4 ms·

Disabling background play in the YouTube app is driven from the licensing deals they have with record labels. If they don't (make a reasonable attempt to) show

• mapgrep 8y ago
  The stuff I want to background is not music, lately it's been a lot of conference talks, and most of the time there's not even an ad. Even when I've used YouTube for music, the ads are always pre-roll. If I watch the pre-roll ad, why not let me background at that point? Google could allow backgrounding for content with no ads. They could allow backgrounding of non musical content if you've watched the ad (they can detect if it's music and what song it is, that's how they pay royalties to labels on songs uploaded by random people). They could allow backgrounding of musical content if you've watched the ad. YouTube doesn't attempt to handle any of these scenarios. Handling these scenarios would involve an investment of software and possibly legal resources — only to improve the experience of millions and millions of users, and to conserve tons of energy, without making Google any money, and even potentially reducing revenue to YouTube Red (or Premium or whatever it is next week). Why would a company in a monopoly position do that? I get WHY Google won't do this. It's not about licensing, it's about money and motivations. But I'm not going to pay into it.
• drbacon 8y ago
  If there were a HackerNews Gold, I would gift this comment one. Thank you.