similar to a higher bitrate in that case.
I’d guess yt-dlp (1) + cookies from your browser or Google username and password. You can run yt-dlp on iPhone in a-Shell (2).
a-Shell supports Apple Shortcuts, so you could, for example, make a shortcut that runs ‘ yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio -o "%
(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" <PLAYLIST URL>’, which downloads a playlist and maintains the order (e.g 1, 2, 3 and so on).
On a side note, a-Shell can help you get around tethering limits using iOS-SOCKS-Server (3) or an equivalent. On Android, PDANet is great for this, but on iOS it takes a little more work.
I mean, this is quite fine in my opinion. 1080p is plenty of quality, and if you can afford a 4k display you can probably pony up for youtube premium. 4k is pretty much a "premium" content resolution anyway.
This comes with the service. There is no punishment.
Today words like HD, UHD, HDR, 1080p etc. are just marketing speech. There is no more a certain value associated with them.
The local walmart has 3 55" TV options for under $300 that are 2160p displays, and even more 43" options that are under $200. This is not a premium feature in TVs anymore.
You can argue that it is a premium content feature and NetFlix would certainly agree. But today you can shoot 4k on a new mid-tier cellphone, or for even less money on an older used flagship phone, and edit 4k video on just about any used business laptop of the last 5-8 years. It feels weird to call this premium with how accessible creating 4k video is.
Personally, I'm more annoyed at their increase in ads recently than at this limitation. I don't know what the acceptable limit is, but 5-10 ads at the beginning is clearly way too many and much more of a problem. I really want reasonable competition. I don't consider Floatplane or Vimeo to be that competition.
> But today you can shoot 4k on a new mid-tier cellphone, or for even less money on an older used flagship phone, and edit 4k video on just about any used business laptop of the last 5-8 years.
You can, but you aren't really gaining any substantive clarity on a cellphone because the lens is the resolution limiter more than the sensor.
> You can argue that it is a premium content feature.
That's pretty much what I'm arguing, really. From a sensible viewing distance (8-10ft), 1080p and 2160p do not have huge differences in quality, and a lot of these TVs have some form of upscaling that achieves varying degrees of success in making lower-resolution content look better. Of course, it's not "4k" 4k, but I feel really this marginal gain is pretty much the perfect kind of thing to put behind a premium paywall.
> Personally, I'm more annoyed at their increase in ads recently than at this limitation.
Agreed, that is awful.
> Floatplane
is a competitor to Patreon if anything, in my opinion.
Vimeo is just too far behind to ever be serious competition.
It's not just about the money but the convenience and potentially privacy.
Is there a newspaper out there that allows you to pay in one click and doesn't make you fill out a long form with all kinds of private info?
People are not going to spend 5 minutes filling in a form and creating yet another account if running the link through archive/etc takes 30 seconds instead.
Privacy is also another problem - if you block ads for privacy reasons, why would you then volunteer that info and your money? You may as well just deal with the ads - privacy impact is the same, but at least you don't pay.
I pay for YouTube Premium, even though ad blockers defang YouTube completely. I think consumers should definitely send such signals to companies, esp. since the price is of YT premium is very reasonable. I feel much less inclined to subscribe to most movie streaming platforms, as their UI and overall experience is usually worse than PirateBay + VLC, or to digital print media, as they still show ads to subscribers.
BTW what is kind of annoying is the "double ads" model in a lot of YT videos, where it's both YT showing you ad clips and then the youtuber editing in short commercials as well. You can pay YT premium to remove the first kind, but you can't do anything about the second kind...
My dislike for ads does not come from general disregard for the idea of advertising in the first place, but from the fact that most actual ads are "small e evil" - i.e. disingenuous, manipulative, gaudy, appealing to human weaknesses etc. They make the world a worse place.
The price might be very reasonable for someone making a US tech salary. But it's quite expensive for people in lower income countries, specially when you take into account that there are many services you could subscribe to, it adds up fast.
> My dislike for ads does not come from general disregard for the idea of advertising in the first place, but from the fact that most actual ads are "small e evil" - i.e. disingenuous, manipulative, gaudy, appealing to human weaknesses etc. They make the world a worse place.
I sadly have to agree with this.
I think twitter did a great job of dealing with "small e evil" ads by allowing replies to ads - ads are just promoted tweets, that you can reply to, like other tweets. However, now twitter allows everyone to hide replies to their tweets. I still sometimes see ads on twitter with hostile replies, but that's probably only because they don't understand twitter as a channel, they treat it like any other channel where you don't have to worry about that. If they had someone ready to hide all critical replies that wouldn't happen.
I think reddit had a similar model, with promoted posts?
Considering 4k screens will only become more popular as the screens on pretty much everything progress foward this feels hilariously shortsighted. Also the optics of it are terrible, any customer that ever even considers resolution at any point of their app usage will feel burnt by this new gate put in front of them. Resolution was not a "premium" feature yesterday or 5 years before then, and the framing of premium implies that it's features should be "icing on the cake" of the base service, so to speak. This is just artificial and stupid. All this does is reopen old wounds about the lack of background playback. What a terrible move for a platform that already has subterranean PR and is merely "tolerated" by most of its end users.
Why not just put a a full width banner at the top of the website calling anyone with the gall not to pay for premium a second class citizen? They're gonna pitch a shit fit anyway, might as well hasten the process.
36 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] threadYT's censorship of certain political content needs to stop, but they instead remove the "Dislike" counts.
YT's search is broken and everyone knows it, but they instead focus on making it even harder to consume quality content at high-resolution (like this link suggests).
They took a great idea and turned it into a giant cesspool with some gold here and there. No wonder people don't want to go Premium.
But other political content is ok, isn't it ?
I've always thought that just as a matter of "manners" one should attempt to use as little of a limited resource as possible - especially when using perhaps internet or worse, cellular data or radio spectrum.
Back when Google did the whole "we will set the default resolution lower" thing at the beginning of the pandemic, were YouTube users en masse pissed off at the lower quality, or did they even notice? I would argue that most people would not be scrutinizing the video, especially if they were not full screened, at which point the resolution may as well be wasted.
I'm not necessarily defending paywalling the feature, but I do think there is validity into pushing users into a lower qulity funnel for reasons beyond simple greed.
On the other hand, I watch most of the videos I watch in windowed theater mode in 1440p on my 4K screen. I find that 1440p is the best quality that does not cause frequent seeking in the video to lag, and I tend to do this a lot to skip for example, sponsor segments and other "fluff” manually. I'm on fiber internet, so it's probably got something to do with either YouTube or my computer's video decode pipeline
The reply further down was "I'm streaming it from my phone to my TV" which would be a definite use case for wanting 4K on a phone.
It's also how it works with Airplay 2 on iOS now.
There isn't really a use case for wanting a higher resolution to cast it elsewhere.
a-Shell supports Apple Shortcuts, so you could, for example, make a shortcut that runs ‘ yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio -o "% (playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" <PLAYLIST URL>’, which downloads a playlist and maintains the order (e.g 1, 2, 3 and so on).
On a side note, a-Shell can help you get around tethering limits using iOS-SOCKS-Server (3) or an equivalent. On Android, PDANet is great for this, but on iOS it takes a little more work.
1: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
2: https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/
3: https://github.com/nneonneo/ios-socks-server
> bandwidth
Last time i looked, youtube will give you 4k even at 100kbps.
You can argue that it is a premium content feature and NetFlix would certainly agree. But today you can shoot 4k on a new mid-tier cellphone, or for even less money on an older used flagship phone, and edit 4k video on just about any used business laptop of the last 5-8 years. It feels weird to call this premium with how accessible creating 4k video is.
Personally, I'm more annoyed at their increase in ads recently than at this limitation. I don't know what the acceptable limit is, but 5-10 ads at the beginning is clearly way too many and much more of a problem. I really want reasonable competition. I don't consider Floatplane or Vimeo to be that competition.
You can, but you aren't really gaining any substantive clarity on a cellphone because the lens is the resolution limiter more than the sensor.
That's pretty much what I'm arguing, really. From a sensible viewing distance (8-10ft), 1080p and 2160p do not have huge differences in quality, and a lot of these TVs have some form of upscaling that achieves varying degrees of success in making lower-resolution content look better. Of course, it's not "4k" 4k, but I feel really this marginal gain is pretty much the perfect kind of thing to put behind a premium paywall.
> Personally, I'm more annoyed at their increase in ads recently than at this limitation.
Agreed, that is awful.
> Floatplane
is a competitor to Patreon if anything, in my opinion.
Vimeo is just too far behind to ever be serious competition.
Is there a newspaper out there that allows you to pay in one click and doesn't make you fill out a long form with all kinds of private info?
People are not going to spend 5 minutes filling in a form and creating yet another account if running the link through archive/etc takes 30 seconds instead.
Privacy is also another problem - if you block ads for privacy reasons, why would you then volunteer that info and your money? You may as well just deal with the ads - privacy impact is the same, but at least you don't pay.
BTW what is kind of annoying is the "double ads" model in a lot of YT videos, where it's both YT showing you ad clips and then the youtuber editing in short commercials as well. You can pay YT premium to remove the first kind, but you can't do anything about the second kind...
My dislike for ads does not come from general disregard for the idea of advertising in the first place, but from the fact that most actual ads are "small e evil" - i.e. disingenuous, manipulative, gaudy, appealing to human weaknesses etc. They make the world a worse place.
I sadly have to agree with this.
I think twitter did a great job of dealing with "small e evil" ads by allowing replies to ads - ads are just promoted tweets, that you can reply to, like other tweets. However, now twitter allows everyone to hide replies to their tweets. I still sometimes see ads on twitter with hostile replies, but that's probably only because they don't understand twitter as a channel, they treat it like any other channel where you don't have to worry about that. If they had someone ready to hide all critical replies that wouldn't happen.
I think reddit had a similar model, with promoted posts?
Why not just put a a full width banner at the top of the website calling anyone with the gall not to pay for premium a second class citizen? They're gonna pitch a shit fit anyway, might as well hasten the process.