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But that is different. You cannot compare free and voluntary with commercial services. If you had to pay for those volunteers to maintain at a market rate, all

But that is different. You cannot compare free and voluntary with commercial services. If you had to pay for those volunteers to maintain at a market rate, all that free stuff would be prohibitively expensive on a per user basis. I agree that Roku, time and time again, has been too aggressive in their tactics to extract maximum profit from their users via the apps they consume (HBO disappeared for a while last year, and I think Showtime did as well), but they do have COSTS they have to cover, and profits they have to make to maximize value to shareholders. Is this a perfect system, no, but it is the system that exists currently.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> If you had to pay for those volunteers to maintain at a market rate, all that free stuff would be prohibitively expensive on a per user basis. These "platforms" start out with an existing open source operating system (BSD or Linux) that already works and has done so for decades. Then they add some features to it that represent a relatively modest one-time modification to the work that has already been done, after which further necessary changes amount to primarily security updates. Corporations often spend massive resources doing further rearranging on an ongoing basis, but nobody really needs or wants that. If you gave people the choice between the current version of a given platform or the version from 2009 but with security updates, most people would shrug and have no strong preference, if not prefer the older one. But also, YouTube is a platform and it goes both ways. Why should anybody need a special deal to display a website on their device?