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> But it's worth $15 for my family to not be subject to stupid ads. Yes. Nursery rhymes and other entertainment for toddlers is by far our largest use case for

> But it's worth $15 for my family to not be subject to stupid ads. Yes. Nursery rhymes and other entertainment for toddlers is by far our largest use case for YouTube, and ads would frequently comprise things like the latest horror movie trailer. If we didn't have the option of YouTube Premium to make it so the ads didn't interject, we would've been done with YouTube a long time ago. Kind of a non-issue for us now though -- since moving to an area serviced by Comcast and thus having a mandatory data cap, we just use youtube-dl to grab the video once and then stream them over the LAN through a Plex server.

andybak 8y ago
Is wired connectivity still that much of a problem in parts of the US? We have data caps in the UK but they only kick in at absurd levels of usage - to the point it's never occured to me to check. I rather assumed that there would be a gradual improvement in the situation over there.
- etcet 8y ago
  Most Comcast customers in the US have a 1T monthly cap. Their language: "After using these 2 courtesy months, if you exceed the plan you will be charged $10.00 for each 50GB of additional data provided, but charges will not exceed $200 each month, no matter how much you use." I hit 700G last month. If I had to do a full backup or restore I'd definitely go over 1T. Annoyingly, they count both ingress and egress traffic.
- mjevans 8y ago
  It is. Source: I live in a 'dense' suburb near Seattle (renting, but finally in a house that's not as noisy or otherwise hell as apartments can be). I'm a Comcast customer (for lack of ANY OTHER actual high speed data competition; DSL is like 8M bit down and less than 1M bit up per second). Their 1G bit plan gives me something like 25-30 M bit/sec upload, and comes with a VERY small 1T bytes cap. Not even /trying/, I easily come near to 700-800 M bytes per month. I fully expect to exceed that during the holiday season when I have to liquidate my vacation time per my current employer's policy (or loose it) and have nothing better to do than binge on various legal video products.
  - flerchin 8y ago
    Probably just a typo, but 800MB is .0008 of a Terabyte.
    - mjevans 8y ago
      It was, I was thinking in the line speed (close to 1000 M bit/sec) but was talking about the used quota T / G.
  - techsupporter 8y ago
    This is one reason you’ll have to drag me out of the city: only Seattle and a handful of very expensive suburbs (Mercer Island and the like) have CenturyLink’s symmetrical 1000/1000 service for $85 with no caps. It is a godsend for a household that hoovers down bits like they’re going out of style. Even Frontier is better than Comcast, at least in the data cap respect, and that’s saying something bad about Comcast...
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  Video is big. Numbers that sound large like "1 terabyte" are easily consumed by streaming video, even at 1080p. Multiply by the number of active streaming devices in your home, and then account for all other internet usage. It adds up fast. Comcast is looking to recoup some of the income they've lost from cord-cutters by targeting users whose bandwidth consumption looks suspiciously like video. They seem committed to getting you to pay them for TV/video content one way or the other, while simultaneously discouraging further cord-cutting by raising the specter of potentially-unpredictable overages.
kevinventullo 8y ago
Forgetting ads, are you not worried about Elsagate-style content when showing nursery rhymes to your kids?
- andrepd 8y ago
  And besides Elsagate, those awful "unboxing" videos that will teach your barely sapient toddler to be a consumerist machine.
  - rebuilder 8y ago
    Is that any worse than kid's programming on regular TV, though? Apart from the actual ads, it seems a lot of children's shows are just advertisements in and of themselves. My kid started wanting all kinds of Paw Patrol merch without ever seeing the show. Word-of-mouth really works, provided it's backed by a massive propafanda campaign targeted at a critically impaired demographic, anyway. Fortunately, the national broadcasting company here do a kid's show with no advertising, and seem to also have filtered out the shows that are just selling toys. The only problem is, they insist on making their own programming as well as showing cartoons they've bought from elsewhere. I can tell when the in-house production starts even if I'm not watching at the moment, because my kid will start going "I don't want to watch this!" I remember watching the same show, and having the same aversion to the local content, as a kid. Now, as a parent, I wonder if they intentionally put in some low-interest stuff in to make the show less addictive and teach the kids some kind of life lesson... If so, it probably worked better on TV than it does on their streaming service, where you can skip at will. Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play!
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > My kid started wanting all kinds of Paw Patrol merch without ever seeing the show. Oh, Paw Patrol. I smelled something is weird when I started finding PP-branded toys & stuffs in our local Walmart equivalent. Reading your comment, now I realize this must be it. The show is in part a vehicle for selling merch. > Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play! Great idea. I'm planning to go full "youtube-dl -> home media server, no Internet on devices" way with my future kids. An artificially scheduled programming is something I might try out.

andybak 8y ago

Is wired connectivity still that much of a problem in parts of the US? We have data caps in the UK but they only kick in at absurd levels of usage - to the point it's never occured to me to check. I rather assumed that there would be a gradual improvement in the situation over there.

etcet 8y ago
Most Comcast customers in the US have a 1T monthly cap. Their language: "After using these 2 courtesy months, if you exceed the plan you will be charged $10.00 for each 50GB of additional data provided, but charges will not exceed $200 each month, no matter how much you use." I hit 700G last month. If I had to do a full backup or restore I'd definitely go over 1T. Annoyingly, they count both ingress and egress traffic.
mjevans 8y ago
It is. Source: I live in a 'dense' suburb near Seattle (renting, but finally in a house that's not as noisy or otherwise hell as apartments can be). I'm a Comcast customer (for lack of ANY OTHER actual high speed data competition; DSL is like 8M bit down and less than 1M bit up per second). Their 1G bit plan gives me something like 25-30 M bit/sec upload, and comes with a VERY small 1T bytes cap. Not even /trying/, I easily come near to 700-800 M bytes per month. I fully expect to exceed that during the holiday season when I have to liquidate my vacation time per my current employer's policy (or loose it) and have nothing better to do than binge on various legal video products.
- flerchin 8y ago
  Probably just a typo, but 800MB is .0008 of a Terabyte.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    It was, I was thinking in the line speed (close to 1000 M bit/sec) but was talking about the used quota T / G.
- techsupporter 8y ago
  This is one reason you’ll have to drag me out of the city: only Seattle and a handful of very expensive suburbs (Mercer Island and the like) have CenturyLink’s symmetrical 1000/1000 service for $85 with no caps. It is a godsend for a household that hoovers down bits like they’re going out of style. Even Frontier is better than Comcast, at least in the data cap respect, and that’s saying something bad about Comcast...
cookiecaper 8y ago
Video is big. Numbers that sound large like "1 terabyte" are easily consumed by streaming video, even at 1080p. Multiply by the number of active streaming devices in your home, and then account for all other internet usage. It adds up fast. Comcast is looking to recoup some of the income they've lost from cord-cutters by targeting users whose bandwidth consumption looks suspiciously like video. They seem committed to getting you to pay them for TV/video content one way or the other, while simultaneously discouraging further cord-cutting by raising the specter of potentially-unpredictable overages.

kevinventullo 8y ago

Forgetting ads, are you not worried about Elsagate-style content when showing nursery rhymes to your kids?

andrepd 8y ago
And besides Elsagate, those awful "unboxing" videos that will teach your barely sapient toddler to be a consumerist machine.
- rebuilder 8y ago
  Is that any worse than kid's programming on regular TV, though? Apart from the actual ads, it seems a lot of children's shows are just advertisements in and of themselves. My kid started wanting all kinds of Paw Patrol merch without ever seeing the show. Word-of-mouth really works, provided it's backed by a massive propafanda campaign targeted at a critically impaired demographic, anyway. Fortunately, the national broadcasting company here do a kid's show with no advertising, and seem to also have filtered out the shows that are just selling toys. The only problem is, they insist on making their own programming as well as showing cartoons they've bought from elsewhere. I can tell when the in-house production starts even if I'm not watching at the moment, because my kid will start going "I don't want to watch this!" I remember watching the same show, and having the same aversion to the local content, as a kid. Now, as a parent, I wonder if they intentionally put in some low-interest stuff in to make the show less addictive and teach the kids some kind of life lesson... If so, it probably worked better on TV than it does on their streaming service, where you can skip at will. Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play!
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > My kid started wanting all kinds of Paw Patrol merch without ever seeing the show. Oh, Paw Patrol. I smelled something is weird when I started finding PP-branded toys & stuffs in our local Walmart equivalent. Reading your comment, now I realize this must be it. The show is in part a vehicle for selling merch. > Maybe there's an idea, a dumb stream with no skipping and no channel surfing for kids. Don't like the show? Maybe it's more fun to go out and play! Great idea. I'm planning to go full "youtube-dl -> home media server, no Internet on devices" way with my future kids. An artificially scheduled programming is something I might try out.